Analytical Writing in 3 Simple Steps

Introduction

Analysis. It sounds hard—but it’s really pretty simple.

If you do much writing in school, chances are that you’ll end up doing some kind of analytical writing. Maybe you’re doing a rhetorical analysis or a literary analysis or who knows what else kind of analysis.

The point is that analysis is a common type of academic writing, and it can be kind of tricky, mostly because it involves a different kind of attention and discipline when compared to research writing.

Instead of going out into the world and finding sources and information, analysis requires focused attention to detail. You look deeply and thoughtfully at a single thing rather than collecting knowledge from all over.

And, because that kind of focused attention is unfamiliar to a lot of people at first, it can be hard to know where to start. But the good news is that analysis is actually pretty easy—in fact, to do any kind of analysis, you really only need to answer three questions: What? So what? and How do you know?

Today, I want to show you how to answer those questions and write a fantastic analytical paper. But, before we do that, I think it’s important to get on the same page about what the goal of analysis really is.

[Analysis]

At its most basic, analysis is a process of explaining how something works by breaking it down to its individual parts and describing the role that each piece plays in an object’s overall purpose.

So, for example, we could analyze a pen by pulling it apart, describing each of the pieces, and then explaining how those pieces contribute to the pen’s purpose—which is to write.

And here, we can see a pen, broken down and ready for our analytical insight.

You have the barrel—this piece houses all the internal stuff, but it also gives you something to hold onto and it makes the pen look nice from the outside.

The cap keeps ink from leaking all over the place when you aren’t using the pen, and the clip lets you clip your pen onto something, like a pocket, for convenient transportation.

Moving into the center, you have the nib—that’s the part that transfers ink to paper, allowing a person to write

The grip, which a person holds while writing, and the converter, which holds ink so that you can keep writing without having to dip your pen in an inkwell every six letters.

If our goal is to analyze the pen and explain how it does its job, we can accomplish that by breaking it down to its individual pieces and describing how those pieces contribute to the purpose of writing.

At its most basic, that is what analysis is.

Of course, it’s not likely that you’ll be writing an analysis paper on something as simple as a pen—literary and rhetorical texts, for example, can get fairly complex. But the basic task of analysis remains just as simple as if you were analyzing a pen.

And it happens in three steps.

 What?

The first step of analysis is to document the various pieces of the thing you’re analyzing. Break it down, cut it up, separate it into its individual components. The goal is not to see the pen, but to see the individual working pieces of the pen.

When you answer what, you’re telling your reader what you notice. And it’s important to be as specific as possible—remember, we’re looking for details. And the more specific you are, the more convincing your analysis can be.

So, for example, if you wanted to say something about an author’s word choice, don’t just say

“The author uses a lot of scientific and technical language.”

That might be true, but it doesn’t show readers the actual details—it doesn’t specifically answer the what question. In order to do that, it would be more effective to say something like

“The author uses scientific and technical words like lysis, hydrophobic, and mitochondria.”

See how this sentence provides more specific details? That’s what we’re after when we’re doing analysis. Be detailed, be specific, be thorough. I’ve yet to see a writer be too specific, but I’ve seen countless writers not be specific enough.

Of course, your job is not just to list every specific detail you can see. Chances are, you’re going to have a limited amount of space to write your analysis, and a bulleted list of specific details by itself will be pretty boring and uninformative in the end.

So, as you prepare to write your analysis, you’ll need to do some work to select the most significant details from your analysis. You can’t talk about everything, so you’re going to need to pick the most important things to talk about.

And, in order to do that, you might look for patterns in the thing you’re analyzing. Are there things that the author or creator does consistently? Chances are those patterns will point you to significant details.

Or are there places where the creator violates their patterns and does something unusual? If so, that disruption in the pattern is a likely place to find significant details.

Whatever the object you’re analyzing, remember that your goal is to explain the overall significance of the object—so focus on the details that contribute the most to that purpose.

When we were talking about the pen, we focused on the details that make the pen function. We spent little to no time talking about aesthetic things like decorations or colors. That’s because the focus was on explaining how the pen worked, not how it looked.

So think about the overall purpose of your analysis as you explain how your object works—and then include the details that contribute the most to that purpose. Again, being as specific as possible.

So What?

But identifying specific details is only part of the job. Anyone can take apart a pen or notice details in a poem or advertisement—but an analyst goes further and explains the significance of those details to the reader, showing them how those details work.

So, again, we didn’t just point out the nib of the pen, we explained that it works to transfer ink to paper—that’s the job the nib has in order for the pen to do its job.

When you identify important details in the thing you’re analyzing, then, spend some time explaining how they contribute to the overall purpose of the object.

How do the scenes of a car racing through a forest motivate viewers to go buy a car? How does a rhyme pattern help to reinforce the poet’s feelings of joy?

Often, I’ll see less experienced analysts only partially explain the importance of the details. Usually, they just say what they mean, but they don’t say how those details support the object’s overall purpose.

For example, they might say something like, “The author uses scientific and technical words like lysis, hydrophobic, and mitochondria. These words show that they know about science.”

This isn’t bad writing—but it’s only part of the job. Remember, the question now is So what? Why do these details matter? It’s true that they show that the author is a knowledgeable, but why does that matter? So what?

