research paper analysis essay

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How to craft an engaging and insightful analytical essay that captivates your readers.

Embark on a journey of intellectual discovery as you learn how to unravel the complex layers of meaning in your chosen subject matter. Analytical essays require a keen eye for detail and an unwavering commitment to exploration. Step into the shoes of a detective armed with a pen, and prepare to unlock the hidden secrets that lie beneath the surface.

Beyond the mere act of writing, an analytical essay challenges you to transform ordinary observations into profound insights, shedding light on the deeper significance of the topic at hand. In this step-by-step guide, we will unveil the secrets to crafting a compelling analysis that captivates your readers, leaving them enlightened and inspired.

Discover the power of analysis as you learn how to dissect your subject matter, exploring its various components and piecing them together to reveal a greater truth. Dive into the intricate nuances of language, symbolism, and narrative structure, as you employ critical thinking to dissect the elements that shape your chosen topic. Through this process, you will develop a deeper understanding of the subject matter and cultivate an appreciation for the art of analysis.

Understanding the Basics of an Analytical Essay

Analytical essays are a popular form of academic writing that require students to carefully examine and interpret a given topic or text. These essays go beyond simply summarizing or expressing personal opinions; rather, they involve a deep analysis and evaluation of the subject matter. In an analytical essay, a writer breaks down the topic into its various components and examines them critically to gain a comprehensive understanding.

When writing an analytical essay, it is important to approach the topic with objectivity and a critical mindset. The purpose of such an essay is to analyze, evaluate, and interpret the subject matter, providing insights and arguments that are supported by evidence and logical reasoning. It is not about expressing personal preferences or biases, but rather about presenting a well-structured and well-supported analysis.

One key aspect of an analytical essay is the use of evidence to support the writer’s claims and arguments. This evidence can come in various forms, such as quotes from the text being analyzed, statistical data, expert opinions, or examples from real-life situations. The writer must carefully select and present this evidence in a way that enhances their analysis and strengthens their overall argument.

In addition to evidence, an analytical essay should also include logical reasoning and clear organization. The writer needs to present their ideas in a coherent and logical manner, guiding the reader through their analysis step by step. Each paragraph should focus on a specific idea or aspect of the topic, with smooth transitions between paragraphs to ensure a seamless flow of ideas.

Furthermore, an analytical essay requires attention to detail and critical thinking. The writer must carefully examine the subject matter, paying close attention to nuances, patterns, and underlying meanings. They should ask questions, challenge assumptions, and consider different perspectives in order to develop a well-rounded analysis.

In conclusion, an analytical essay is a form of academic writing that involves a deep analysis and evaluation of a given topic or text. It requires objectivity, evidence-based arguments, logical reasoning, and attention to detail. By understanding the basics of an analytical essay, students can effectively approach this type of writing and develop strong analytical skills that are crucial for academic success.

Choosing a Topic for Your Analytical Essay

One of the crucial steps in writing an analytical essay is selecting the right topic. To ensure the success of your essay, it is important to choose a subject that is both interesting and allows for in-depth analysis. Here are some tips to help you select the perfect topic for your analytical essay:

• Consider your interests: Start by thinking about subjects that you are passionate about or have a strong curiosity towards. Analytical essays require in-depth analysis and critical thinking, so choosing a topic that genuinely interests you will make the process more enjoyable.
• Research potential topics: Once you have identified a few areas of interest, conduct preliminary research to familiarize yourself with the subject matter. Look for relevant articles, books, or academic papers that provide insight into the topic. This will help you assess the availability of information and determine if the topic has enough substance for analysis.
• Narrow down your options: After conducting initial research, narrow down your list of potential topics. Consider the scope and feasibility of each topic. Ensure that your chosen subject can be adequately explored within the given word count and time frame.
• Identify the focus: Analytical essays often require a specific focus or thesis statement. Determine the angle or perspective you want to take towards your chosen topic. Think about the questions you want to answer or the arguments you want to make in your essay.
• Consider the audience: Keep in mind the intended audience for your essay. Think about their interests and prior knowledge on the topic. Choose a subject that is both accessible and engaging for your readers.
• Seek feedback: Once you have narrowed down your topic options, seek feedback from peers, professors, or writing tutors. Their insights and suggestions can help you refine your topic and ensure that it aligns with the objectives of your essay.

By following these guidelines, you can choose a topic for your analytical essay that not only captivates your readers but also allows you to showcase your analytical and critical thinking skills.

Conducting In-Depth Research for Your Essay

Thorough research is an essential part of writing a compelling analytical essay. By delving deep into your topic, you can gather a wealth of information and evidence to support your arguments and strengthen your analysis. In this section, we will explore effective strategies and resources for conducting in-depth research for your essay.

When embarking on your research journey, it is crucial to start by clearly defining the scope and objectives of your essay. This will help you narrow down your focus and determine the specific areas you need to explore. Consider the main themes, concepts, or theories that are relevant to your essay and identify keywords that will guide your research.

One approach to conducting research is to utilize various academic databases and online libraries. These platforms offer a vast collection of scholarly articles, peer-reviewed journals, books, and other resources that can provide you with authoritative and reliable information. Be sure to use appropriate search terms and filters to refine your search and find the most relevant sources.

In addition to academic sources, it is also beneficial to explore different types of media, such as news articles, documentaries, podcasts, and interviews. These sources can offer unique perspectives, real-life examples, and current events related to your topic, enhancing the depth and breadth of your analysis.

As you gather information, it is crucial to critically evaluate the credibility and reliability of your sources. Consider the author’s credentials, the publication date, and the reputation of the source. Look for sources that have been peer-reviewed or published by reputable institutions to ensure the accuracy and authenticity of the information presented.

Furthermore, taking organized notes while conducting research can greatly facilitate the writing process. Use a structured approach, such as creating an outline or using note-taking software, to record key points, quotes, and references from your sources. This will help you keep track of your research findings and make it easier to incorporate them into your essay later on.

By investing time and effort into conducting in-depth research, you can lay a solid foundation for your analytical essay. Engaging with a diverse range of sources, critically evaluating their reliability, and taking organized notes will enable you to develop a well-rounded and evidence-based argument.

Developing a Thesis Statement and Outline

Creating a strong thesis statement and outline is a crucial step in the process of writing an analytical essay. These components provide a solid foundation for your essay, helping you to organize your thoughts and present a clear and logical argument.

A thesis statement is the main claim or argument of your essay. It is a concise and focused statement that expresses your position on the topic. Your thesis statement should be specific, debatable, and supported by evidence. It sets the tone for your entire essay and guides the reader in understanding the main point you will be making.

To develop a strong thesis statement, you need to thoroughly analyze your topic and gather evidence to support your argument. Consider the main ideas or themes that emerge from your analysis and choose one that you can effectively argue. Your thesis statement should be clear, concise, and written in a way that engages the reader.

Once you have developed your thesis statement, it is important to create an outline for your essay. An outline helps you to organize your thoughts and ensure that your essay flows smoothly and logically.

In your outline, include the main points you want to address in each paragraph, along with supporting evidence or examples. This will help you structure your essay and ensure that you stay focused on your main argument. Consider the order in which you want to present your points, and make sure that each paragraph builds upon the previous one.

In addition to organizing your thoughts, an outline also helps you to identify any gaps in your argument or evidence. By seeing the structure of your essay laid out in an outline, you can easily identify areas that need further development or additional research.

In conclusion, developing a strong thesis statement and outline is essential for writing an effective analytical essay. These components provide a clear roadmap for your essay and ensure that you present a well-reasoned argument supported by evidence. Take the time to carefully consider your thesis statement and outline before you begin writing, as they will greatly contribute to the overall success of your essay.

Analyzing and Interpreting the Evidence in Your Essay

Once you have gathered and presented your evidence in your analytical essay, the next crucial step is to analyze and interpret it. This process involves carefully examining your evidence to derive meaningful insights and draw informed conclusions.

When analyzing the evidence, you should consider its relevance, credibility, and significance. Ask yourself whether the evidence directly supports your thesis statement and helps you prove your main argument. Assess the sources of your evidence and evaluate their trustworthiness and authority. Additionally, determine the significance of the evidence in relation to your overall analysis and the broader context of your essay.

Once you have analyzed the evidence, you need to interpret it. Interpretation involves extracting meaning from the evidence and making connections to your thesis statement and argument. Consider the underlying themes, patterns, and implications of the evidence. Look for relationships between different pieces of evidence and identify any possible contradictions or alternative interpretations.

Effective interpretation requires critical thinking and a deep understanding of the subject matter. Consider different perspectives and viewpoints, and critically evaluate the implications of your interpretation. Ensure that your interpretation aligns with your main argument and supports the overall thesis of your essay.

Remember that analyzing and interpreting evidence in your essay is a continuous process. As you delve deeper into your analysis, you may discover new insights and perspectives that require further examination. Stay open-minded and be willing to revise or adjust your interpretation if new evidence or arguments warrant it.

By effectively analyzing and interpreting the evidence in your essay, you can provide a robust and compelling argument that engages your readers and demonstrates your analytical skills.

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Research Paper Analysis: How to Analyze a Research Article + Example

Why might you need to analyze research? First of all, when you analyze a research article, you begin to understand your assigned reading better. It is also the first step toward learning how to write your own research articles and literature reviews. However, if you have never written a research paper before, it may be difficult for you to analyze one. After all, you may not know what criteria to use to evaluate it. But don’t panic! We will help you figure it out!

In this article, our team has explained how to analyze research papers quickly and effectively. At the end, you will also find a research analysis paper example to see how everything works in practice.

• 🔤 Research Analysis Definition

📊 How to Analyze a Research Article

✍️ how to write a research analysis.

• 📝 Analysis Example
• 🔎 More Examples

🔗 References

🔤 research paper analysis: what is it.

A research paper analysis is an academic writing assignment in which you analyze a scholarly article’s methodology, data, and findings. In essence, “to analyze” means to break something down into components and assess each of them individually and in relation to each other. The goal of an analysis is to gain a deeper understanding of a subject. So, when you analyze a research article, you dissect it into elements like data sources , research methods, and results and evaluate how they contribute to the study’s strengths and weaknesses.

📋 Research Analysis Format

A research analysis paper has a pretty straightforward structure. Check it out below!

Research articles usually include the following sections: introduction, methods, results, and discussion. In the following paragraphs, we will discuss how to analyze a scientific article with a focus on each of its parts.

How to Analyze a Research Paper: Purpose

The purpose of the study is usually outlined in the introductory section of the article. Analyzing the research paper’s objectives is critical to establish the context for the rest of your analysis.

When analyzing the research aim, you should evaluate whether it was justified for the researchers to conduct the study. In other words, you should assess whether their research question was significant and whether it arose from existing literature on the topic.

Here are some questions that may help you analyze a research paper’s purpose:

• Why was the research carried out?
• What gaps does it try to fill, or what controversies to settle?
• How does the study contribute to its field?
• Do you agree with the author’s justification for approaching this particular question in this way?

How to Analyze a Paper: Methods

When analyzing the methodology section , you should indicate the study’s research design (qualitative, quantitative, or mixed) and methods used (for example, experiment, case study, correlational research, survey, etc.). After that, you should assess whether these methods suit the research purpose. In other words, do the chosen methods allow scholars to answer their research questions within the scope of their study?

For example, if scholars wanted to study US students’ average satisfaction with their higher education experience, they could conduct a quantitative survey . However, if they wanted to gain an in-depth understanding of the factors influencing US students’ satisfaction with higher education, qualitative interviews would be more appropriate.

When analyzing methods, you should also look at the research sample . Did the scholars use randomization to select study participants? Was the sample big enough for the results to be generalizable to a larger population?

You can also answer the following questions in your methodology analysis:

• Is the methodology valid? In other words, did the researchers use methods that accurately measure the variables of interest?
• Is the research methodology reliable? A research method is reliable if it can produce stable and consistent results under the same circumstances.
• Is the study biased in any way?
• What are the limitations of the chosen methodology?

How to Analyze Research Articles’ Results

You should start the analysis of the article results by carefully reading the tables, figures, and text. Check whether the findings correspond to the initial research purpose. See whether the results answered the author’s research questions or supported the hypotheses stated in the introduction.

To analyze the results section effectively, answer the following questions:

• What are the major findings of the study?
• Did the author present the results clearly and unambiguously?
• Are the findings statistically significant ?
• Does the author provide sufficient information on the validity and reliability of the results?
• Have you noticed any trends or patterns in the data that the author did not mention?

How to Analyze Research: Discussion

Finally, you should analyze the authors’ interpretation of results and its connection with research objectives. Examine what conclusions the authors drew from their study and whether these conclusions answer the original question.

You should also pay attention to how the authors used findings to support their conclusions. For example, you can reflect on why their findings support that particular inference and not another one. Moreover, more than one conclusion can sometimes be made based on the same set of results. If that’s the case with your article, you should analyze whether the authors addressed other interpretations of their findings .

Here are some useful questions you can use to analyze the discussion section:

• What findings did the authors use to support their conclusions?
• How do the researchers’ conclusions compare to other studies’ findings?
• How does this study contribute to its field?
• What future research directions do the authors suggest?
• What additional insights can you share regarding this article? For example, do you agree with the results? What other questions could the researchers have answered?

Now, you know how to analyze an article that presents research findings. However, it’s just a part of the work you have to do to complete your paper. So, it’s time to learn how to write research analysis! Check out the steps below!

1. Introduce the Article

As with most academic assignments, you should start your research article analysis with an introduction. Here’s what it should include:

• The article’s publication details . Specify the title of the scholarly work you are analyzing, its authors, and publication date. Remember to enclose the article’s title in quotation marks and write it in title case .
• The article’s main point . State what the paper is about. What did the authors study, and what was their major finding?
• Your thesis statement . End your introduction with a strong claim summarizing your evaluation of the article. Consider briefly outlining the research paper’s strengths, weaknesses, and significance in your thesis.

Keep your introduction brief. Save the word count for the “meat” of your paper — that is, for the analysis.

2. Summarize the Article

Now, you should write a brief and focused summary of the scientific article. It should be shorter than your analysis section and contain all the relevant details about the research paper.

Here’s what you should include in your summary:

• The research purpose . Briefly explain why the research was done. Identify the authors’ purpose and research questions or hypotheses .
• Methods and results . Summarize what happened in the study. State only facts, without the authors’ interpretations of them. Avoid using too many numbers and details; instead, include only the information that will help readers understand what happened.
• The authors’ conclusions . Outline what conclusions the researchers made from their study. In other words, describe how the authors explained the meaning of their findings.

If you need help summarizing an article, you can use our free summary generator .

3. Write Your Research Analysis

The analysis of the study is the most crucial part of this assignment type. Its key goal is to evaluate the article critically and demonstrate your understanding of it.

We’ve already covered how to analyze a research article in the section above. Here’s a quick recap:

• Analyze whether the study’s purpose is significant and relevant.
• Examine whether the chosen methodology allows for answering the research questions.
• Evaluate how the authors presented the results.
• Assess whether the authors’ conclusions are grounded in findings and answer the original research questions.

Although you should analyze the article critically, it doesn’t mean you only should criticize it. If the authors did a good job designing and conducting their study, be sure to explain why you think their work is well done. Also, it is a great idea to provide examples from the article to support your analysis.

4. Conclude Your Analysis of Research Paper

A conclusion is your chance to reflect on the study’s relevance and importance. Explain how the analyzed paper can contribute to the existing knowledge or lead to future research. Also, you need to summarize your thoughts on the article as a whole. Avoid making value judgments — saying that the paper is “good” or “bad.” Instead, use more descriptive words and phrases such as “This paper effectively showed…”

Need help writing a compelling conclusion? Try our free essay conclusion generator !

5. Revise and Proofread

Last but not least, you should carefully proofread your paper to find any punctuation, grammar, and spelling mistakes. Start by reading your work out loud to ensure that your sentences fit together and sound cohesive. Also, it can be helpful to ask your professor or peer to read your work and highlight possible weaknesses or typos.

📝 Research Paper Analysis Example

We have prepared an analysis of a research paper example to show how everything works in practice.

No Homework Policy: Research Article Analysis Example

This paper aims to analyze the research article entitled “No Assignment: A Boon or a Bane?” by Cordova, Pagtulon-an, and Tan (2019). This study examined the effects of having and not having assignments on weekends on high school students’ performance and transmuted mean scores. This article effectively shows the value of homework for students, but larger studies are needed to support its findings.

