Questions to Guide You When Writing a Literary Analysis

For the past couple of days, I've been reading The Book of Books: Explore America's 100 Best-Loved Novels. This is a large and thick tome that talks about the most beloved novels in America. After going through the list, it's safe to say that the titles included in the list can also be considered as the most beloved books not just in America but in the world.

Anyway, at the end of the book is a little section called "How to Read a Literary Text". It's a list of questions (and the corresponding explanations) that a reader can use to analyze and better understand a literary text. It struck me that these are also the most important questions that a reader should ask when writing a literary analysis or literary critique.

If you ever find yourself writing an analysis of a piece of writing, these questions can help guide you through the process:

1. What is the point of view? Who tells the story? Is the narrator reliable or unreliable>
2. What is the setting of the novel? What kind of world is being portrayed?
3. What's the order of events? How is the work structured? Why is the story told in the order that it is?
4. When does the action take place? Over what time period? In what era? Now, the past, the very very past? The future?
5. What kind of language is used? Descriptive? Straightforward? Plainspoken? Lofty?
6. What's the pace of the novel? Fast? Slow? Does it take place over a day, a month, a decade?
7. What form does the work take?
8. What are the key ideas or themes?
9. What are the recurring images or symbols?
10. Put yourself in the shoes of the main character. What would you do differently? How would you feel if you were put into the same situation?
11. What drives the main character? What does he or she want? What obstacles stand in the way?
12. How well do the characters understand the situation they are in? What do readers know that characters don't?
13. What is the primary conflict of the story?
14. What other books did this book remind you of?
15. If you could ask the author one question, what would it be?
16. How do the characters change? What do they learn?
17. What's the title of the work, and why does it matter? How does it set up your expectations before you begin reading? How does your understanding of the title change after you've finished?
18. What strikes you about the names used for characters and places in the novel? What kind of information or insight do you get from these labels?
19. How does the era of the book's composition play into the novel?
20. Would you want to be friends with the protagonist? Or is the protagonist unlikable? If so, why?

An Honest ContentGather Review: Is Writing For ContentGather Worth It? Or Is It a Scam?

In this honest and comprehensive Content Gather review, I'm going to try and help you decide if the site is the right opportunity for you. Before anything else, what is Content Gather? Well, in the simplest of terms, it's a writing portal that connects content creators and content buyers. As a writer, you join to sell your articles or offer your writing services.

There are two main ways on how you can get paid on ContentGather. One, you submit a pre-written article to a pool referred to as the "marketplace". You earn if someone buys it. Two, you browse through the "custom jobs" section and look for articles that have been requested by members who are in need of content. You get paid if the "custom job" you claimed, wrote, and submitted gets approved by the requester.

Just a bit of disclaimer: ContentGather used to be Postloop. This was a service provider that connected forum owners with people who wanted to earn some extra cash by posting on forums. I was an active member of Postloop and I made quite a few hundred dollars there in the few months that I've been there. Postloop shut down its services and the owners decided to take another direction. The direction they took is content creation and that's how they came up with ContentGather.

How to Join Content Gather
The process is quite simple. All you really need is an email address and a PayPal account. You should also be at least sixteen years of age. Wherever you are in the world, you are welcome to register and join as long as you can write good content in the English language. Having a PayPal account is a very important requirement because it's the only method of payment that ContentGather offers. If you don't have a PayPal account, then there's no way for the company to pay you. Becoming a member of ContentGather is easy. It will take you just a few minutes. After confirming your registration, you can start submitting articles for sale. Of course, these articles will be subjected to a review by editors before that are forwarded to the "marketplace".


How to Get Paid on ContentGather
As mentioned above, the company only pays through PayPal so make sure that you have one before you sign up. You can request for a payout as long as your accumulated earnings are $5 or more. The company will process your request within a 24-hour period. You should also keep in mind that ContentGather takes 20% of the price that you put on your articles. For instance, if you submit an article and priced it at $20, you will only be paid $16 if someone buys it. The difference of $4 is the cut that ContentGather gets which is 20% of $20.

Rules and Requirements for the Articles You Write
The most important requirement is that your articles are grammatically correct and follow accepted sentence structures. Furthermore, the word count shouldn't go under 250 nor go above 1,500. You should also keep in mind that the articles you submit to the "marketplace" will be reviewed first by the staff before these can be purchased by buyers. The staff is very strict about the submissions. If they reject the article you submitted, you aren't allowed to resubmit it for reconsideration. That said, make sure that the article is perfect before you click on the submit button.


Direct Hire Feature
Members looking for articles can also directly hire your services on the site. When they view your profile, there's a "Hire Me" button on the right top corner which they can click if they want your writing services. Of course, people will need your services more if you have a lot of articles in the "marketplace" and if you have high ratings from both the staff and people you wrote for.

The Content Gather Referral Program
Yes, the site has a referral program wherein you earn 5% of the amount that your referrals earn. Whether you referred a writer or someone looking for content, the referral percentage of 5% remains the same. You can check and track the people who signed up with your link on the Referrals section of your profile.

Based on the information discussed above, do you think ContentGather is the right writing portal for you? If your answer is a yes, then head over there right now and sign up and start earning money.

Google Pays Tribute To Russian Author Leo Tolstoy With An Interactive Doodle

Every now and then, search engine giant Google pays tribute to people and historical events via a doodle that would appear on its homepage for at least a day. Anyone or anything that gets a doodle receives massive publicity and exposure online as Google generates millions of searches a day.

Today (September 9), the tribute went to one of the greatest novelists of all time. The Russian writer Leo Tolstoy. A master of realistic fiction, Tolstoy is most well-known for War and Peace, Anna Karenina, and The Cossacks. He is mostly associated with these titles but these are just a tip of Tolstoy's massive iceberg of works. He has written novellas, dozens of short stories and an impressive collection of philosophical writings.

Featured in the Google doodle are War and Peace, Anna Karenina and the novella The Death of Ivan Ilyich. Below are screenshots from the brilliant doodle.

To learn more about Leo Tolstoy, you can read an overview of his biography and writings on Wikipedia. A list of his works can be found here. And for memorable quotes from his works, find them here. Tolstoy's most well-known works include Childhood, Boyhood, Youth, The Cossacks, War and Peace, Anna Karenina, and Resurrection. He has also written novellas like Family Happiness, The Death of Ivan Ilyich, and The Forged Coupon.