Blog Prompt - Drafting the Literary Analysis

Throughout my senior year of high school, particularly in English class, it seemed like there was no end to prompts that required one to closely read and analyze a piece of literature.Whether it was one of Donne's famous sonnets or Karl Marx's and Friedrich Engels' Manifesto of the Communist Party, in simple terms what we always had to look at was what the author was trying to communicate,what techniques he or she made use of in efforts to achieve their purpose, and ultimately, whether or not he or she managed to accomplish their goal. I saw our latest assignment in Freshman Composition, the analytical essay,  to be essentially the same as the assignments which I had encountered in high school. Although this was the case, one thing that I found to be interesting was the fact that we have a lot more leeway with regards to what we would like to discuss whereas in my previous experiences, the prompts were usually more tailored so that we would focus the essay that we would write in the end.
For the literary analysis, I ultimately decided to use Malcolm X's "The Ballot or the Bullet" speech. I chose this piece over the others suggested because it really grabbed my attention the day that we first used a small excerpt of it in class. From that small excerpt, what immediately caught my attention was Malcolm X's particular writing style. It was evident that Malcolm X was one to speak his mind. He writes in such a way where his readers not only understand what he is saying but rather, they are also capable of feeling the emotions driving his words. What really sealed the deal for me was the fact that after reading the entire speech, it was evident that there was something far more important at the heart of his work than what the title conveyed. I guess what I am trying to get at is the fact that it really seemed to me that Malcolm X chose everything that he talked about in his speech deliberately. What Malcolm X was really trying to accomplish in his speech was to hit his audience hard so that they would wake up and adopt a more proactive approach in their fight for equality.
The toughest obstacle to overcome in an analytical essay is definitely to come up with an arguable thesis. In order to make sure that my thesis was arguable, I first wrote it down and then continued to quickly jot down a couple of points both in opposition and in favor it. I repeated this a couple of times and gradually developed it to the one that I ended up using. I think that once you manage to come up with a decent arguable thesis, you already have a good portion of the work done because at that point you already have more than a good idea of what your essay will ultimately look like.