That analysis could go a step further by saying something like, “The author uses scientific and technical words like lysis, hydrophobic, and mitochondria. These words show that they are knowledgeable, a move that prompts readers to trust them and believe their message.”

See how this sentence goes a step further and explains why those details matter in terms of the object’s overall purpose? The words are not just a demonstration of the author’s knowledge—they have a purpose, one of getting readers to trust the author.

Or you could say, “The rhythm in this poem—a mix of trochees and dactyls—evokes the feel of nursery rhymes” and then go on to explain why that pattern matters by saying, “This rhythm complements the nostalgic tone of the poem, bringing readers back to their childhood.”

Again, don’t just point out details, and don’t just explain them in isolation—show readers why they matter by explaining how they contribute to the object’s overall purpose.

And it’s worth remembering that how you answer the So what? question will depend on the kind of analysis you’re doing. If you’re doing a rhetorical analysis, for example—and let’s be real, why would you want to do any other kind?—you should explain the significance of the details in terms of how they motivate the audience to do what the author wants them to do. Why do the details matter?

How do you know?

And, finally, once you’ve identified specific details and explained how they contribute to your object’s overall purpose, it’s important to take some time to explain to your readers how you know that your analysis is valid.

This step gets us back to one of the primary purposes of academic writing in general: your readers don’t just want to know what you know—they want to know how you know it. They want to know where your knowledge comes from and the process you used to get it.

So take a little time to explain the logical steps you took to understand the details in the way that you did.

If this were a math problem, we’d be telling you to show your work—put your thought process on the page so that your readers can see it and understand that your thinking is sound.

So, if we went back to our sample analysis:

“The rhythm in this poem—a mix of trochees and dactyls—evokes the feel of nursery rhymes. This rhythm complements the nostalgic tone of the poem, bringing readers back to their childhood.”

If we read this, we could say, that’s fine—this is what you know—but how do you know it? What leads you to believe that the nursery rhyme rhythm is nostalgic or evokes childhood?

You could show your work—or make that thought process explicit—by saying something like this:

“The rhythm in this poem—a mix of trochees and dactyls—evokes the feel of nursery rhymes. Nursery rhymes are a common fixture in early childhood literature, so the poet’s use of those rhythms brings back readers’ memory of the nursery rhymes they learned as children, thereby enhancing the nostalgic tone of the piece.”

Now, I understand that you may find that a little tedious. It may feel like you’re saying things that are obvious. But it’s important to remember that you’ve spent a good long time analyzing your object—and your readers haven’t. What may seem obvious to you may not be obvious to them. So help them to get it by spelling out your thought process.

Show your readers how you know—and you’ll make it far more likely that your readers will understand your analysis in the way that you intend. As an analyst, your job is to show readers what they might overlook and to make implicit things explicit.

So, even if how you know something feels obvious—say it explicitly so that nobody can miss it.

An example

Now, before we quit, I just want to you show a real-life example of academic analysis so that you can see how it works—and so you can see that I’m not just making this stuff up.

So here’s part of an analytical paragraph that I wrote when I was finishing PhD school. This paragraph is focused on analyzing a Physics Girls video and explaining how she conveys her ethos or persona to her audience:

[M]oments of flubbed performance are a defining feature of Cowern’s persona [which mixes authority with relatable solidarity] here—in addition to [her fumbling over a] bike helmet, we also see a couple attempts at catching a marker, a poor attempt at drawing a girl on a bicycle that gets replaced with a post-production graphic, and even a miswritten equation that gets redacted with a big “oops” superimposed on the shot—all moments that may have been more discreetly edited out in a more institutional video but that remain in order to evoke the kind of blooper-preserving editing that is common on YouTube and thereby leverage Cowern’s reputation as a YouTuber and popularizer.

With some adjustments to include some information that shows up elsewhere in the paragraph, we can see answers to all three questions in this passage:

What do we notice? Well we get a good list of specific details.

So what?  We get a description (earlier in the paragraph and reintroduced here) of what those details contribute to the creator’s overall persona.

And how do we know? Well, the paragraph concludes with an explanation of how those details contribute to the purpose of constructing an authoritative but relatable persona.

See, it’s as easy as that, even for someone working on a PhD. That’s right—you’re already doing real serious academic work, and it only requires answering three simple questions.

Also, just a reminder—you do need to answer these three questions, probably in just about every paragraph you write. But you don’t need to answer them in the same order every time. As you can see here, I answered them in a different order—and that’s fine. As long as the pieces are there, you’re in good shape.

Conclusion

So that’s it for today. Like I said at the beginning, analysis can be a little challenging at first because we’re generally more used to doing research papers and things like that.

But the reality is that analysis is easy-peasy. You just have to answer three questions—and you don’t even have to go to the library (or the library website) to find the answers.

Before you go, let me know if you have any questions or if there’s another writing topic that you’d like me to talk about. My goal is to be helpful to you—so don’t be shy about letting me know how I can do that.

We’re always talking about writing and ways to make it more effective and meaningful—so I hope you’ll stick around to see some of the other things we’ve already talked about.

Either way, though, thanks for spending this time with me. Happy analyzing—and I’ll see you next week!