Cordova et al. (2019) conducted a descriptive quantitative study using a sample of 115 Grade 11 students of the Central Mindanao University Laboratory High School in the Philippines. The sample was divided into two groups: the first received homework on weekends, while the second didn’t. The researchers compared students’ performance records made by teachers and found that students who received assignments performed better than their counterparts without homework.

The purpose of this study is highly relevant and justified as this research was conducted in response to the debates about the “No Homework Policy” in the Philippines. Although the descriptive research design used by the authors allows to answer the research question, the study could benefit from an experimental design. This way, the authors would have firm control over variables. Additionally, the study’s sample size was not large enough for the findings to be generalized to a larger population.

The study results are presented clearly, logically, and comprehensively and correspond to the research objectives. The researchers found that students’ mean grades decreased in the group without homework and increased in the group with homework. Based on these findings, the authors concluded that homework positively affected students’ performance. This conclusion is logical and grounded in data.

This research effectively showed the importance of homework for students’ performance. Yet, since the sample size was relatively small, larger studies are needed to ensure the authors’ conclusions can be generalized to a larger population.

🔎 More Research Analysis Paper Examples

Do you want another research analysis example? Check out the best analysis research paper samples below:

• Gracious Leadership Principles for Nurses: Article Analysis
• Effective Mental Health Interventions: Analysis of an Article
• Nursing Turnover: Article Analysis
• Nursing Practice Issue: Qualitative Research Article Analysis
• Quantitative Article Critique in Nursing
• LIVE Program: Quantitative Article Critique
• Evidence-Based Practice Beliefs and Implementation: Article Critique
• “Differential Effectiveness of Placebo Treatments”: Research Paper Analysis
• “Family-Based Childhood Obesity Prevention Interventions”: Analysis Research Paper Example
• “Childhood Obesity Risk in Overweight Mothers”: Article Analysis
• “Fostering Early Breast Cancer Detection” Article Analysis
• Space and the Atom: Article Analysis
• “Democracy and Collective Identity in the EU and the USA”: Article Analysis
• China’s Hegemonic Prospects: Article Review
• Article Analysis: Fear of Missing Out
• Codependence, Narcissism, and Childhood Trauma: Analysis of the Article
• Relationship Between Work Intensity, Workaholism, Burnout, and MSC: Article Review

We hope that our article on research paper analysis has been helpful. If you liked it, please share this article with your friends!

• Analyzing Research Articles: A Guide for Readers and Writers | Sam Mathews
• Summary and Analysis of Scientific Research Articles | San José State University Writing Center
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• Article Analysis Assignment | University of Wisconsin-Madison
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• Critique/Review of Research Articles | University of Calgary
• Art of Reading a Journal Article: Methodically and Effectively | PubMed Central
• Write a Critical Review of a Scientific Journal Article | McLaughlin Library
• How to Read and Understand a Scientific Paper: A Guide for Non-scientists | LSE
• How to Analyze Journal Articles | Classroom

How to Write an Animal Testing Essay: Tips for Argumentative & Persuasive Papers

Descriptive essay topics: examples, outline, & more.

How To Write an Analytical Essay

If you enjoy exploring topics deeply and thinking creatively, analytical essays could be perfect for you. They involve thorough analysis and clever writing techniques to gain fresh perspectives and deepen your understanding of the subject. In this article, our expert research paper writer will explain what an analytical essay is, how to structure it effectively and provide practical examples. This guide covers all the essentials for your writing success!

What Is an Analytical Essay

An analytical essay involves analyzing something, such as a book, movie, or idea. It relies on evidence from the text to logically support arguments, avoiding emotional appeals or personal stories. Unlike persuasive essays, which argue for a specific viewpoint, a good analytical essay explores all aspects of the topic, considering different perspectives, dissecting arguments, and evaluating evidence carefully. Ultimately, you'll need to present your own stance based on your analysis, synthesize findings, and decide whether you agree with the conclusions or have your own interpretation.

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How to Structure an Analytical Essay

Crafting an excellent paper starts with clear organization and structuring of arguments. An analytical essay structure follows a simple outline: introduction, body, and conclusion.

Introduction: Begin by grabbing the reader's attention and stating the topic clearly. Provide background information, state the purpose of the paper, and hint at the arguments you'll make. The opening sentence should be engaging, such as a surprising fact or a thought-provoking question. Then, present your thesis, summarizing your stance in the essay.

Body Paragraphs: Each paragraph starts with a clear topic sentence guiding the reader and presents evidence supporting the thesis. Focus on one issue per paragraph and briefly restate the main point at the end to transition smoothly to the next one. This ensures clarity and coherence in your argument.

Conclusion: Restate the thesis, summarize key points from the body paragraphs, and offer insights on the significance of the analysis. Provide your thoughts on the topic's importance and how your analysis contributes to it, leaving a lasting impression on the reader.

Meanwhile, you might also be interested in how to write a reflection paper , so check out the article for more information!

How to Write an Analytical Essay in 6 Simple Steps

Once you've got a handle on the structure, you can make writing easier by following some steps. Preparing ahead of time can make the process smoother and improve your essay's flow. Here are some helpful tips from our experts. And if you need it, you can always request our experts to write my essay for me , and we'll handle it promptly.

Step 1: Decide on Your Stance

Before diving into writing, it's crucial to establish your stance on the topic. Let's say you're going to write an analytical essay example about the benefits and drawbacks of remote work. Before you start writing, you need to decide what your opinion or viewpoint is on this topic.

• Do you think remote work offers flexibility and improved work-life balance for employees?
• Or maybe you believe it can lead to feelings of isolation and decreased productivity?

Once you've determined your stance on remote work, it's essential to consider the evidence and arguments supporting your position. Are there statistics or studies that back up your viewpoint? For example, if you believe remote work improves productivity, you might cite research showing increased output among remote workers. On the other hand, if you think it leads to isolation, you could reference surveys or testimonials highlighting the challenges of remote collaboration. Your opinion will shape how you write your essay, so take some time to think about what you believe about remote work before you start writing.

Step 2: Write Your Thesis Statement

Once you've figured out what you think about the topic, it's time to write your thesis statement. This statement is like the main idea or argument of your essay.

If you believe that remote work offers significant benefits, your thesis statement might be: 'Remote work presents an opportunity for increased flexibility and work-life balance, benefiting employees and employers alike in today's interconnected world.'

Alternatively, if you believe that remote work has notable drawbacks, your thesis statement might be: 'While remote work offers flexibility, it can also lead to feelings of isolation and challenges in collaboration, necessitating a balanced approach to its implementation.'

Your thesis statement guides the rest of your analytical essay, so make sure it clearly expresses your viewpoint on the benefits and drawbacks of remote work.

Step 3: Write Topic Sentences

After you have your thesis statement about the benefits and drawbacks of remote work, you need to come up with topic sentences for each paragraph while writing an analytical essay. These sentences introduce the main point of each paragraph and help to structure your essay.

Let's say your first paragraph is about the benefits of remote work. Your topic sentence might be: 'Remote work offers employees increased flexibility and autonomy, enabling them to better manage their work-life balance.'

For the next paragraph discussing the drawbacks of remote work, your topic sentence could be: 'However, remote work can also lead to feelings of isolation and difficulties in communication and collaboration with colleagues.'

And for the paragraph about potential solutions to the challenges of remote work, your topic sentence might be: 'To mitigate the drawbacks of remote work, companies can implement strategies such as regular check-ins, virtual team-building activities, and flexible work arrangements.'

Each topic sentence should relate back to your thesis statement about the benefits and drawbacks of remote work and provide a clear focus for the paragraph that follows.

Step 4: Create an Outline

Now that you have your thesis statement and topic sentences, it's time to create an analytical essay outline to ensure your essay flows logically. Here's an outline prepared by our analytical essay writer based on the example of discussing the benefits and drawbacks of remote work:

Step 5: Write Your First Draft

Now that you have your outline, it's time to start writing your first draft. Begin by expanding upon each point in your outline, making sure to connect your ideas smoothly and logically. Don't worry too much about perfection at this stage; the goal is to get your ideas down on paper. You can always revise and polish your draft later.

As you write, keep referring back to your thesis statement to ensure that your arguments align with your main argument. Additionally, make sure each paragraph flows naturally into the next, maintaining coherence throughout your essay.

Once you've completed your first draft, take a break and then come back to review and revise it. Look for areas where you can strengthen your arguments, clarify your points, and improve the overall structure and flow of your essay.

Remember, writing is a process, and it's okay to go through multiple drafts before you're satisfied with the final result. Take your time and be patient with yourself as you work towards creating a well-crafted essay on the benefits and drawbacks of remote work.

Step 6: Revise and Proofread

Once you've completed your first draft, it's essential to revise and proofread your essay to ensure clarity, coherence, and correctness. Here's how to approach this step:

• Check if your ideas make sense and if they support your main point.
• Make sure your writing style stays the same and your format follows the rules.
• Double-check your facts and make sure you've covered everything important.
• Cut out any extra words and make your sentences clear and short.
• Look for mistakes in spelling and grammar.
• Ask someone to read your essay and give you feedback.

What is the Purpose of an Analytical Essay?

Analytical essays aim to analyze texts or topics, presenting a clear argument. They deepen understanding by evaluating evidence and uncovering underlying meanings. These essays promote critical thinking, challenging readers to consider different viewpoints.

They're also great for improving critical thinking skills. By breaking down complex ideas and presenting them clearly, they encourage readers to think for themselves and reach their own conclusions.

This type of essay also adds to academic discussions by offering fresh insights. By analyzing existing research and literature, they bring new perspectives or shine a light on overlooked parts of a topic. This keeps academic conversations lively and encourages more exploration in the field.

Analytical Essay Examples

Check out our essay samples to see theory in action. Crafted by our dissertation services , they show how analytical thinking applies to real situations, helping you understand concepts better.

With our tips on how to write an analytical essay, you're ready to boost your writing skills and craft essays that captivate your audience. With practice, you'll become a pro at analytical writing, ready to tackle any topic with confidence. And, if you need help to buy essay online , just drop us a line saying ' do my homework for me ' and we'll jump right in!

Do Analytical Essays Tend to Intimidate You?

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How to Write an Analytical Essay?

What is an analytical essay.

Daniel Parker

is a seasoned educational writer focusing on scholarship guidance, research papers, and various forms of academic essays including reflective and narrative essays. His expertise also extends to detailed case studies. A scholar with a background in English Literature and Education, Daniel’s work on EssayPro blog aims to support students in achieving academic excellence and securing scholarships. His hobbies include reading classic literature and participating in academic forums.

is an expert in nursing and healthcare, with a strong background in history, law, and literature. Holding advanced degrees in nursing and public health, his analytical approach and comprehensive knowledge help students navigate complex topics. On EssayPro blog, Adam provides insightful articles on everything from historical analysis to the intricacies of healthcare policies. In his downtime, he enjoys historical documentaries and volunteering at local clinics.

Guide to Writing an Analytical Essay

An analytical essay is a type of academic writing in which a complicated topic or idea is broken down into smaller parts, analyzed and looked at, and a well-structured argument or evaluation is given. The main purpose of an analytical essay is to show that the writer has a deep understanding of the topic and can also think critically about it. Analytical essays are important in many fields, such as literature, history, science, and sociology. They require a deep knowledge of the topic and the ability to think critically and objectively about the information given. Analytical essays include things like a literary analysis, a research paper , or an analysis of a piece of rhetoric. Writing an analytical essay is useful because it helps the writer improve their analytical and critical thinking skills. In analytical essays, students must look at and evaluate different sources, find patterns and relationships, and come to meaningful conclusions. When students write analytical essays, they also improve their research skills because they have to find relevant information from multiple sources and put it all together in a logical argument.

Also, analytical essays are important in academic writing because they help students understand ideas, theories, and concepts that are hard to understand. By breaking a topic down into smaller parts, students can better understand it and figure out what the main ideas and themes are. Analytical essays help students get better at writing by making them present their arguments in a way that is clear, concise, and well-organized. Writing an analytical essay is a skill that students need to learn if they want to do well in school and in their careers. For analytical essays, you need to be able to think critically , do research, and write well, all of which are important for success in many fields. By getting better at these skills, students can become better writers and thinkers, which will help them reach their academic and career goals.

What You'll Learn

Understanding the Basics of Analytical Essays

There are a few main things that set an analytical essay apart from other types of essays. One of the most important things about it is that it requires a thorough look at the subject. An analytical essay isn’t just a description of a topic or a point of view. Instead, it calls for a thorough look at the subject, breaking it down into its different parts and evaluating each one carefully.

Argumentative essays try to convince the reader to agree with a certain point of view. Descriptive essays, on the other hand, try to give a detailed description of a topic. Analytical essays, on the other hand, require the writer to look at the topic objectively and judge it, as well as use evidence from different sources to back up their claims. In an analytical essay, you can’t say enough about how important analysis is. Analysis is the process of breaking down big ideas or thoughts into smaller, more manageable pieces. By analyzing the topic, the writer can find the main ideas, patterns, and connections, which can then be used to back up their arguments.

Also, analysis lets the author draw conclusions that make sense based on the evidence given. If there wasn’t any analysis in an analytical essay, it would just be a list of facts and opinions. Analysis is what gives depth and substance to an analytical essay and lets the writer make a well-reasoned, evidence-based argument.

Analytical essays are different from other types of essays because they focus on analysis and evaluation. They require a thorough look at a subject, breaking it down into its different parts and judging each one objectively. Students can get the skills they need to do well in school and in the workplace by learning what makes an analytical essay unique and what role analysis plays in this type of writing.

Choosing a Topic for Your Analytical Essay

It can be hard to decide what to write about in an analytical essay, but there are several ways to come up with ideas. One way to do this is to make a list of possible topics based on your interests, your schoolwork, or what’s going on in the world right now. You can also find possible topics by reading articles, books, or other materials in your field of study. When choosing a topic for your analytical essay, you should think about a few things. First and foremost, the topic must fit with the needs of the course or assignment. It should also be narrow enough to allow for a detailed analysis while still having enough information for research . Also, the topic should be something you’re interested in as a writer. This will make the writing process more interesting and fun.

To help you get started, here are some examples of potential analytical essay topics:

1. The impact of social media on mental health

2. Analyzing the themes of race and identity in Toni Morrison’s “Beloved”

3. The role of technology in modern education

4. An analysis of the effectiveness of the Affordable Care Act

5. Examining the causes and consequences of income inequality in the United States

6. The portrayal of gender roles in Shakespeare’s plays

7. Analyzing the impact of climate change on global food production

8. A critical analysis of the role of the media in shaping public opinion

9. A comparison of different political ideologies and their impact on society

10. An analysis of the ethical implications of gene editing technology.

A topic for an analytical essay must be chosen with care, taking into account several factors such as relevance, scope, and personal interest. By brainstorming ideas, researching different sources, and applying these criteria, you can choose a topic that is both interesting and informative, allowing you to write a well-researched and well-argued analytical essay.

Conducting Research for Your Analytical Essay

In order to write an analytical essay, you need to do research. It lets the writer gather relevant information, find patterns and relationships, and come to conclusions that make sense. If you didn’t do research for your analytical essay, it wouldn’t have much substance or credibility, and the arguments you made would be weak and not backed up. You can gather information for your analytical essay from a number of different places. There are many examples, such as books, academic journals, online databases, government reports, and reputable news sources. When choosing sources, think about how relevant, reliable, and trustworthy they are. Academic sources like peer-reviewed journals and scholarly books are more reliable and credible than popular sources like blogs and social media posts.

To conduct effective research for your analytical essay, here are some tips to keep in mind:

1. Start early: Give yourself plenty of time to conduct research, as it can be a time-consuming process.

2. Use multiple sources: Gather information from a variety of sources to ensure you have a well-rounded understanding of the topic.

3. Take notes: Keep detailed notes on the information you gather, including the source and page number, to make it easier to cite your sources later.

4. Evaluate your sources: Assess the reliability and credibility of your sources, looking for biases or conflicts of interest that may affect the information presented.

5. Organize your research: Create a system for organizing your research, such as using annotated bibliographies or note-taking apps, to keep track of your sources and ideas.

You can conduct effective research for your analytical essay by following these tips, gathering reliable and credible information that supports your arguments and improves the overall quality of your writing.

