How To-41: How to Write an Analytical Essay

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Writing an essay is all about organizing your thoughts. Here's how to put together your ideas into a coherent analytical essay. An analytical essay is an essay that compares main ideas between 2 topics.

Steps

1. Draw a square and put your introduction in it. (the introduction should grab your reader's attention)
   
2. Start to plot out what you want to write. Do this underneath your introduction.
   
3. Come up with a main idea for each paragraph. Explain your main idea, maybe throw in a quote that will help to explain it in better detail.
   
4. Back up your ideas with examples. If you're writing a Descriptive consider a personal example. Otherwise, find an objective example to support your analysis.
   
5. Follow these procedures for each paragraph that you need to write.
   
6. State your conclusion. Restate your introduction and leave the readers thinking.Make your conclusion something very brief that anyone could read, try writing as if you were talking to a toddler, a very affective way of getting your point across.

Tips

• Beginnings and endings are great places to use quotes, to use made up metaphors, and to use repetition, for effect.
  
• If you are writing a formal analysis or critique, then avoid using colloquial writing. Though informal language may bring some color to a paper, you do not want to risk weakening your argument by influencing it with verbal slang.
  
• When writing this type of essay you do NOT need to quote anything, pretend as if they were your own words, (if doing MLA, APA, or Turbain) These types of essays Do not require quotes and will be marked down accordingly if they are added.
  
• Ask yourself "What am I trying to prove?" the answer should be in your thesis, if not go back and fix it.

Warnings

• Avoid making your essay too tacky by using too little quotes. Remember that you want to incorporate others ideas, too.(without quotations if possible)
  
• Don't try to add useless sentences to make an analytical essay longer; it is better to leave it short and to the point. Make each sentence count.

Things You'll Need

• paper
  
• pen
  
• spell checker
  
• thesaurus

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