What Every Student Should Know About Writing About Literature walks students through the process of reading, analyzing, and writing about literary works. The text opens with a brief chapter that defines imaginative literature; then follows a student as he completes a writing assignment on Guy de Maupassant's "The Necklace" (the story is included in the text). Featuring samples of student work at all stages of the writing process, the text covers reading actively, note-taking, pre-writing, finding and narrowing a topic, drafting the essay, developing thesis statements and topic sentences, using verb tenses properly when writing about literature, building and supporting literary arguments, revising and editing the essay, quoting from literary sources, and documenting in MLA style.