Developing a Thesis Statement for Your Analytical Essay

A thesis statement is a short sentence that sums up the main argument or point of an essay. It gives the reader a clear idea of where the author stands on the subject and acts as a road map. In an analytical essay, the thesis statement is very important because it sets the tone for the whole essay and shows the writer how to analyze and evaluate the subject . In an analytical essay, you can’t say enough about how important a strong thesis statement is. A well-written thesis statement states the writer’s main point in a clear and concise way, making it easier for the reader to follow the writer’s thought process and understand the purpose of the essay. A strong thesis statement also helps the writer focus their analysis and evaluation, making sure that each paragraph supports the main point and builds on it.

To develop a strong thesis statement for your analytical essay, here are some tips to consider:

1. Start with a question: Ask yourself a question related to your topic and use the answer to develop your thesis statement.

2. Be specific: Your thesis statement should be specific and focused on the main argument of your essay .

3. Use evidence: Support your thesis statement with evidence from your research, such as quotes or statistics, to give it more credibility and strength.

4. Be original: Your thesis statement should be unique and original, providing a fresh perspective on the topic.

5. Revise as needed: As you write your essay , revisit your thesis statement and revise it if necessary to ensure it remains relevant and accurate.

By following these tips, you can develop a strong thesis statement for your analytical essay, providing a clear and concise statement of your main argument and guiding the reader through your analysis and evaluation of the topic.

Analytical Essay Structure

An analytical essay is made up of an introduction, body paragraphs, and a conclusion, just like a regular essay. The purpose of the introduction is to give background on the topic, introduce the thesis statement, and get the reader interested. Through analysis and evaluation of the topic, the body paragraphs should support the thesis statement with evidence and examples . The conclusion should sum up the main points of the essay and restate the thesis statement in a new way that makes sense.

Here is a more detailed breakdown of the structure of an analytical essay:

1. Introduction: The introduction should set the tone for the essay by providing background information on the subject as well as a clear thesis statement. It should also engage the reader and convey the writer’s point of view on the subject.

2. Body paragraphs: The body of the essay should be divided into several paragraphs, each focusing on a different aspect of the topic. Each paragraph should start with a clear topic sentence that supports the thesis statement and then proceed to an analysis and evaluation of the subject matter, using evidence and examples to support the writer’s argument.

3. Conclusion: The conclusion should summarize the essay’s main points and restate the thesis statement in a new and meaningful way. It should also provide the reader with a sense of closure, leaving them with a clear understanding of the writer’s point of view on the subject.

To organize your ideas in an analytical essay, here are some tips to consider:

1. Create an outline: Before you start writing your essay , create an outline that organizes your ideas and supports your thesis statement. This will help you to organize your thoughts and ensure that each paragraph supports the main argument.

2. Use topic sentences: Each paragraph should begin with a clear topic sentence that supports the thesis statement and provides a roadmap for the reader.

3. Use evidence: Use evidence and examples to support each point you make in your essay , ensuring that each paragraph reinforces the main argument.

4. Use transitions: Use transitional phrases and sentences to connect your ideas and ensure that your essay flows smoothly from one paragraph to the next.

By following these tips, you can organize your ideas effectively in an analytical essay, producing a well-structured and well-supported piece of writing.

Writing the Introduction Paragraph

An analytical essay’s introduction paragraph serves as a road map for the reader, providing background information on the topic, introducing the thesis statement, and engaging the reader. The introduction’s purpose is to set the tone for the essay , grab the reader’s attention, and provide a clear understanding of the writer’s viewpoint on the topic.

To write an engaging introduction paragraph for your analytical essay, here are some tips to consider:

1. Start with a hook: Begin your introduction with a hook that captures the reader’s attention and makes them want to keep reading. This could be a surprising statistic, a provocative question, or a striking image.

2. Provide background information: Provide some context for the topic by providing background information and explaining why it is important.

3. Introduce the thesis statement: Clearly state your thesis statement in the introduction, providing a roadmap for the reader and guiding the rest of your essay.

4. Be concise: Keep your introduction concise and to the point, avoiding unnecessary information or tangents.

5. Revise as needed: As you write your essay, revisit your introduction and revise it as needed to ensure that it remains relevant and engaging.

Here are some examples of effective introduction paragraphs for an analytical essay:

1. “Throughout history, the concept of justice has been a subject of debate and controversy. From the ancient Greeks to modern-day philosophers, the definition and application of justice have been explored in depth. In this essay, I will examine the concept of justice in the context of criminal justice reform and argue that a more restorative approach is needed to address the root causes of crime and reduce recidivism.

2. The rise of social media has had a profound impact on our society, transforming the way we communicate, share information, and interact with the world around us. However, this transformation has not been without its challenges. In this essay, I will explore the impact of social media on mental health and argue that we need to take a more proactive approach to addressing the negative effects of social media on our well-being.

3. “Climate change is one of the most pressing issues of our time, affecting everything from the environment to the economy. Despite the overwhelming scientific evidence, there are still those who deny the reality of climate change or refuse to take action. In this essay, I will analyze the reasons for this denial and argue that we need to take urgent action to address the threat of climate change before it’s too late.”

Writing the Body Paragraphs

An analytical essay’s body paragraphs are where the writer presents their analysis and evaluation of the topic. The purpose of the body paragraphs is to provide evidence and examples to support the thesis statement, while using clear and concise language to make the argument as persuasive as possible.

To write clear and concise body paragraphs for your analytical essay, here are some tips to consider:

1. Use topic sentences: Each body paragraph should begin with a clear topic sentence that supports the thesis statement and provides a roadmap for the reader.

2. Provide evidence: Use evidence and examples to support each point you make in your essay , ensuring that each paragraph reinforces the main argument. The evidence should be relevant, reliable, and credible.

3. Use analysis and evaluation: Analyze and evaluate the evidence you present to demonstrate how it supports your argument. This shows the reader that you have thought deeply about the topic and considered multiple perspectives.

4. Be clear and concise: Use clear and concise language to make your argument as persuasive as possible. Avoid using jargon, complex sentences, or overly technical language that may confuse the reader.

5. Use transitions: Use transitional phrases and sentences to connect your ideas smoothly and ensure that your essay flows from one paragraph to the next.

Here are some examples of effective body paragraphs for an analytical essay:

1. The first reason why a restorative approach to criminal justice reform is necessary is that it addresses the root causes of crime. Rather than simply punishing offenders, restorative justice encourages dialogue between the offender and the victim, allowing both parties to understand the harm that has been caused and work together to find a solution. This approach has been shown to reduce recidivism rates and promote healing within communities.”

2. One of the most significant negative effects of social media on mental health is the increase in anxiety and depression. Studies have shown that social media use is associated with feelings of isolation, comparison, and low self-esteem, all of which contribute to poor mental health . In order to address this issue, we need to take a more proactive approach to promoting mental health and well-being, such as limiting social media use, encouraging face-to-face interactions, and providing mental health resources for those in need.

3. One of the main reasons why climate change denial persists is due to the influence of special interest groups and political ideology . These groups use their resources to spread misinformation and discredit the overwhelming scientific consensus on climate change. In order to combat this, we need to prioritize education and awareness, promote scientific literacy, and hold those who spread misinformation accountable for their actions.”

Writing the Conclusion Paragraph

The conclusion paragraph of an analytical essay summarizes the author’s main points and emphasizes the significance of the thesis statement. The conclusion’s goal is to leave a lasting impression on the reader by bringing the essay to a close and reinforcing the main argument .

To write a strong conclusion for your analytical essay, here are some tips to consider:

1. Restate the thesis statement: The conclusion should restate the thesis statement in a new and meaningful way, emphasizing its importance and relevance to the topic.

2. Summarize the main points: Summarize the main points of the essay, highlighting the evidence and examples that support the thesis statement .

3. Provide a final thought: End the essay with a final thought or reflection on the topic, leaving the reader with something to think about or consider.

4. Be concise: Keep the conclusion concise and to the point, avoiding any new information or arguments.

5. Make it memorable: Use language and phrasing that is memorable and impactful, leaving a lasting impression on the reader.

Here are some examples of effective conclusion paragraphs for an analytical essay:

1. “In conclusion, a restorative approach to criminal justice reform is not only necessary but essential. By addressing the root causes of crime, promoting dialogue and understanding, and fostering healing within communities, we can create a more just and equitable society for all.”

2. In order to address the negative effects of social media on mental health , we need to take a more proactive approach to promoting well-being. By limiting social media use, encouraging face-to-face interactions, and providing mental health resources, we can create a healthier and more connected society.

3. “Climate change is one of the most pressing issues of our time, and we must take urgent action to address it. By promoting education and awareness, prioritizing scientific literacy, and holding those who spread misinformation accountable, we can create a more sustainable and equitable future for generations to come.”

Editing and Proofreading Your Analytical Essay

The editing and proofreading stages of the essay writing process are critical. It ensures that the essay is clear, concise, and error-free, improving overall writing quality and the credibility of the arguments presented.

To edit and proofread your analytical essay, here are some tips to consider:

1. Take a break: After completing your essay, take a break before editing and proofreading it. This will allow you to approach the essay with fresh eyes and a clear mind.

2. Read it out loud: Reading the essay out loud can help you to identify awkward phrasing, grammatical errors, and other issues.

3. Be consistent: Ensure that you are consistent in your use of language, formatting, and citation styles throughout the essay.

4. Use a checklist: Use a checklist to ensure that you have addressed all the necessary components of the essay, such as the thesis statement, evidence, and analysis.

5. Get feedback: Ask a friend or colleague to read your essay and provide feedback on areas that need improvement.

Common mistakes to avoid in analytical essays include:

1. Using overly complicated language or jargon that may confuse the reader.

2. Failing to provide evidence or examples to support the thesis statement.

3. Neglecting to address counterarguments or alternative perspectives on the topic.

4. Making unsupported claims or presenting opinions as facts.

5. Failing to proofread and edit the essay thoroughly, leading to grammatical errors and typos.

By following these tips and avoiding common mistakes, you can edit and proofread your analytical essay effectively, producing a well-written and error-free piece of writing.

Analytical Essay Examples

Here are some examples of successful analytical essays:

1. “The Symbolism of the Green Light in The Great Gatsby” by F. Scott Fitzgerald: This essay analyzes the symbolism of the green light in the novel, arguing that it represents Gatsby’s hopes and dreams and his ultimate failure to achieve them.

2. “The Rhetoric of Malcolm X” by Malcolm X: In this essay, Malcolm X analyzes his own rhetorical strategies, explaining how he uses language and persuasion to achieve his goals.

3. “The Role of Women in Shakespeare’s Macbeth” by William Shakespeare: This essay analyzes the role of women in the play, arguing that they are often marginalized and oppressed by the male characters.

Each of these essays follows a clear and well-structured format, with a strong thesis statement, supporting evidence, and a clear conclusion. The writers use analysis and evaluation to present their arguments, using evidence and examples to support their claims.

When using analytical essay examples to improve your writing, here are some tips to consider:

1. Choose examples that are relevant to your topic or subject matter.

2. Read the example essays carefully, paying attention to the structure, language, and evidence used.

3. Identify the thesis statement and main arguments of the essay.

4. Analyze the evidence used to support the arguments, evaluating its relevance and credibility.

5. Consider how the writer uses language and rhetoric to persuade the reader.

6. Use The examples as a guide for structuring your own essay, but be sure to use your own unique ideas and perspective.

7. Practice writing your own analytical essays and seek feedback from others to improve your writing skills.

8. Avoid copying or plagiarizing the example essays, as this can lead to serious academic consequences.

Frequently Asked Questions

1. what is an analytical essay.

An analytical essay is a type of academic writing that requires the writer to analyze and evaluate a specific topic or subject matter. The writer presents an argument or thesis statement and supports it with evidence and examples, using analysis and evaluation to persuade the reader.

2. What are the main characteristics of an analytical essay?

The main characteristics of an analytical essay include:

– A clear and concise thesis statement that presents the writer’s argument

– Use of evidence and examples to support the argument

– Analysis and evaluation of the evidence presented

– Clear and logical structure, with well-developed paragraphs and transitions between them

– Use of formal and academic language

– Objective and impartial tone

3. What are some tips for writing an analytical essay?

Here are some tips for writing an analytical essay:

– Choose a topic that interests you and that you can analyze in depth

– Develop a clear and concise thesis statement that presents your argument

– Use evidence and examples to support your argument, ensuring that they are relevant, reliable, and credible

– Analyze and evaluate the evidence presented, demonstrating your critical thinking skills

– Use a clear and logical structure, with well-developed paragraphs and transitions between them

– Use formal and academic language, avoiding slang and colloquialisms

– Edit and proofread your essay thoroughly, ensuring that it is error-free and well-written.

To summarize, writing an effective analytical essay necessitates a thorough understanding of the subject matter, a well-developed thesis statement, strong evidence and analysis, and a clear and logical structure. To summarize the main points covered in this guide:

– The writer of an analytical essay must analyze and evaluate a specific topic or subject matter.

– A clear thesis statement, evidence and examples to support the argument, analysis and evaluation of the evidence, a clear and logical structure, formal and academic language, and an objective tone are the main characteristics of an analytical essay.

– Choosing a relevant topic, developing a clear thesis statement, using credible evidence and examples, analyzing and evaluating the evidence, using a clear and logical structure, using formal and academic language, and thoroughly editing and proofreading the essay are all tips for writing a successful analytical essay.

An effective analytical essay demonstrates critical thinking skills as well as the ability to analyze and evaluate complex issues. It is an important skill for both academic and professional success.

Finally, practicing writing on a regular basis, seeking feedback from others, and reading and analyzing examples of successful analytical essays can all help you improve your own writing skills.

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How to Write an Analysis Essay: The Ultimate Study Guide

Have an analytical essay to write? We get it. We’ve been there. Fortunately, we are here for you, with some insights into writing a successful analytical paper. Keep reading this article.

Analytical Essay Definition

How to write an analytical essay: step by step, analysis essay outline, analytical essay topic.

An analytical essay is a writing assignment. Your goal here is to introduce and discuss a claim as well as to deliver a detailed review of a given topic.

You can write analysis essays on topics from different fields. These include such topics as politics, economics, art, philosophy, music, literature, etc. Analytical assignments are a substantial part of any academic work. That is why university and college students often have to compose such papers. An outstanding analytical essay intends to explain and contextualize any topic—both the author and the reader benefit from it. In order to get a clearer picture of what this type of work should look like, check out some examples in our free essays collection.

Types of Analytical Essay

There are different types of analytical essays. It is important to find out what kind of essay you will write to use the correct structure.

📌 Cause and effect analytical essay. Also known as reason and result essay, this type of work discusses the purpose of something, which then enables us to analyze it while studying its effect on other things. 📌 Comparison and contrast analysis. This essay type examines two subjects to highlight their subtle similarities or differences through contrasting, comparison, or both processes at once. 📌 Classification. This type provides classification of things with common similarities into groups or categories to better learn their nature and carry out the analysis. 📌 Process essay. Such works talk about the way of doing something in order to give some sort of guidance or directions to readers. 📌 Definition. These essays comprise research to define an idea, concept, or term and provide evidence to support it. They also contain explanation through examples.

We use all these types of analytical essays while writing different kinds of analyses. The most common variants of analysis are literary analysis, painting analysis, and analysis of speech.

Find their detailed descriptions down below!

What is a Literary Analysis

While writing a literary analysis essay, you don’t always have to study a work of literature in its entirety. Sometimes you need to describe only a particular character or one aspect of the work. When studying various literary work elements, you are likely to understand the whole piece better. This process makes literary analysis one of the most exciting types of papers.

There are two main ways of composing the work – from the style perspective and from the literature piece elements perspective.

If you want to concentrate on the style , you can consider following criteria:

• Structure and organization
• Point of view
• Word choice
• Figurative language

In case of choosing to look into the elements of the work, you need to describe these aspects:

It is also possible to analyze all these elements considering different analytical essays: cause and effect, comparison and contrast, classification, process, and definition papers.

It would be a mistake to think that an analysis of literary work is just a summary of a piece of writing. On the contrary, it is rather a debate about the work that conveys a writer’s interpretation of the work.

