How to Write an Analytical Essay

Analytical essay seems to be as easy as ABC. You get a topic, analyze it, state your results, go enjoy your life. What’s unclear about that? Nonetheless, when it comes to thinking about how to write analytical essay, things get a little bit more complicated. In order to get your analytical essay right, you need to follow a solid structure and get killer arguments, that will carve your analytical thesis in the stone. Luckily, there are some tips that can help you clarify all As, Bs and Cs of writing an analytical essay.

Compartmentalize It: Recipes of Great Analytical Writing

What is an analytical essay? This question gets easier to answer when you’ve clarified, what analytical essay is not. You should clearly distinguish between writing analytical paper and writing a summary. While the latter retells general point of a certain work or research, the first aims at looking closely into particular features, relating it to the point the author is making.

Analytical paper or analytical essay starts with the same thing: a hook. You need it to get readers hungry for your work and willing to find out, how you are going to prove your ideas. You can hook your readers by a provocative question or by a phrase that is going to get them thinking about your topic. Next step is analytical thesis statement. Writing a thesis for analytical essay gets much easier once you have found an answer to the question “how to start a research paper”. Thesis serves a main topic for your work. Just as in thesis for a research paper, thesis for analytical essay narrows the subject of your research to the particular object of analytical research paper. Here you are to state your ideas, which should be logical, debatable and provable.

Next step in writing an analytical essay is outlining body paragraphs of your analytical research. WikiHow suggests following “CEE”-principle, which can be decrypted to “Claim – Evidence – Explanation”. This way you can better understand the essence of what is analytical writing in general: you provide a claim, give the evidence, that proves that the claim is relevant, afterwards you explain, how your evidence relates to the claim. This way you look at every facet of your topic, proving its significance and relevance.

Conclusion for an analytical essay has to underline relation between your thesis and the arguments, you have used to prove it. PapersMaster also suggests building connection between your topic and the bigger picture, which shows global value of your topic and its applicability not just to your particular topic but also to other situations.