The Essay 4 average (37.5) was a tiny bit lower than the average for the first three essays (39.9), but if you compare Essay 4 to the first-draft average (34.7) there’s a noticeable improvement. This is great news! You’ve let a little Larry into your brain and you listen to it when it chirps questions at you—I hope it chirped aplenty as you wrote Essay 5.
Another possible explanation for the 2-point difference is that Essay 4 asked you to write about art forms you’re less likely to have written about before: even when you don’t know exactly what to say about “The Letter from Home,” several years of literary education have at least taught you how to write about it.
Casual movie-watchers are less likely to question genre conventions: if you know that a thriller is going to be suspenseful, why would you analyze how music contributes to that suspense? But this is what the essay prompt asked you to analyze: precisely how can music be suspenseful? Certainly we’re not held in the same kind of suspense when we listen to the Symphonic Dances from West Side Story: why should we be terrified when we hear a few violins playing high quick notes?
When you write analytical essays, try to approach every issue as though you were a child learning the material for the first time. Why have certain conventions solidified the way they have? How do artists’ choices respond to the aesthetic problems they face? What other options does the artist have and why did s/he choose the one that wound up on the screen—why, in other words, did we see Miriam strangled through her glasses and not her bracelet or shoes?