How to Write Painting Analysis

Analyzing a painting is never easy. If you aren’t sure where to start, remember that you don’t need to be a painter or an expert in the field. Start your writing by answering some of these questions:

🤔 When was the painting made? 🤔 How big/small is it? 🤔 What kind of painting is it? It could be a portrait, a landscape, or still life. 🤔 How does the artist use colors and shapes? 🤔 What is your idea of the mood of the picture? 🤔 Is there a story behind the image? 🤔 Do you know who the artist is? 🤔 Did the artist use any symbols in the painting? 🤔 How would you describe the brushwork? Is the paint thick or thin?

Some more tips on how to analyze a work of art :

• “Description of a painting” does not mean “analysis of a painting,” so do not dive into too much detail. Going beyond stating the obvious, a student can demonstrate a more profound understanding of the piece of art.
• Try to avoid such judgmental expressions as “I like this” or “I don’t like this.” Remember to support your opinion with evidence or justification.
• Talk about several visual elements. Make sure you discuss different visual aspects of the artwork. Do not limit your analysis to talking only about colors or patterns. Try to show the painting from different perspectives.

Speech Analysis: Overview

While writing a speech analysis, you need to answer two questions. The first question you need to discuss here is WHAT the speaker says. Analyze their speech according to the standard procedure of text analysis, conversation analysis, and dialogue analysis.

The second important question is HOW the speaker expresses the ideas. Sometimes you need to analyze it to read between the lines and get the speaker’s view better. Important messages in speeches are often sent through appearance and behavior.

When analyzing a speech, try to consider the following questions :

🔎 Who is giving a speech? 🔎 What does the speaker look like? 🔎 How are they dressed? 🔎 What is the speaker’s behavior? 🔎 Does the speaker use gestures? 🔎 What is their voice like?

Some more tips on how to analyze a speech:

• A good piece of advice is to analyze the speaker and the audience they are talking to. You can describe their background and education, the atmosphere of the meeting, the general mood of the audience.
• It is also possible to talk about the meeting itself. Maybe it is a conference or a TV show, a workshop or a big plenary. All these details are crucial because they influence the speaker directly.

Writing an analytical essay can be tricky. You need to consider many aspects if you want your work to sound competent. We’ve prepared a list of 5 key steps that will help you create the best analytical essay possible.

5 Key Steps to a Perfect Analytical Essay

1. pick a good topic.

Before talking about any topic, it is helpful to study it from the ground up. When you become a real expert on the subject, you realize that analysis is relatively simple.

Check websites of trustworthy institutions to see if they have works on similar issues, or just google published papers on related topics. They can help you structure your work better.

They can also give you inspiration about the ideas you might discuss in your work.

2. Produce an analytical thesis statement

A thesis statement is the foundation of your work. It can be expressed in one sentence and supported by the most important arguments.

A working thesis statement gives the readers a general idea of the structure of your paper. It also provides them with the central point of your work and the main arguments supporting the idea. Aside from that, it declares a position about the subject that needs discussing and proving.

Here is an example of a good thesis statement:

“Worldwide nature preserving measures should concentrate on saving endangered species. It would allow many rare kinds of animals to live and breed in a safe environment.”

3. Do your research

Before writing an essay, it is vital to study the topic thoroughly. Do not skip this step, as it is essential to demonstrate that you have learned the topic and are ready to present your results, supported by arguments. So, get ready! Read relevant studies, do experiments, collect statistics – everything counts!

4. Set a realistic goal

When choosing a goal for your research, stay realistic. Try to make your goal as precise as possible. In this case, it will be easy for you to achieve your aim and to demonstrate your results at their best. It is also easier to find arguments for and against your thesis statement if your goal is precise and narrow.

5. Create an analysis essay outline

Any written assignment needs thorough planning, and analytical essays need it too. Before you write, make a well-structured outline of your work, including every paragraph’s essential points.

An analysis essay consists of an introduction, several main body paragraphs, and a conclusion. Let’s investigate this part in more detail.

There are many ways to structure an analytical assignment. Which format is best depending on the type of essay and the main goals of the writing task? We have prepared three different kinds of outlines for you.

The first type of structure is perfect when you need to state the central position in the text and defend it. Concentrate on the position you take, but don’t forget to mention alternative perspectives as well. In this type of work, you do not need to explain why the alternative ways are wrong. Show the readers that they exist.

The second type is good for when you not only want to defend your position. You also aim to explain why the other perspectives are wrong. In this case, you need to think carefully about arguments for your position. You will also need arguments against the different opinions.

And the third type is a perfect fit if you aim to demonstrate a wide range of several issues.For each of them, you have the central position and defending arguments. This type of essay tends to be the longest, as it covers several issues. It also includes alternative positions on all the problems. The thing is – there is no need to prove the alternative ideas wrong. You should only defend your main statement.

Analytical Essay Introduction: Examples

The purpose of the introduction of your essay is to make the readers focus. To keep the attention, you need to include a hook in the introduction . The hook can look like a rhetorical or provocative question, a quotation, or a bold statement.

A good intro also mentions the issue you will talk about. Besides, it states the position you are taking and background information on the topic. It is usually situated at the end of the introductory paragraph.

Some examples of good introductions:

✅ “The symbolism in JD Salinger’s Franny and Zooey” keeps the feeling of melancholia and uncertainty throughout the entire novel.” ✅ “Although there are many reasons for the 2nd World War, it is nationalism that formed hatred and provoked the War’s start.” ✅ “All animals are equal, but some animals are more equal.” Animal Farm is full of ironic and provocative phrases, which invite the reader to continue exploring the story. ✅ In Animal Farm, the author uses irony types to show totalitarianism and to manifest its inability to make every member of society equal.

Analysis Essay Body: Paragraph Format + Examples

The main body is a part of an essay with the aim to show readers the main idea development. Here, you need to add some evidence to support your thesis. Usually, there are three paragraphs. It depends on how broad the thesis statement is. Writers typically look for the evidence in different resources. It can be in the form of a summary, a quotation, or a paraphrase.

Here is an example of how to start a body paragraph:

“In the article, the author describes a particular scenario of doing house chores with her husband. She is paving the way for the following discussion of…”

Remember to include topic sentences in each paragraph! The main idea of the paragraph should be there. It also should be connected to your work’s central position. It is crucially important to support every claim in the thesis statement with proof. Try to include arguments supported by research and strong evidence. That is the reason to have a narrow thesis statement. The broader your thesis is – the more paragraphs the main body will contain.

For example:

“At first look, the plot of the story seems direct. It tells a story of… The central question of the story is looking for meaning in life. For instance: “Never have I had such a strong fish nor one who acted so strangely. Perhaps he is too wise to jump…”. This passage shows the readers the simple structure of …”

❓ How to Write an Analysis Essay?

To write an analysis essay, you need to study your topic thoroughly and conduct a research. After that, it is a good idea to think about the structure of your essay. Decide on the position, that you are going to defend. Besides, think about the opposite arguments and the evidence for the support of your central point.

❓ How to Write an Analytical Thesis?

The Thesis Statement is the root of your assignment. It needs to be further discussed and supported by evidence while writing. Before writing the main body and discussing quotes, make sure that your statement is clear and debatable. Do not forget to make your thesis statement persuasive. In this case, the audience will see your perspective and believe what you are saying.

❓ What Are the Characteristics of an Effective Introduction?

The goal of the introduction of your essay is to keep the readers’ focus. To bring this attention to your topic, you need to start with a hook. The hook can be in the form of a rhetorical or provocative question, a quotation, or a bold statement. A good introduction also includes the question you will discuss. Apart from that, it states the position you are taking and background information on the topic. It is usually placed at the end of the introductory paragraph.

❓ Can I Use a Quote in My Conclusion?

It is better to use a quotation in the introduction or the essay body. But if the quote can logically finish your analysis, then use it! Just make sure that your quotation does not include any new ideas or information. The reason is that the aim of the conclusion is to restate your thesis statement and your topic.

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5 Steps to Write a Great Analytical Essay

General Education

Do you need to write an analytical essay for school? What sets this kind of essay apart from other types, and what must you include when you write your own analytical essay? In this guide, we break down the process of writing an analytical essay by explaining the key factors your essay needs to have, providing you with an outline to help you structure your essay, and analyzing a complete analytical essay example so you can see what a finished essay looks like.

What Is an Analytical Essay?

Before you begin writing an analytical essay, you must know what this type of essay is and what it includes. Analytical essays analyze something, often (but not always) a piece of writing or a film.

An analytical essay is more than just a synopsis of the issue though; in this type of essay you need to go beyond surface-level analysis and look at what the key arguments/points of this issue are and why. If you’re writing an analytical essay about a piece of writing, you’ll look into how the text was written and why the author chose to write it that way. Instead of summarizing, an analytical essay typically takes a narrower focus and looks at areas such as major themes in the work, how the author constructed and supported their argument, how the essay used literary devices to enhance its messages, etc.

While you certainly want people to agree with what you’ve written, unlike with persuasive and argumentative essays, your main purpose when writing an analytical essay isn’t to try to convert readers to your side of the issue. Therefore, you won’t be using strong persuasive language like you would in those essay types. Rather, your goal is to have enough analysis and examples that the strength of your argument is clear to readers.

Besides typical essay components like an introduction and conclusion, a good analytical essay will include:

• A thesis that states your main argument
• Analysis that relates back to your thesis and supports it
• Examples to support your analysis and allow a more in-depth look at the issue

In the rest of this article, we’ll explain how to include each of these in your analytical essay.

How to Structure Your Analytical Essay

Analytical essays are structured similarly to many other essays you’ve written, with an introduction (including a thesis), several body paragraphs, and a conclusion. Below is an outline you can follow when structuring your essay, and in the next section we go into more detail on how to write an analytical essay.

Introduction

Your introduction will begin with some sort of attention-grabbing sentence to get your audience interested, then you’ll give a few sentences setting up the topic so that readers have some context, and you’ll end with your thesis statement. Your introduction will include:

• Brief background information explaining the issue/text
• Your thesis

Body Paragraphs

Your analytical essay will typically have three or four body paragraphs, each covering a different point of analysis. Begin each body paragraph with a sentence that sets up the main point you’ll be discussing. Then you’ll give some analysis on that point, backing it up with evidence to support your claim. Continue analyzing and giving evidence for your analysis until you’re out of strong points for the topic. At the end of each body paragraph, you may choose to have a transition sentence that sets up what the next paragraph will be about, but this isn’t required. Body paragraphs will include:

• Introductory sentence explaining what you’ll cover in the paragraph (sort of like a mini-thesis)
• Analysis point
• Evidence (either passages from the text or data/facts) that supports the analysis
• (Repeat analysis and evidence until you run out of examples)

You won’t be making any new points in your conclusion; at this point you’re just reiterating key points you’ve already made and wrapping things up. Begin by rephrasing your thesis and summarizing the main points you made in the essay. Someone who reads just your conclusion should be able to come away with a basic idea of what your essay was about and how it was structured. After this, you may choose to make some final concluding thoughts, potentially by connecting your essay topic to larger issues to show why it’s important. A conclusion will include:

• Paraphrase of thesis
• Summary of key points of analysis
• Final concluding thought(s)

5 Steps for Writing an Analytical Essay

Follow these five tips to break down writing an analytical essay into manageable steps. By the end, you’ll have a fully-crafted analytical essay with both in-depth analysis and enough evidence to support your argument. All of these steps use the completed analytical essay in the next section as an example.

#1: Pick a Topic

You may have already had a topic assigned to you, and if that’s the case, you can skip this step. However, if you haven’t, or if the topic you’ve been assigned is broad enough that you still need to narrow it down, then you’ll need to decide on a topic for yourself. Choosing the right topic can mean the difference between an analytical essay that’s easy to research (and gets you a good grade) and one that takes hours just to find a few decent points to analyze

Before you decide on an analytical essay topic, do a bit of research to make sure you have enough examples to support your analysis. If you choose a topic that’s too narrow, you’ll struggle to find enough to write about.

For example, say your teacher assigns you to write an analytical essay about the theme in John Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath of exposing injustices against migrants. For it to be an analytical essay, you can’t just recount the injustices characters in the book faced; that’s only a summary and doesn’t include analysis. You need to choose a topic that allows you to analyze the theme. One of the best ways to explore a theme is to analyze how the author made his/her argument. One example here is that Steinbeck used literary devices in the intercalary chapters (short chapters that didn’t relate to the plot or contain the main characters of the book) to show what life was like for migrants as a whole during the Dust Bowl.

You could write about how Steinbeck used literary devices throughout the whole book, but, in the essay below, I chose to just focus on the intercalary chapters since they gave me enough examples. Having a narrower focus will nearly always result in a tighter and more convincing essay (and can make compiling examples less overwhelming).

#2: Write a Thesis Statement

Your thesis statement is the most important sentence of your essay; a reader should be able to read just your thesis and understand what the entire essay is about and what you’ll be analyzing. When you begin writing, remember that each sentence in your analytical essay should relate back to your thesis

In the analytical essay example below, the thesis is the final sentence of the first paragraph (the traditional spot for it). The thesis is: “In The Grapes of Wrath’s intercalary chapters, John Steinbeck employs a variety of literary devices and stylistic choices to better expose the injustices committed against migrants in the 1930s.” So what will this essay analyze? How Steinbeck used literary devices in the intercalary chapters to show how rough migrants could have it. Crystal clear.

#3: Do Research to Find Your Main Points

This is where you determine the bulk of your analysis--the information that makes your essay an analytical essay. My preferred method is to list every idea that I can think of, then research each of those and use the three or four strongest ones for your essay. Weaker points may be those that don’t relate back to the thesis, that you don’t have much analysis to discuss, or that you can’t find good examples for. A good rule of thumb is to have one body paragraph per main point

This essay has four main points, each of which analyzes a different literary device Steinbeck uses to better illustrate how difficult life was for migrants during the Dust Bowl. The four literary devices and their impact on the book are:

• Lack of individual names in intercalary chapters to illustrate the scope of the problem
• Parallels to the Bible to induce sympathy for the migrants
• Non-showy, often grammatically-incorrect language so the migrants are more realistic and relatable to readers
• Nature-related metaphors to affect the mood of the writing and reflect the plight of the migrants

#4: Find Excerpts or Evidence to Support Your Analysis

Now that you have your main points, you need to back them up. If you’re writing a paper about a text or film, use passages/clips from it as your main source of evidence. If you’re writing about something else, your evidence can come from a variety of sources, such as surveys, experiments, quotes from knowledgeable sources etc. Any evidence that would work for a regular research paper works here.

In this example, I quoted multiple passages from The Grapes of Wrath  in each paragraph to support my argument. You should be able to back up every claim you make with evidence in order to have a strong essay.

#5: Put It All Together

Now it's time to begin writing your essay, if you haven’t already. Create an introductory paragraph that ends with the thesis, make a body paragraph for each of your main points, including both analysis and evidence to back up your claims, and wrap it all up with a conclusion that recaps your thesis and main points and potentially explains the big picture importance of the topic.

Analytical Essay Example + Analysis

So that you can see for yourself what a completed analytical essay looks like, here’s an essay I wrote back in my high school days. It’s followed by analysis of how I structured my essay, what its strengths are, and how it could be improved.

One way Steinbeck illustrates the connections all migrant people possessed and the struggles they faced is by refraining from using specific titles and names in his intercalary chapters. While The Grapes of Wrath focuses on the Joad family, the intercalary chapters show that all migrants share the same struggles and triumphs as the Joads. No individual names are used in these chapters; instead the people are referred to as part of a group. Steinbeck writes, “Frantic men pounded on the doors of the doctors; and the doctors were busy.  And sad men left word at country stores for the coroner to send a car,” (555). By using generic terms, Steinbeck shows how the migrants are all linked because they have gone through the same experiences. The grievances committed against one family were committed against thousands of other families; the abuse extends far beyond what the Joads experienced. The Grapes of Wrath frequently refers to the importance of coming together; how, when people connect with others their power and influence multiplies immensely. Throughout the novel, the goal of the migrants, the key to their triumph, has been to unite. While their plans are repeatedly frustrated by the government and police, Steinbeck’s intercalary chapters provide a way for the migrants to relate to one another because they have encountered the same experiences. Hundreds of thousands of migrants fled to the promised land of California, but Steinbeck was aware that numbers alone were impersonal and lacked the passion he desired to spread. Steinbeck created the intercalary chapters to show the massive numbers of people suffering, and he created the Joad family to evoke compassion from readers.  Because readers come to sympathize with the Joads, they become more sensitive to the struggles of migrants in general. However, John Steinbeck frequently made clear that the Joads were not an isolated incident; they were not unique. Their struggles and triumphs were part of something greater. Refraining from specific names in his intercalary chapters allows Steinbeck to show the vastness of the atrocities committed against migrants.

