7 Keys to Writing an Analysis Essay

An analysis essay has its own peculiarities that distinguish it from other essay types. If some other essays allow being emotional and even biased towards something, expressing your own attitude, this one should be as objective as possible. A proper analysis isn’t based on personal opinion but on the research and credible references.

Analysis essays are simultaneously very easy and hard to write. You don’t have to reflect on the topic by yourself alone – all the sources are at your service. For example, you have to write an essay on obesity. That’s not a hard topic, as you have access to a lot of resources with needed information like scientific studies or essay examples on services like PaperAp. But you also have the responsibility of choosing the right sources, fact-checking, and presenting different points of view equally – to clear your essay of any traces of prejudice.

So, how to write an excellent analysis essay? These 7 simple keys will guide you step by step right to the result and your well-deserved A grade!

 

1. Choose your topic

It sounds simple, but the right topic is half of your success. Sometimes the topic is given to you by the teacher. This means that it is well-known, well-checked, and there are enough sources for the analysis. But if you are allowed to choose the topic by yourself, you should check the availability of non-prejudiced sources before you start writing.

Remember that later you should reinforce your statements with good references and compare your topic to something relevant. So, try to write down two or three topics that you want to write about and then briefly check (Google for the scientific texts is enough for this stage) if there are any sources available and if they present the different points of view.

 

2. Compose a thesis statement

The thesis statement is basically all your text in a nutshell. What do you want to say to the world in a few sentences? Remember that your thesis statement should be as precise as possible. Imagine that people see it on the cover of your essay. Will they open it and read further? Will they understand what’s inside?

There are lots of guides for writing thesis statements alone; there are even generators that create it from your text automatically. But writing it by yourself is important because you formulate what you write about just in a single paragraph. You distinguish the essential thing of your text and knowing it is important for following your topic strictly.

 

3. Create a draft

This isn’t an essay still, so you may not worry about the structure for now. You should set the main goals of your analysis on this stage. What aspects of the topic you want to highlight, and what points of view you will use to do this? Investigate your issue and find out what main parts of it are. Do you want to describe them all or only several of them?

Remember about your word limit. You may roughly distribute the number of words for each aspect and see if there are enough – both words and materials. It’s better to know about word limits and parts ratio beforehand, otherwise you’ll have to shorten your text at the last moment, or write anything, sometimes completely irrelevant to the topic, to hit the limit.

 

4. Make the structure

At this stage, you will organize your draft into a convenient structure. Write a plan for your text. It should have an introduction – basically, the definition of the problem and the reasons you want to study it – and a conclusion that sums up the results of your work (has the problem been solved? Has it been studied enough?).

Usually, there are three paragraphs more between introduction and conclusion, making it five paragraphs total. But if you have a big word limit, you may expand the middle part as you need, until each paragraph covers a separate aspect of the problem, a separate point of view, or is logically distinguished in any other way.

 

5. Check the links between paragraphs

Despite the fact that this essay is mostly academic, it is still a single whole text. Make sure that the paragraphs are logically connected, and there is at least some transition from one to another. Are all the aspects that you have in the middle part mentioned in the introduction? Are they used in conclusion and relevant?

To check if your paragraphs are linked, you may make a simple test. Just shift everything between the introduction and conclusion in random order. If nothing looks wrong, then the paragraphs are completely separated from each other, and you need to make more links between them.

 

6. Double-check your references.

Even if your essay is flawless, the credibility of references is another part that your grade depends on. Luckily, modern Internet libraries allow you to check it easily, looking at the reviews of the other scientists, the quotation index, or the reliability of the media you take your quotation from.

There are different requirements for the different essay levels. At school, you may use local media as references, but for college or university, you usually need something more important. It is great when you can illustrate one point of view with several independent sources – it will make your essay look truly serious and professional.

 

7. Check the grammar and spelling

Usually, these little mistakes are hiding from a tired eye. Re-reading your essay the next day to see them with a fresh glance is always a great idea. Maybe, you’ll find a sentence you want to polish or remember a fact that should be included. The final edits should always be made after some time when your brain reboots, and you may read your text as if it wasn’t written by you.

Conclusion

An analysis essay is a serious piece of work that needs an academic approach. But writing it has strict guidelines and following them almost guarantees you an excellent grade. We hope that our tips will help you to make a great text!

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