Steinbeck also creates significant parallels to the Bible in his intercalary chapters in order to enhance his writing and characters. By using simple sentences and stylized writing, Steinbeck evokes Biblical passages. The migrants despair, “No work till spring. No work,” (556).  Short, direct sentences help to better convey the desperateness of the migrants’ situation. Throughout his novel, John Steinbeck makes connections to the Bible through his characters and storyline. Jim Casy’s allusions to Christ and the cycle of drought and flooding are clear biblical references.  By choosing to relate The Grapes of Wrath to the Bible, Steinbeck’s characters become greater than themselves. Starving migrants become more than destitute vagrants; they are now the chosen people escaping to the promised land. When a forgotten man dies alone and unnoticed, it becomes a tragedy. Steinbeck writes, “If [the migrants] were shot at, they did not run, but splashed sullenly away; and if they were hit, they sank tiredly in the mud,” (556). Injustices committed against the migrants become greater because they are seen as children of God through Steinbeck’s choice of language. Referencing the Bible strengthens Steinbeck’s novel and purpose: to create understanding for the dispossessed.  It is easy for people to feel disdain for shabby vagabonds, but connecting them to such a fundamental aspect of Christianity induces sympathy from readers who might have otherwise disregarded the migrants as so many other people did.

The simple, uneducated dialogue Steinbeck employs also helps to create a more honest and meaningful representation of the migrants, and it makes the migrants more relatable to readers. Steinbeck chooses to accurately represent the language of the migrants in order to more clearly illustrate their lives and make them seem more like real paper than just characters in a book. The migrants lament, “They ain’t gonna be no kinda work for three months,” (555). There are multiple grammatical errors in that single sentence, but it vividly conveys the despair the migrants felt better than a technically perfect sentence would. The Grapes of Wrath is intended to show the severe difficulties facing the migrants so Steinbeck employs a clear, pragmatic style of writing.  Steinbeck shows the harsh, truthful realities of the migrants’ lives and he would be hypocritical if he chose to give the migrants a more refined voice and not portray them with all their shortcomings. The depiction of the migrants as imperfect through their language also makes them easier to relate to. Steinbeck’s primary audience was the middle class, the less affluent of society. Repeatedly in The Grapes of Wrath , the wealthy make it obvious that they scorn the plight of the migrants. The wealthy, not bad luck or natural disasters, were the prominent cause of the suffering of migrant families such as the Joads. Thus, Steinbeck turns to the less prosperous for support in his novel. When referring to the superior living conditions barnyard animals have, the migrants remark, “Them’s horses-we’re men,” (556).  The perfect simplicity of this quote expresses the absurdness of the migrants’ situation better than any flowery expression could.

In The Grapes of Wrath , John Steinbeck uses metaphors, particularly about nature, in order to illustrate the mood and the overall plight of migrants. Throughout most of the book, the land is described as dusty, barren, and dead. Towards the end, however; floods come and the landscape begins to change. At the end of chapter twenty-nine, Steinbeck describes a hill after the floods saying, “Tiny points of grass came through the earth, and in a few days the hills were pale green with the beginning year,” (556). This description offers a stark contrast from the earlier passages which were filled with despair and destruction. Steinbeck’s tone from the beginning of the chapter changes drastically. Early in the chapter, Steinbeck had used heavy imagery in order to convey the destruction caused by the rain, “The streams and the little rivers edged up to the bank sides and worked at willows and tree roots, bent the willows deep in the current, cut out the roots of cottonwoods and brought down the trees,” (553). However, at the end of the chapter the rain has caused new life to grow in California. The new grass becomes a metaphor representing hope. When the migrants are at a loss over how they will survive the winter, the grass offers reassurance. The story of the migrants in the intercalary chapters parallels that of the Joads. At the end of the novel, the family is breaking apart and has been forced to flee their home. However, both the book and final intercalary chapter end on a hopeful note after so much suffering has occurred. The grass metaphor strengthens Steinbeck’s message because it offers a tangible example of hope. Through his language Steinbeck’s themes become apparent at the end of the novel. Steinbeck affirms that persistence, even when problems appear insurmountable, leads to success. These metaphors help to strengthen Steinbeck’s themes in The Grapes of Wrath because they provide a more memorable way to recall important messages.

John Steinbeck’s language choices help to intensify his writing in his intercalary chapters and allow him to more clearly show how difficult life for migrants could be. Refraining from using specific names and terms allows Steinbeck to show that many thousands of migrants suffered through the same wrongs. Imitating the style of the Bible strengthens Steinbeck’s characters and connects them to the Bible, perhaps the most famous book in history. When Steinbeck writes in the imperfect dialogue of the migrants, he creates a more accurate portrayal and makes the migrants easier to relate to for a less affluent audience. Metaphors, particularly relating to nature, strengthen the themes in The Grapes of Wrath by enhancing the mood Steinbeck wants readers to feel at different points in the book. Overall, the intercalary chapters that Steinbeck includes improve his novel by making it more memorable and reinforcing the themes Steinbeck embraces throughout the novel. Exemplary stylistic devices further persuade readers of John Steinbeck’s personal beliefs. Steinbeck wrote The Grapes of Wrath to bring to light cruelties against migrants, and by using literary devices effectively, he continuously reminds readers of his purpose. Steinbeck’s impressive language choices in his intercalary chapters advance the entire novel and help to create a classic work of literature that people still are able to relate to today. 

This essay sticks pretty closely to the standard analytical essay outline. It starts with an introduction, where I chose to use a quote to start off the essay. (This became my favorite way to start essays in high school because, if I wasn’t sure what to say, I could outsource the work and find a quote that related to what I’d be writing about.) The quote in this essay doesn’t relate to the themes I’m discussing quite as much as it could, but it’s still a slightly different way to start an essay and can intrigue readers. I then give a bit of background on The Grapes of Wrath and its themes before ending the intro paragraph with my thesis: that Steinbeck used literary devices in intercalary chapters to show how rough migrants had it.

Each of my four body paragraphs is formatted in roughly the same way: an intro sentence that explains what I’ll be discussing, analysis of that main point, and at least two quotes from the book as evidence.

My conclusion restates my thesis, summarizes each of four points I discussed in my body paragraphs, and ends the essay by briefly discussing how Steinbeck’s writing helped introduce a world of readers to the injustices migrants experienced during the dust bowl.

What does this analytical essay example do well? For starters, it contains everything that a strong analytical essay should, and it makes that easy to find. The thesis clearly lays out what the essay will be about, the first sentence of each of the body paragraph introduces the topic it’ll cover, and the conclusion neatly recaps all the main points. Within each of the body paragraphs, there’s analysis along with multiple excerpts from the book in order to add legitimacy to my points.

Additionally, the essay does a good job of taking an in-depth look at the issue introduced in the thesis. Four ways Steinbeck used literary devices are discussed, and for each of the examples are given and analysis is provided so readers can understand why Steinbeck included those devices and how they helped shaped how readers viewed migrants and their plight.

Where could this essay be improved? I believe the weakest body paragraph is the third one, the one that discusses how Steinbeck used plain, grammatically incorrect language to both accurately depict the migrants and make them more relatable to readers. The paragraph tries to touch on both of those reasons and ends up being somewhat unfocused as a result. It would have been better for it to focus on just one of those reasons (likely how it made the migrants more relatable) in order to be clearer and more effective. It’s a good example of how adding more ideas to an essay often doesn’t make it better if they don’t work with the rest of what you’re writing. This essay also could explain the excerpts that are included more and how they relate to the points being made. Sometimes they’re just dropped in the essay with the expectation that the readers will make the connection between the example and the analysis. This is perhaps especially true in the second body paragraph, the one that discusses similarities to Biblical passages. Additional analysis of the quotes would have strengthened it.

Summary: How to Write an Analytical Essay

What is an analytical essay? A critical analytical essay analyzes a topic, often a text or film. The analysis paper uses evidence to support the argument, such as excerpts from the piece of writing. All analytical papers include a thesis, analysis of the topic, and evidence to support that analysis.

When developing an analytical essay outline and writing your essay, follow these five steps:

Reading analytical essay examples can also give you a better sense of how to structure your essay and what to include in it.

What's Next?

Learning about different writing styles in school? There are four main writing styles, and it's important to understand each of them. Learn about them in our guide to writing styles , complete with examples.

Writing a research paper for school but not sure what to write about? Our guide to research paper topics has over 100 topics in ten categories so you can be sure to find the perfect topic for you.

Literary devices can both be used to enhance your writing and communication. Check out this list of 31 literary devices to learn more !

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How to write a good analytical essay

Published September 27, 2020. Updated June 7, 2022.

Analytical Essay Definition

An analytical essay is an essay that provides an analysis of a work or issue.

Overview of Analytical Essay Writing

An analytical essay is used to analyze just about anything. Mostly, students will be asked to analyze a piece of writing, a film, or a specific issue. Topics for analytical essays should be neither too broad nor too narrow and should have enough sources to support the analysis. An analytical essay should be structured with an outline that consists of an introduction, body, and conclusion. Enough time should be spent writing, rewriting, and revising thoroughly. Line editing, spell-checking, and proofreading should be done carefully, and the sentence flow should be checked to create the final analytical essay.

Worried about your writing? Submit your paper for a Chegg Writing essay check , or for an Expert Check proofreading . Both can help you find and fix potential writing issues.

What is an analytical essay?

So, first things first: what is an analytical essay? Analytical essays are just what they sound like — they are, simply put, an analysis. To analyze is to “study or determine the nature and relationship of the parts of something” (Merriam-Webster). An analytical essay can analyze just about anything, but most often, students are asked to analyze a piece of writing, a film, or a specific issue.

It’s important to note the difference between argumentative and analytical essays. Though they are similar, there is a distinction: argumentative papers aim to prove a point through a well-researched, persuasive argument, while analytical papers posit a question and explore possible answers.

Some analytical essays will set out to prove a point, which can make them easily confused with argumentative essays. Remember, the main goal of argumentative essays is to argue a point. The main objective of analytical essays is to analyze a work or idea. Often, a firm stance will be used as a vehicle to create a more structured analysis. But, it’s not the point of the essay.

How to prepare to write an analytical essay

Before you dive into brainstorming topics for your analytical essay, be sure to read and reread the rubric for the assignment. Depending on your field of study, the guidelines will vary. For instance, psychology, education, and the sciences tend to use APA format, while the humanities, languages, and the fine arts tend to use MLA or Chicago style.

Once you know which format to use, take heed of any specific expectations your instructor has for this assignment. For example:

• When is it due?
• What is the expected page count?
• Will your instructor expect to see an outline before the draft?
• Is there a set topic list, or can you choose your own?
• Is there someplace to look at sample analytical essays that got A’s?

If anything is unclear, don’t hesitate to ask your instructor.

How to brainstorm the perfect topic for your analytical essay

Some instructors will offer their students a set of essay topics to choose from. That makes it easy for you — just pick the topic that intrigues you the most! Since your instructor has approved all the topics, you shouldn’t have to worry about any of them being too “broad” or “narrow.”

On the other hand, many instructors expect students to brainstorm their own topics. In this case, you will need to ensure your topic is relevant and not too broad or narrow.

After you think of a topic that interests you and is neither too broad nor too narrow, make sure you can find an adequate number of reputable sources to substantiate your analysis. You’ll need to evaluate all your sources’ credibility and probably include a few peer-reviewed journal articles (tip: use a database).

Many good sources can be found online or at your school’s library (in-person and online). If you’re having trouble finding useful sources, it may be a warning sign that your idea is too broad or narrow. If you’re stuck finding sources at all, ask your librarian for help.

How to structure an analytical essay

Now that you’ve found a good topic, it’s time to get organized! Even if you prefer to write spontaneously, creating an outline (even a loose one) can help you stay on track while you draft. The traditional outline for an analytical essay looks like the following:

Introduction

• main point #1
• main point #2
• main point #3

Works cited

Let’s examine each section.

No good analytical essay is complete without a super-strong introductory paragraph. It’s like the title screen at the beginning of a movie. Without it, you’d have no idea what the movie’s about!

A good introduction should state:

• the topic of your essay
• your thesis statement (the one- or two-line gist of your paper)
• the question or idea you’ll analyze
• your research methodology

The body of your essay is not limited to three points, as shown above, but three is typically considered the minimum for a good analysis. To make your analysis more compelling, present your points and arguments in a “strong, stronger, strongest” format.

• strong supporting evidence #1
• stronger supporting evidence #2
• strongest supporting evidence #3

Many students struggle with writing conclusions for their essays. It can feel unnecessary to restate what’s already been said, right? But really, a strong conclusion does much more than repeat what’s already been said. Your conclusion should:

• restate your thesis statement
• hit on all the main points of the essay
• explore the implications of the main points

Works cited 

A works cited or bibliography page should be the final section of your paper. A works-cited page includes a list of the resources you quoted or cited within the body of your work. A bibliography includes these, plus any resources you consulted and didn’t refer to in the paper, or any resources that influenced your ideas on the topic. Check your assignment to see which of these two pages you will need to have.

How to write an analytical essay

It might not seem like it when you’re staring at that blank document and flashing cursor, but this is the easy part! If you’ve adequately researched and planned your analysis, the writing process will flow much more quickly.

Remember, it’s usually not possible to write an essay in one sitting. Don’t wait until the last minute to get started! You’ll need to factor in time for breaks, meetings with your writing tutor, and the dreaded writer’s block.

Don’t expect your first draft to be perfect. It is normal (and smart) to write multiple drafts. You may even need to change your main argument halfway through your draft. That’s okay! Be ready to re-brainstorm, re-outline, and rewrite.

How to revise an analytical essay

Revision may just be the most crucial step of the essay-writing process. Even if you brainstorm the perfect topic, create a brilliant outline, and write a strong first draft, none of that brilliance will shine through if your paper is full of typos, grammar errors, and rambling tangents.

You’ll want to complete these steps of editing, in this order:

• line editing
• spell-checking
• proofreading

Revision deals with broad issues, such as an argument that doesn’t make sense or a source that doesn’t support your thesis. Line editing, spell-checking, and proofreading have more to do with your writing, the flow of your sentences, and any spelling or grammatical errors.

After you finish, it also doesn’t hurt to check your paper for plagiarism !

Example analytical essay on folklore and current events

Before you turn in that paper, don’t forget to cite your sources in APA format , MLA format , or a style of your choice.

Key takeaways

• An analytical essay is, simply put, an analysis of a work or issue.
• Be sure to understand your instructor’s expectations before you dive into writing an analytical essay.
• Topics for analytical essays need to be neither too broad nor too narrow and should have enough sources to support your analysis.
• The basic outline for an analytical essay consists of an introduction, body, conclusion, and works cited (or bibliography).
• Leaving yourself enough time to write, rewrite, and revise thoroughly is a vital part of writing an analytical essay that earns an A.

“Analyze.” Merriam-Webster.com Dictionary , Merriam-Webster, www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/analyze.

By Jolee McManus. Jolee earned a BA in English from the University of Georgia. She has several years of experience as a writing tutor and freelance copywriter and editor.

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Analytical Essay: Dissection of Student’s Feared Topic

Analytical essay is not just a nightmare for college students, it also gives them a headache when they are making one. Every student finds these essays cumbersome and excessively demanding due to the nature of complexities involved in them. That’s the prime reason these students fail in their term papers, coursework projects, etc.

We almost had you! Right? In the presence of our esteemed professional writers, there’s nothing to worry about! We will make your day by offering you all the information you need to become successful in your academic career. If you’re struggling to get to grips with such assignments, this blog post is for you. Today, we will discuss everything from writing an analytical essay to outlining its various parts.

Additionally, we will provide you with an ideal essay example that’ll do more than just providing you knowledge. So, take out your notepads / tablets / computers and start scribbling right away. Let’s get ready because we are deep diving into this topic right now!

Table of Contents

How to Write an Analytical Essay?

Writing an analytical essay is not as difficult as doing a thorough analysis yourself. Since a critical analysis essay is all about analyzing a topic / subject/ personality/ character / book / or any literary write-up or idea, we have to do two types of analysis in it. The first one is looking at it through a microscopic view and secondly is by the author’s point of view or eyes.

Analytic essay is your golden opportunity to demonstrate your skills to provide a critical point of view about a topic and enlighten your audience. Let’s just start learning how to write one when you’re clueless and need immediate help.

Read the Prompt Thoroughly

The first thing a student must do is thoroughly study the essay prompt if given by your professor. Typically, an analytic essay is given by your professor or college board to evaluate a candidate’s abilities of examining a phenomena. On the other hand, if you have been given a free choice of picking any topic of your liking then you must do so, as you’re told.

Your essay prompt provides you directions and rest is on you to figure out the purpose of the assignment. The first thing a student must do is to read the prompt a minimum of three times. Read it and understand what are the requirements you must follow and in case you need further guidelines or space in exploring the topic further.

It’s alright if you feel confused at first or even at second attempt, because college assignments are not meant to be a piece of cake. For the same reason, it’s recommended to read three times and understand the context from your teacher’s point of view. After you do it a couple of times, you’ll know what to do and how to do it.

Pick a Topic

The second and one of the essential steps of writing an analytic essay is choosing a topic. Your topic is the direction you will choose to achieve your objectives. For example, if you’re a psychology student then you can choose a subject such as what is an  existential crisis  and how to overcome it. For students of applied and clinical psychology this topic is relevant and allows them to present their analysis.

Similarly, medical science students can choose a topic for a cause and effect essay and enlighten their audience on the extent of a disease, etc. When choosing a topic do remember to avoid certain steps that will cause nothing but trouble:

• Choosing a topic out of discipline / scope /
• Topic that requires resources other than your institution provided you
• Subject that requires prior authorization or approval
• A topic that’s based on opinions rather than facts
• Challenging previous studies without proof / evidence(s)
• Going beyond the depths of your skills and abilities
• Easy topic that lacks your audience’s interest or surface-level information

When a subject for your analytic essay, it’s important to avoid aforementioned mistakes that are common in academic writing.

Start Researching on it

After going through the topic’s selection process, it’s time to start researching about it. In today’s digital age, you can speed up the process by finding relevant information on the internet as well. There are two types of research involved in this process: one deals with empirical or statistical data, and the other is non-empirical.

To start a statistical or quantitative research method, you first need to gather evidence that demonstrates results in numbers. Most of the science, medical, psychology, economics and marketing subjects require quantitative methods to follow in the assignment making process.

On the contrary, literature, sociology, history and anthropy requires only the use of qualitative research techniques. Regardless of the requirement of the research method, your evidence must be solid and should stand firm with time. To have a credible research readily available at your side, here are the things that you should follow:

• Start your research from prominent scholarly journals, books, newspapers, etc
• After collecting the evidence from them, use secondary sources such as books, articles written on the primary sources of research and experiments, etc
• The last step is gathering the evidence on the opinions from the readers who get to read the book and understand the context as well.

By doing the steps above mentioned, you’ll be able to gather three types of research and it will help you create your narrative on the topic.

Formulate an Outline Deduce from the Research

The next essential component of writing an analytic essay is making an outline from the arguments you deduce from your research. Making an outline is a technical part and one must consider how many arguments they should add in the body section that respond to queries appropriately. A general outline of analytical essay consist of three sections or parts known as:

• Introduction (starting paragraph)
• Body paragraph (middle section)
• A conclusion part (last paragraph)

Irrespective of the word count or requirements of the essay, it must consist of these parts. These parts of outline help your readers navigate to the exact section they want to read. For example, if your audience wants to read about the facts or evidence you’ve collected they can easily move to body paragraphs.

The last part of an outline is a conclusion. It circles around restating your thesis statement and provides a closure or end for your audience. An author provides a summary of all the main findings in this section, and gives their concluding remarks. Upon making an exclusive and wonderful conclusion, you can leave a lingering impression on your audience.

Write your First Draft

Here comes the composing part where you must write all the worlds and thoughts you gathered on the topic. As we discussed before you need to compartmentalize all of your arguments into an outline and then add them in the relevant sections. Your first draft must have these following details in the essay such as:

Introduction

An introduction is the first paragraph of the essay. It consists of three parts such as a hook sentence, background information and a thesis statement. All of these parts collectively form the outer shell of the intro section. Let’s discuss the role of each part in detail here.

A hook statement is the first line of the essay that serves as the eye grabbing or attention grabber sentence. It can be a famous quote, a historical fact or an eye opening result. You can write it in one or maximum two lines with word count ranging from 8 to 20.

The second part is background information that informs the audience about the origins of the topic or subject in question. This way you provide your audience with information that plays a pivotal role in their understanding and evokes an emotional response in them.

And finally, we have the life line of the essay and yes that’s a “Thesis Statement”. It’s the crux of the entire effort and educates the audience why they should accept the author’s opinion. Typically, you can formulate the thesis sentence after you gather all the evidence and read all the books and supporting evidence.

Body Paragraph(s)

A body paragraph section is the middle part of the essay and is by far the lengthiest one. It consists of the author’s opinion, corroborating evidence and adding anti-thesis and its answers in the rebuttal.

The body paragraph must start with a topic sentence that provides a short summary of the entire paragraph’s discussion. After that, you must add your arguments on the topic and let the conversation flow logically. A golden rule of thumb says you must add one argument and then its supporting evidence. This way, each of your arguments is backed by evidence and informs the audience appropriately.

Lastly, you can add transition words to crossover from one topic or point of discussion to the next one. It helps connect two different or opposing ideas and makes a bridge between them.

This is where you end your discussion and assure your readers that there’s nothing more that should be added in the context and they have to accept the author’s take on the topic. When you write this section, divide your attention into three sections.

When you start writing a conclusion, start from presenting the summary of the entire discussion you’ve started and is about to end. Secondly, reiterate the thesis sentence to provide emphasis on your research and its crux.

Thirdly, you must present your final remarks that closes the door for further discussion on the topic for now. Your conclusion remarks must be strong and persuasive enough to demonstrate your command on the topic.

Finally, the conclusion must show its significance to future generations and usefulness in the field of your studies.

Revise the Essay

After writing all the parts of the essay such as introduction, body paragraphs and conclusion, it’s time to revise your write-up. A revision is the best way where structural issues can be diagnosed and rectified timely.

Revision is a technique that not only helps you in seeing the issues but it also educates students on common slip-ups in their writing.

Proofread and Edit the Analytical Essay

The last part of writing an essay is doing a thorough proofreading for rectifying typos. Any grammatical issues can be solved at this stage. Students can use many tools for such work and improve their vocabulary and grammar issues. Lastly, in the light of the highlighted changes, edit your draft and make appropriate changes. Read the essay again and seek professional help if you think of having less skills and time required for this task. Submit the essay to your professor after completing it.

By following these guidelines students can compose breathtaking analytical essays for their college assignments. Our expert’s guide provides a step by step process that helps in understanding the actions students must take without deviating from the requirements.

Defining What is an Analytical Essay?

An analytic essay is a college assignment typically assigned to higher education students who are seeking master’s or PhD level degrees. By its definition an analytical essay allows students to choose a topic and discuss it with critical analysis under a microscope.

For instance, students can choose a topic such as dictatorship and then they must do thorough research on this subject. On the other hand, students also need to educate their audience about what are the benefits and disadvantages of this ideology, etc. Origins, current state and future iterations also needed to be mentioned in this write-up.

In short, the further you dig, the better it will get for your audience. Additionally, your analysis must be objective, adding a subjective tone may cost you top grades. Although, a small space is given for a subjective opinion but exaggeration is strictly prohibited for doing so.

This definition will help students get to grips with this academic writing style that focuses on the examination of an idea or topic with a critical eye.

Creating an Analytical Essay Outline Template

It becomes a handful for students to create an outline for an analytical essay and make it work. Don’t worry, here we will be discussing all about it and make you a pro in no time. Let’s look at the following parts of the analytical essay outline.

Start Making a Good Introduction

The initial step for a student is to craft an engaging introduction for their essay, a crucial component of an analytical essay’s structure. As it’s the first element that your reader or professor encounters, adhering to the guidelines we’ve outlined here is critical.

Begin with a captivating hook sentence that will pique your audience’s interest. Ensure your hook is compelling enough to entice your readers to peruse the entire essay. Following this, provide some background information on the topic to enlighten your readers. Finally, incorporate a thesis statement to exhibit your mastery of the subject.

This way, you will quickly complete the first part of the structure, which will inspire your peers as well. Here is an example of introduction template for better understanding of the practical work:

“Religious fascism is today’s biggest dilemma and causes mass influx of cruelty and terror in the world. Since the inception of religion and its cult following, people who are followers of any theology interjected and forcefully stomp their superiority on others. Supposedly the pious leadership of the catholic church and other organized religion took control of the state and held captive basic civil rights and freedom of speech. Salem trials of 1692 is a best example of injustice in persecution of women harassed, tortured and killed under the name of religion.

Step by step abolition of churches and religious authority over the state results in greater peace, one that was never predicted has been achieved. For longer peace and prosperity, it’s essential for state institutions to completely suppress religion and make them limited to the compounds of the church, temple etc should be the top priority of any country or a free state.”

Students we have presented you with the best version of an introduction part of an critical analysis essay. You can take an example from it and make one for your college assignment.

Make Body Paragraphs

The main body of an essay’s blueprint is the most pivotal component. It encompasses the writer’s investigation, contrasting viewpoints, and corroborating proof. Learners should initiate their main body sections with a concise introductory sentence that encapsulates the paragraph’s content.

The subsequent step involves presenting your arguments on the subject, supplemented by substantiating evidence that aligns with your position. If the subject’s investigation is extensive and the proof exceeds a couple of points, you may consider incorporating a second and third paragraph.

Following the enumeration of corroborating evidence, it’s advisable to introduce counter arguments or dissenting opinions. These opposing views originate from individuals who disagree with your position. Their inclusion offers a balanced outlook that underscores your reliability and objectivity regarding the topic.

The final task is to incorporate transitional phrases to facilitate movement from one paragraph to another. These transitions also maintain coherence when shifting from one section to another or transitioning to an entirely different subject.

Let’s have a look at body paragraph’s template:

“Just like crimes, organized religion spreads its tentacles into the society and makes it hollow with fake preaching and surface-level understanding. All the elected popes run secretive societies where they allow for persecution,torture and brainwashing techniques to their followers and non-followers. 

Dan Brown’s book Da Vinci Code clearly provides historic evidence of catholic church’s involvement in Salem Witch Trial and killings of Protestant and Eastern Orthodox church followers. Knights Templars were the biggest army at the church’s disposal and they killed thousands on the behest of the Pope of Rome. Religious extremism exists in many forms today and 9/11 attacks on twin towers is an example of one where islamic terrorists killed more than 3000 people in New Work City according to the US Department of Defense website. So we can safely establish that religious extremism in any form should be disbanded by all possible means.

End the Debate in Conclusion Paragraph

The concluding section of the analytical essay blueprint is the finale. The initial step you should undertake is to reaffirm your thesis statement, underscoring its significance and applicability. Following this, encapsulate the primary points of the essay along with a final remark. The closing comments bring the discussion to a halt, leaving no room for further debates or disagreements. Lastly, highlight the value of your work and its potential contribution to future scholarly research.

The conclusion you provide must be good and composed keeping in view the future challenges. This way you will be able to forecast five to ten years in future and provide your perspective to your readers. Let’s look at a conclusion example:

“We have established that organized religion and its extremist wing have created havoc in our society. There are no instances where religion played a good role in society. From creation of killing squads like Knights Templar to public prosecution of Salem Witches, history has witnessed brutality all over the world. It’s essential for political parties to part ways from such criminal actions and arrest supporters as well.

For creating greater harmony and love between different cultures and societies, it’s essential to devoid these actions or steps from religion and promote non-religious discussions and trade of ideas than selling beliefs and hatred”

Students we have presented a completed outline template for your understanding. You can take inspiration or follow it and compose marvelous essays for your assignments.

Analytical Essay Introduction

The opening paragraph of an analytical essay introduction serves as the initial segment of the task. Its main objective is to convey information to the readers utilizing a variety of methods. The first line you pen down will serve as your captivating sentence, designed to elicit an emotional reaction from the readers.

A writer possesses the liberty to sway their reader’s perception by employing a captivating sentence that personally engages them. This strategy allows you to persuade them to pursue your scholarly paper from beginning to end.

The subsequent section involves incorporating background data into the context. This portion underscores the significance of the issue addressed in the final paper. It also acquaints the audience with the historical background of the topic and underscores the urgency of its resolution.

Analytical Essay Thesis Statement

The third stage commences with the creation of a succinct analytical essay thesis statement that encapsulates the research question and topic. Once you’ve amassed your research materials and evidence, crafting your thesis sentence becomes a straightforward task. However, without comprehensive and relevant information, the formulation of this critical statement is unattainable. For a college term paper research statement, it’s imperative to keep it brief yet packed with insightful details.

A hypothesis statement, positioned at the conclusion of the introductory paragraph, enlightens readers about your method of arriving at the results. It serves as the cornerstone of your entire discussion and the arguments put forth in support or opposition of the subject.

To articulate your central idea of analytical essay thesis statement, adhere to the steps outlined below:

• Ensure it’s incisive and compelling
• It should be pertinent to the overall topic and its context
• Strive for utmost precision
• It should encapsulate the topic, research question, and research answer in a single sentence.
• Once you’ve drafted your thesis sentence, polish it further before proceeding to the outline section.

Analytical Essay Body Paragraphs

The body paragraphs of an analytical essay serve as the core of the outline, where students are required to incorporate their comprehensive research. This section includes a review of literature, discussion, methodologies, and more. It’s a critical juncture for students where they need to demonstrate their proficiency and abilities to convince their readers.

Initiate the body paragraph with a sentence that encapsulates the topic, providing your audience with a glimpse of what’s to be discussed in this section. Following this, you can delve into the key points and substantiate your arguments with solid evidence.

In the body section, you can also explore the literature review and pinpoint the gaps in the existing material. This approach allows you to swiftly identify areas requiring enhancement and propose solutions to address them.

Incorporating counterarguments in your research paper is also advisable. This step enables you to present your responses or counterarguments, showcasing your impartiality and competence as a writer, which can help persuade your readers. After embedding all the persuasive elements and proofs in the body paragraph, you can then transition to crafting a conclusion.

Steps for How to Write an Analytical Essay

The steps to process analysis essays are given below that will surely help students from all disciplines and knowledge. Let’s look at them one by one:

Step 1: Choose Topic for Process Analysis Essays

Even if you’re a skilled writer with aspirations of turning professional, there are still many steps to take. One of the first steps in writing an analytical essay is choosing a topic. Your topic serves as a compass, guiding your research and ensuring you stay on track.

There are several strategies students can use to choose a topic effectively. If you’re unsure about what to choose, consider reviewing previously published work for inspiration. This can be a quick way to find a solution.

Alternatively, you could seek guidance from your professor or student counselor. They are well-equipped to provide valuable advice that can greatly benefit your essay.

Lastly, you could choose a topic based on your personal interest and its breadth. This allows you to stay engaged and delve deeper into the subject and its various subtopics.

Step 2: Conduct Research

The second phase involves conducting an exhaustive investigation on the subject matter. The depth of your research will directly influence the novelty of the information you present to your readers. A robust research foundation is crucial for ensuring your essay unfolds as intended.

During the research and evidence collection process, students should steer clear of common pitfalls that could compromise their work and its credibility. These errors are not confined to any particular field and include:

• Conducting inadequate research or providing insufficient justification for research points
• Relying on sources with questionable credibility
• Using outdated or invalidated analyses that have been superseded by newer methodologies
• Including content that is not relevant to the specific scenario discussed in the topic
• Citing research sources without obtaining the author’s consent.

Step 3. Create Ideas in your Mind

Upon conducting thorough research, begin by creating a mind map of your arguments. Consider various strategies that could effectively convince your audience to favor your viewpoint over existing ones. Incorporate ideas that align with the evidence you’ve gathered. Once your mind map is fully developed, you’re prepared to move on to the subsequent step.

Step 4. Start with Intro Section

Begin the drafting process by crafting an engaging opening paragraph. Draw in your audience with a compelling first sentence, often referred to as a hook. This should be concise and designed to pique their curiosity about the topic. Follow this with some contextual information about the subject to give your readers a solid foundation. At this point, your readers should have a good understanding of the topic. Conclude with a thesis statement that offers your unique viewpoint on the subject.

Step 5. Add Research to the Body Paragraph

Now, incorporate the research or evidence you’ve gathered and refined for your audience. The best practice is to follow each of your statements with its corresponding evidence. This approach allows for a swift presentation of your narrative and its supporting evidence, preventing any confusion for the audience.

After you’ve presented your evidence, which could be a quote, an interview, or a journal reference, introduce contrasting viewpoints to demonstrate your neutrality on the subject. Include a counter-argument that addresses these opposing views. At this point, you’ve reached the crucial phase of your essay writing process.

Step 6. Write a Conclusion

The conclusion serves as the juncture where the key points of the assignment are recapped. It weaves together various thoughts and offers a final viewpoint on the subject matter. The conclusion underscores the thesis statement and leaves a lasting impression on the reader.

Step 7. Reference or Bibliography

It’s imperative to recognize the resources utilized in your work. The section for references or bibliography enumerates all the books, articles, websites, or other materials you consulted during your research. This part not only enhances the trustworthiness of your assignment but also safeguards against any plagiarism allegations. By grasping these elements of coursework structure, you can efficiently arrange your assignments and articulate your thoughts in a logical manner. Therefore, when you undertake such tasks next time, ensure to include these vital aspects and observe your grades escalate.

These steps will help you write process analysis essays with comfort and compliance. 

Analytical Essay Topics

Analytical essay topics pertain to a specific category of essays that necessitate comprehensive scrutiny. The author meticulously inspects the topic, deconstructs it into its fundamental elements, and delivers a critique or evaluation. These topics can span a wide array of fields such as literature, films, art pieces, societal matters, scientific phenomena, and more.

For example, in the realm of literature, an analytical essay topic could be “Examine the motif of deceit in Shakespeare’s Hamlet”. In this scenario, the author would dissect the play, furnish evidence of deceit, and interpret its influence on the storyline and characters.

When it comes to societal matters, a topic like “Examine the origins and repercussions of income disparity in metropolitan regions” would necessitate an in-depth exploration of socio-economic elements contributing to income inequality and its aftermath.

In the field of science, a topic could be “Examine the repercussions of climate change on polar ice caps”. This would entail an exhaustive analysis of climate data and interpretation of its impact on polar regions.

Bear in mind that the objective is not merely to recapitulate the topic but to delve into it, comprehend its subtleties, and deliver an educated evaluation. It’s about probing beneath the surface to understand the intricacies of the subject matter.

Click to see more “ Analytical Essay Topics “

Analytical Essay Examples

Many students wonder how to find the analytical essay examples but today their luck is about to change for good! We will share the types and examples of analytical essays here to end the confusion for students. These examples are mentioned below:

Poetry Analysis Essay

Poetry analysis essays allow a writer or a student to examine or present their critical analysis on a piece of poem, book’s paragraph or stanzas, etc. Typically, these assignments are common for English literature students. They are difficult and make students dig more into the historical value of the poem and its effects on the readers.

Process Analysis Essay

Process analysis essays explain how a process in a system works such as “how the car engine works”, etc. Students need to explain everything in a step by step approach and educate their audience how a process is completed.

Character Analysis Essay

A character analysis essay allows writers to explain or provide an analysis about a character. This character can be a historical figure, such as a politician, actor, philosopher, writer, etc. Students must choose a character that played a significant role in history or in the present and explain the intimate details about them.

click to see more “ Analytical Essay Examples “

Analytical Essay Conclusion

“The final part of your analytical essay is the conclusion, where you summarize your narration and connect it to your main point. To write a good conclusion, you should follow these steps:

• Show how the thesis and the story are related.
• Remind the reader of the key events that shaped the story.
• Explain the main message that your narration conveys.
• Emphasize the importance of the climax and its effects on the story.
• End with a statement or a question that makes the reader think.
• Do not introduce new information.
• Reinforce a takeaway message.

Understanding the nuances of an analytical essay necessitates a tactical plan. The steps outlined in this guide are organized and straightforward, ensuring that you can craft an exceptional illustrative essay by adhering to them.

If you encounter difficulties while composing an analytical essay, don’t hesitate to seek professional help. Expert assignment writing services are available to provide guidance and support.

With the right assistance, you can create compelling work that includes powerful arguments and reliable evidence.

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How to Write an Analysis Essay: Examples + Writing Guide

An analysis / analytical essay is a standard assignment in college or university. You might be asked to conduct an in-depth analysis of a research paper, a report, a movie, a company, a book, or an event. In this article, you’ll find out how to write an analysis paper introduction, thesis, main body, and conclusion, and analytical essay example.

So, what is an analytical essay? This type of assignment implies that you set up an argument and analyze it using a range of claims. The claims should be supported by appropriate empirical evidence. Note that you need to explore both the positive and negative sides of the issue fully.

Analytical skills are the key to getting through your academic career. Moreover, they can be useful in many real-life situations. Keep reading this article by Custom-writing experts to learn how to write an analysis!

❓ What Is an Analytical Essay?

• 🤔 Getting Started

📑 Analytical Essay Outline

• 📔 Choosing a Title
• 💁 Writing an Introduction
• 🏋 Writing a Body
• 🏁 Writing a Conclusion

🔗 References

Before you learn how to start an analysis essay, you should understand some fundamentals of writing this type of paper. It implies that you analyze an argument using a range of claims supported by facts . It is essential to understand that in your analysis essay, you’ll need to explore the negative sides of the issue and the positive ones. That’s what distinguishes an analytical essay from, say, a persuasive one.

These are the steps to write an academic paper :

• Review the literature . Before starting any paper, you should familiarize yourself with what has already been written in the field. And the analytical essay is no exception. The easiest way is to search on the web for the information.
• Brainstorm ideas. After you’ve done your search, it is time for a brainstorm! Make a list of topics for your analysis essay, and then choose the best one. Generate your thesis statement in the same way.
• Prepare an outline . Now, when you’ve decided on the topic and the thesis statement of your analytical essay, think of its structure. Below you will find more detailed information on how your paper should be structured.
• Write the first draft. You’ve done a lot of work by now. Congratulations! Your next goal is to write the first version of your analysis essay, using all the notes that you have. Remember, you don’t need to make it perfect!
• Polish your draft. Now take your time to polish and edit your draft to transform it into the paper’s final version.

You are usually assigned to analyze an article, a book, a movie, or an event. If you need to write your analytical essay on a book or an article, you’ll have to analyze the style of the text, its main points, and the author’s purported goals.

🤔 Analytical Essay: Getting Started

The key to writing an analysis paper is to choose an argument that you will defend throughout it. For example: maybe you are writing a critical analysis paper on George Orwell’s Animal Farm The first and imperative task is to think about your thesis statement. In the case of Animal Farm , the argument could be:

In Orwell’s Animal Farm , rhetoric and language prove to be more effective ways to keep social control than physical power.

The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill gives a great explanation of the thesis statement , how to create one, and what its function is.

But that’s not all. Once you have your thesis statement, you need to break down how you will approach your analysis essay to prove your thesis. To do this, follow these steps:

• Define the main goal(s) of your analysis . Remember that it is impossible to address each and every aspect in a single paper. Know your goal and focus on it.
• Conduct research , both online and offline, to clarify the issue contained within your thesis statement.
• Identify the main parts of the issue by looking at each part separately to see how it works.
• Try to clearly understand how each part works.
• Identify the links between the various aspects of the topic .
• By using the information you found, try to solve your main problem .

At this point, you should have a clear understanding of both the topic and your thesis statement. You should also have a clear direction for your analysis paper firmly planted in your mind and recorded in writing.

This will give you what you need to produce the paper’s outline.

An outline is the starting point for your work. A typical analytical essay features the usual essay structure. A 500-word essay should consist of a one-paragraph introduction, a three-paragraph body, and a one-paragraph conclusion. Find below a great analytical essay outline sample. Feel free to use it as an example when doing your own work!

Analysis Essay: Introduction

• Start with a startling statement or provocative question.

“All animals are equal, but some animals are more equal”. Animal Farm abounds in ironic and provocative phrases to start an analytical essay.

• Introduce the work and its author.
• Give background information that would help the reader understand your opinion.
• Formulate a thesis statement informing the reader about the purpose of the essay. Essay format does not presuppose telling everything possible on the given topic. Thus, a thesis statement tells what you are going to say, implying what you will not discuss, establishing the limits.

In Animal Farm, Orwell uses different irony types to ridicule totalitarianism to manifest its inability to make every member of society equal and happy.

Analysis Essay: Body

The analytical essay structure requires 2-3 developmental paragraphs, each dedicated to one separate idea confirming your thesis statement. The following template should be used for each of the body paragraphs.

• Start with a topic sentence that supports an aspect of your thesis.

Dramatic irony is used in Animal Farm to point out society’s ignorance.

• Continue with textual evidence (paraphrase, summary, direct quotations, specific details). Use several examples that substantiate the topic sentence.

Animals are unaware of the fact that Boxer was never sent to the hospital. He was sent to the slaughterhouse. However, the reader and writer understand that this is a lie.

• Conclude with an explanation.

By allowing the readers to learn some essential facts before the characters, dramatic irony creates suspense and shows how easy it is to persuade and manipulate the public.

Analysis Essay Conclusion

The next four points will give you a short instruction on how to conclude an analytical essay.

• Never use new information or topics here.
• Restate your thesis in a different formulation.
• Summarize the body paragraphs.
• Comment on the analyzed text from a new perspective.

📔 Choosing a Title for Your Analysis Essay

Choosing a title seems like not a significant step, but it is actually very important. The title of your critical analysis paper should:

• Entice and engage the reader
• Be unique and capture the readers’ attention
• Provide an adequate explanation of the content of the essay in just a few carefully chosen words

In the Animal Farm example, your title could be:

“How Do the Pigs Manage to Keep Social Control on Animal Farm?”

Analysis Essay Topics

• Analyze the media content.
• Analyze the specifics and history of hip-hop culture.  
• Sociological issues in the film Interstellar .
• Discuss the techniques M. Atwood uses to describe social issues in her novel The Handmaid’s Tale .
• Compare and analyze the paintings of Van Gogh and George Seurat.
• Analysis of Edgar Allan Poe’s The Black Cat . 
• Examine the juvenile crime rates.  
• Describe the influence of different parenting styles on children’s mind.
• Analyze the concept of the Ship of Theseus .
• Compare and analyze the various views on intelligence .
• Analysis of The Yellow Wallpaper by Charlotte Perkins Gilman .
• Discuss the techniques used by W. Shakespeare in A Midsummer Night’s Dream . 
• Analyze the biography of Frederic Chopin .
• Manifestation of the Chicano culture in the artwork An Ofrenda for Dolores del Rio .
• Similarities and differences of Roman, Anglo-Saxon, and Spanish Empires .
• Describe the problem of stalking and its impact on human mental health.
• Examine the future of fashion .
• Analyze the topicality of the article Effectiveness of Hand Hygiene Interventions in Reducing Illness Absence .
• Discuss Thomas Paine’s impact on the success of American revolution.
• Meaningful messages in Recitatif by Toni Morrison .
• Explore the techniques used by directors in the film Killing Kennedy .  
• Compare the leadership styles of Tang Empress Wu Zetian and the Pharaoh Cleopatra .
• Evaluate the credibility of Kristof’s arguments in his article Remote Learning Is Often an Oxymoron.
• Analyze genetically modified food. 
• Examine the influence of Europeans on Indian tribes in The Narrative of the Captivity and Restoration of Mrs. Mary Rowlandson .
• Describe the rhetoric techniques used in The Portrait of Dorian Gray by Oscar Wilde .
• The importance of fighting against violence in communities in the documentary film The Interrupters .
• Analyze indoor and outdoor pollution. 
• Analyze the issue of overprotective parenthood .
• Explore the connection between eating habits and advertisement.
• Discuss the urgence of global warming issue.  
• Influence of sleep on people’s body and mental health.
• Analyze the relationship between Christianity and sports .
• Discuss the concept of leadership and its significance for company efficiency. 
• Analyze the key lessons of the book Rich Dad Poor Dad by Robert Kiyosaki.  
• Examine the specifics of nursing ethic.  
• The theme of emotional sufferings in the short story A Rose for Emily .  
• Analysis of bias in books for children .
• Analyze the rhetoric of the article Public Monuments .
• Describe the main messages in Jean-Paul Sartre’s Nausea .
• Explore the problem of structural racism in healthcare.
• The reasons of tango dance popularity.  
• The shortcomings of the American educational system in Waiting for Superman.
• Analyze and compare Erin’s Law and Megan’s Law. 
• Analyze the James Madison’s essay Federalist 10 .
• Examine symbols in the movie The Joker.   
• Compare the thematic connection and stylistic devices in the poems The Road Not Taken and Find Your Way . 
• Describe and analyze the life of Eddie Bernice Johnson.
• Explore the social classes in America. 
• Crucial strengths and weaknesses of the main translation theories .

💁 Writing Your Analytical Essay Introduction

You must understand how to compose an introduction to an analysis paper. The University of Wollongong describes the introduction as a “map” of any writing. When writing the introduction, follow these steps:

• Provide a lead-in for the reader by offering a general introduction to the topic of the paper.
• Include your thesis statement , which shifts the reader from the generalized introduction to the specific topic and its related issues to your unique take on the essay topic.
• Present a general outline of the analysis paper.

Watch this great video for further instructions on how to write an introduction to an analysis essay.

Example of an Analytical Essay Introduction

“Four legs good, two legs bad” is one of the many postulates invented by George Orwell for his characters in Animal Farm to vest them with socialist ideology and control over the animal population. The social revolution on Manor Farm was built on language instruments, first for the collective success of the animals, and later for the power consolidation by the pigs. The novel was written in 1945 when the transition from limitless freedoms of socialist countries transformed into dictatorship. Through his animal protagonists, the author analyzes the reasons for peoples’ belief in the totalitarian regime. In Orwell’s Animal Farm , rhetoric and language prove to be more effective ways to keep social control than physical power.

🏋 Writing Your Analytical Essay Body

The body of the paper may be compared to its heart. This is the part where you show off your talent for analysis by providing convincing, well-researched, and well-thought-out arguments to support your thesis statement. You have already gathered the information, and now all you may start crafting your paper.

To make the body of an analytical essay, keep the following in mind:

• Discuss one argument per paragraph , although each argument can relate to multiple issues
• Strike a balance between writing in an unbiased tone, while expressing your personal opinion
• Be reasonable when making judgments regarding any of the problems you discuss
• Remember to include the opposing point of view to create a balanced perspective

The bottom line is: you want to offer opposing views, but you must pose your arguments so they will counter those opposing views and prove your point of view. Follow these steps when constructing each body paragraph:

• Choose the main sentence. The main or topic sentence will be the first line in your essay. The topic sentence is responsible for presenting the argument you will discuss in the paragraph and demonstrate how this argument relates to the thesis statement.
• Provide the context for the topic sentence , whether it relates to a quote, a specific incident in society, or something else. Offer evidence on who, what, where, when, why, and how.
• Give your analysis of the argument and how it adequately proves your thesis.
• Write a closing sentence that sums up the paragraph and provides a transition to the following paragraph.

Example of an Analytical Essay Body

Literacy can grant power, provided that there are animals who cannot read or write. In the beginning, the animals’ literacy and intellect are relatively the same. Old Major is the cleverest pig; he is the kind old philosopher, like Karl Marx or Vladimir Lenin. During his retirement, he develops a theory that all humans are the root of evil. His speech was the foundation for the pigs’ assumption of power. They refined his ideas into a new ideology and called it Animalism. They also learned how to read. It allowed the pigs to declare themselves the “mind workers.” Therefore, the pigs’ literacy assured the illiterate animals in their objective superiority.

Meanwhile, as the pigs were the intellectual elite, they were not supposed to work, which raised their social status by itself. Snowball tried to promote education among all the animals, but most of them failed to master the alphabet. This is a metaphor for the general public being predominantly ignorant and easy to manipulate. At the same time, Boxer and other animals that spend most of the day in hard work merely have no time to develop their intellect. Thus, the pigs’ intention to build a school for pig children was highly efficient. Unequal access to education and unequal ability to express one’s thoughts in perspective reinforce the social divide, making the pigs smarter and more powerful and undermining other animals’ self-esteem.

At this point, the pigs resort to propaganda and rhetoric. Squealer uses his oratorical gift to refine the pigs’ message to the other animals. Upon Napoleon’s order, he breaks the Seven Commandments of farm governance. At night, he climbs the ladder to change them, and once even falls from the ladder trying to change the commandment on alcohol. The “proletarian” animals soon forget what the Seven Commandments were like in the first place and are unsure if they have ever been altered. Further on, Minimus writes a poem praising Napoleon. Finally, Squealer replaces the Commandments with a single assertion: “All animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others.” Language is no longer used to convince. It is used to control and manipulate.

🏁 Writing Your Analytical Essay Conclusion

The conclusion is short and sweet. It summarizes everything you just wrote in the essay and wraps it up with a beautiful shiny bow. Follow these steps to write a convincing conclusion:

• Repeat the thesis statement and summarize your argument. Even when using the best summary generator for the task, reread it to make sure all the crucial points are included.
• Take your argument beyond what is simply stated in your paper. You want to show how it is essential in terms of the bigger picture. Also, you may dwell on the influence on citizens of the country.

Example of an Analytical Essay Conclusion

Because of everything mentioned above, it becomes clear that language and rhetoric can rise to power, establish authority, and manipulate ordinary people. Animal Farm is the simplified version of a communist society. It shows how wise philosophers’ good intentions can be used by mean leaders to gain unopposed power and unconditional trust. Unfortunately, this can lead to the death of many innocent animals, i.e., people, as totalitarianism has nothing to do with people’s rule. Therefore, language and oratory are potent tools that can keep people oppressed and weak, deprive them of any chance for improvement and growth, and make them think that there is no other possible existence.

Now you are ready to write an analysis essay! See, it’s easier than you thought.

Of course, it’s always helpful to see other analysis essay examples. The University of Arkansas at Little Rock provides some great examples of an analytical paper .

✏️ Analysis Essay FAQ

A great analytical paper should be well-structured, cohesive, and logically consistent. Each part of the essay should be in its place, creating a smooth and easy-to-read text. Most importantly, the statements should be objective and backed by arguments and examples.

It is a paper devoted to analyzing a certain topic or subject. An analysis essay is all about reviewing certain details of the subject and interpreting them. For example, such an analysis for a poem includes a description of artistic means that helped the poet convey the idea.

Writing an analytical essay on a book/movie/poem start with an outline. Point out what catches the eye when reviewing the subject. See how these details can be interpreted. Make sure that you refer to the main idea/message. Add an appropriate introduction and a logical conclusion.

Being more analytical in writing can be essential for a student. This is a skill that can be self-taught: try to start noticing subtle details and describe them. As you write, interpret the facts and strive to draw conclusions. Try to be as objective as possible.

• Elements of Analysis
• How Can I Create Stronger Analysis?
• How to Write a Literary Analysis Essay: Bucks.edu
• Essay Structure | – Harvard College Writing Center
• Analytical Writing: Looking Closely (Colostate.edu)
• Analytical Thesis Statements – University of Arizona
• Writing an analytic essay – UTSC – University of Toronto
• Organizing Your Analysis // Purdue Writing Lab
• How to Write an Analytical Essay: 15 Steps (with Pictures)
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Home » Critical Analysis – Types, Examples and Writing Guide

Critical Analysis – Types, Examples and Writing Guide

Table of Contents

Critical Analysis

Definition:

Critical analysis is a process of examining a piece of work or an idea in a systematic, objective, and analytical way. It involves breaking down complex ideas, concepts, or arguments into smaller, more manageable parts to understand them better.

Types of Critical Analysis

Types of Critical Analysis are as follows:

Literary Analysis

This type of analysis focuses on analyzing and interpreting works of literature , such as novels, poetry, plays, etc. The analysis involves examining the literary devices used in the work, such as symbolism, imagery, and metaphor, and how they contribute to the overall meaning of the work.

Film Analysis

This type of analysis involves examining and interpreting films, including their themes, cinematography, editing, and sound. Film analysis can also include evaluating the director’s style and how it contributes to the overall message of the film.

Art Analysis

This type of analysis involves examining and interpreting works of art , such as paintings, sculptures, and installations. The analysis involves examining the elements of the artwork, such as color, composition, and technique, and how they contribute to the overall meaning of the work.

Cultural Analysis

This type of analysis involves examining and interpreting cultural artifacts , such as advertisements, popular music, and social media posts. The analysis involves examining the cultural context of the artifact and how it reflects and shapes cultural values, beliefs, and norms.

Historical Analysis

This type of analysis involves examining and interpreting historical documents , such as diaries, letters, and government records. The analysis involves examining the historical context of the document and how it reflects the social, political, and cultural attitudes of the time.

Philosophical Analysis

This type of analysis involves examining and interpreting philosophical texts and ideas, such as the works of philosophers and their arguments. The analysis involves evaluating the logical consistency of the arguments and assessing the validity and soundness of the conclusions.

Scientific Analysis

This type of analysis involves examining and interpreting scientific research studies and their findings. The analysis involves evaluating the methods used in the study, the data collected, and the conclusions drawn, and assessing their reliability and validity.

Critical Discourse Analysis

This type of analysis involves examining and interpreting language use in social and political contexts. The analysis involves evaluating the power dynamics and social relationships conveyed through language use and how they shape discourse and social reality.

Comparative Analysis

This type of analysis involves examining and interpreting multiple texts or works of art and comparing them to each other. The analysis involves evaluating the similarities and differences between the texts and how they contribute to understanding the themes and meanings conveyed.

Critical Analysis Format

Critical Analysis Format is as follows:

I. Introduction

• Provide a brief overview of the text, object, or event being analyzed
• Explain the purpose of the analysis and its significance
• Provide background information on the context and relevant historical or cultural factors

II. Description

• Provide a detailed description of the text, object, or event being analyzed
• Identify key themes, ideas, and arguments presented
• Describe the author or creator’s style, tone, and use of language or visual elements

III. Analysis

• Analyze the text, object, or event using critical thinking skills
• Identify the main strengths and weaknesses of the argument or presentation
• Evaluate the reliability and validity of the evidence presented
• Assess any assumptions or biases that may be present in the text, object, or event
• Consider the implications of the argument or presentation for different audiences and contexts

IV. Evaluation

• Provide an overall evaluation of the text, object, or event based on the analysis
• Assess the effectiveness of the argument or presentation in achieving its intended purpose
• Identify any limitations or gaps in the argument or presentation
• Consider any alternative viewpoints or interpretations that could be presented
• Summarize the main points of the analysis and evaluation
• Reiterate the significance of the text, object, or event and its relevance to broader issues or debates
• Provide any recommendations for further research or future developments in the field.

VI. Example

• Provide an example or two to support your analysis and evaluation
• Use quotes or specific details from the text, object, or event to support your claims
• Analyze the example(s) using critical thinking skills and explain how they relate to your overall argument

VII. Conclusion

• Reiterate your thesis statement and summarize your main points
• Provide a final evaluation of the text, object, or event based on your analysis
• Offer recommendations for future research or further developments in the field
• End with a thought-provoking statement or question that encourages the reader to think more deeply about the topic

How to Write Critical Analysis

Writing a critical analysis involves evaluating and interpreting a text, such as a book, article, or film, and expressing your opinion about its quality and significance. Here are some steps you can follow to write a critical analysis:

• Read and re-read the text: Before you begin writing, make sure you have a good understanding of the text. Read it several times and take notes on the key points, themes, and arguments.
• Identify the author’s purpose and audience: Consider why the author wrote the text and who the intended audience is. This can help you evaluate whether the author achieved their goals and whether the text is effective in reaching its audience.
• Analyze the structure and style: Look at the organization of the text and the author’s writing style. Consider how these elements contribute to the overall meaning of the text.
• Evaluate the content : Analyze the author’s arguments, evidence, and conclusions. Consider whether they are logical, convincing, and supported by the evidence presented in the text.
• Consider the context: Think about the historical, cultural, and social context in which the text was written. This can help you understand the author’s perspective and the significance of the text.
• Develop your thesis statement : Based on your analysis, develop a clear and concise thesis statement that summarizes your overall evaluation of the text.
• Support your thesis: Use evidence from the text to support your thesis statement. This can include direct quotes, paraphrases, and examples from the text.
• Write the introduction, body, and conclusion : Organize your analysis into an introduction that provides context and presents your thesis, a body that presents your evidence and analysis, and a conclusion that summarizes your main points and restates your thesis.
• Revise and edit: After you have written your analysis, revise and edit it to ensure that your writing is clear, concise, and well-organized. Check for spelling and grammar errors, and make sure that your analysis is logically sound and supported by evidence.

When to Write Critical Analysis

You may want to write a critical analysis in the following situations:

• Academic Assignments: If you are a student, you may be assigned to write a critical analysis as a part of your coursework. This could include analyzing a piece of literature, a historical event, or a scientific paper.
• Journalism and Media: As a journalist or media person, you may need to write a critical analysis of current events, political speeches, or media coverage.
• Personal Interest: If you are interested in a particular topic, you may want to write a critical analysis to gain a deeper understanding of it. For example, you may want to analyze the themes and motifs in a novel or film that you enjoyed.
• Professional Development : Professionals such as writers, scholars, and researchers often write critical analyses to gain insights into their field of study or work.

Critical Analysis Example

An Example of Critical Analysis Could be as follow:

Research Topic:

The Impact of Online Learning on Student Performance

Introduction:

The introduction of the research topic is clear and provides an overview of the issue. However, it could benefit from providing more background information on the prevalence of online learning and its potential impact on student performance.

Literature Review:

The literature review is comprehensive and well-structured. It covers a broad range of studies that have examined the relationship between online learning and student performance. However, it could benefit from including more recent studies and providing a more critical analysis of the existing literature.

Research Methods:

The research methods are clearly described and appropriate for the research question. The study uses a quasi-experimental design to compare the performance of students who took an online course with those who took the same course in a traditional classroom setting. However, the study may benefit from using a randomized controlled trial design to reduce potential confounding factors.

The results are presented in a clear and concise manner. The study finds that students who took the online course performed similarly to those who took the traditional course. However, the study only measures performance on one course and may not be generalizable to other courses or contexts.

Discussion :

The discussion section provides a thorough analysis of the study’s findings. The authors acknowledge the limitations of the study and provide suggestions for future research. However, they could benefit from discussing potential mechanisms underlying the relationship between online learning and student performance.

Conclusion :

The conclusion summarizes the main findings of the study and provides some implications for future research and practice. However, it could benefit from providing more specific recommendations for implementing online learning programs in educational settings.

Purpose of Critical Analysis

There are several purposes of critical analysis, including:

• To identify and evaluate arguments : Critical analysis helps to identify the main arguments in a piece of writing or speech and evaluate their strengths and weaknesses. This enables the reader to form their own opinion and make informed decisions.
• To assess evidence : Critical analysis involves examining the evidence presented in a text or speech and evaluating its quality and relevance to the argument. This helps to determine the credibility of the claims being made.
• To recognize biases and assumptions : Critical analysis helps to identify any biases or assumptions that may be present in the argument, and evaluate how these affect the credibility of the argument.
• To develop critical thinking skills: Critical analysis helps to develop the ability to think critically, evaluate information objectively, and make reasoned judgments based on evidence.
• To improve communication skills: Critical analysis involves carefully reading and listening to information, evaluating it, and expressing one’s own opinion in a clear and concise manner. This helps to improve communication skills and the ability to express ideas effectively.

Importance of Critical Analysis

Here are some specific reasons why critical analysis is important:

• Helps to identify biases: Critical analysis helps individuals to recognize their own biases and assumptions, as well as the biases of others. By being aware of biases, individuals can better evaluate the credibility and reliability of information.
• Enhances problem-solving skills : Critical analysis encourages individuals to question assumptions and consider multiple perspectives, which can lead to creative problem-solving and innovation.
• Promotes better decision-making: By carefully evaluating evidence and arguments, critical analysis can help individuals make more informed and effective decisions.
• Facilitates understanding: Critical analysis helps individuals to understand complex issues and ideas by breaking them down into smaller parts and evaluating them separately.
• Fosters intellectual growth : Engaging in critical analysis challenges individuals to think deeply and critically, which can lead to intellectual growth and development.

Advantages of Critical Analysis

Some advantages of critical analysis include:

• Improved decision-making: Critical analysis helps individuals make informed decisions by evaluating all available information and considering various perspectives.
• Enhanced problem-solving skills : Critical analysis requires individuals to identify and analyze the root cause of a problem, which can help develop effective solutions.
• Increased creativity : Critical analysis encourages individuals to think outside the box and consider alternative solutions to problems, which can lead to more creative and innovative ideas.
• Improved communication : Critical analysis helps individuals communicate their ideas and opinions more effectively by providing logical and coherent arguments.
• Reduced bias: Critical analysis requires individuals to evaluate information objectively, which can help reduce personal biases and subjective opinions.
• Better understanding of complex issues : Critical analysis helps individuals to understand complex issues by breaking them down into smaller parts, examining each part and understanding how they fit together.
• Greater self-awareness: Critical analysis helps individuals to recognize their own biases, assumptions, and limitations, which can lead to personal growth and development.

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Feeling a bit lost when it comes to writing an analytical essay and don't know how to structure the data? 

Many students find it challenging to dissect a text, organize their thoughts, and structure their analysis essays effectively. 

But don't worry; we've got your back!  In our blog, we've put together some easy-to-follow templates and examples that will help you make a perfect analytical essay outline. No more staring at a blank page! With our tips and examples, you'll have a clear roadmap for your essay. 

So, let's get started!

• 1. Analytical Essay Overview
• 2. How To Write An Analytical Essay Outline? 
• 3. What is the Format of an Analytical Essay?
• 4. Analytical Essay Outline Samples
• 5. Tips to Structure an Analytical Essay

Analytical Essay Overview

An analytical essay is a type of academic writing that examines a topic, idea, or piece of literature in-depth. It involves breaking down the subject into its components, analyzing them, and presenting a well-structured argument or interpretation. 

The goal of an analytical essay is to explore the "how" and "why" of the subject, rather than just describing it. Unlike an argumentative essay , an analytical does not include persuasion of the writer’s claim. It often requires evidence, critical thinking, and careful evaluation to support your thesis and provide insights. 

This essay type is commonly assigned in literature, history, and other academic disciplines to assess your ability to think critically and articulate your ideas clearly.

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How To Write An Analytical Essay Outline? 

Like every other academic writing, an analytical essay requires an organized structure for its content to be readable and understandable. In order to shape all the raw information, an outline is drafted.  

An analytical essay outline is similar to the traditional essay outline of five paragraphs. Here are given the sections of a 5 paragraph analytical essay outline:

The researched information about the specific topic needs to be organized. This is to make sure that the content is clear and effective for the readers. 

Read on to get a better idea of each section of the outline.

Analytical Essay Introduction

The importance and significance of the introduction of an essay can not be denied. An analytical essay introduction is the first section of the essay that sets the stage for analysis.

The purpose of writing an essay introduction is to attract the readers and motivate them to read the essay. The introduction lays the whole groundwork for your essay. So the more substantial the introduction is, the more effective the paper is going to be.

The analytical essay introduction is based on three main elements:

Background Information

• Thesis statement 

A hook statement is an opening sentence of the introductory paragraph. Just as the name suggests, a writer uses a hook statement to “hook” the audience to read further.

A hook can take various forms, such as humor, statistics, questions, or anecdotes. Writers can select any type of opening sentence depending on the essay topic, provided it aligns with the theme and subject matter.

Example Hook:

Ready to write hooks that hook? Check out our ' hook examples' blog post and discover different types of powerful hooks!

Following the hook, provide some context about the topic being analyzed. This is where you bridge the gap between the general attention grabber and the specific argument you'll present in the thesis statement.

For Example:

Thesis Statement 

Following the hook comes the most critical element of an essay - the thesis statement. A thesis statement is the writer’s stance or argument on the chosen work. This is where the writer states and highlights the main argument of the essay topic. 

The thesis statement can be written by keeping in mind the original text’s goal and the writer’s analysis. 

For example,

Analytical Essay Body Paragraphs

The body paragraphs of an essay support your claim by providing shreds of evidence. All the gathered and relevant information that justifies the argument is presented in this section.

The body of the analytical essay should be divided into different paragraphs. Discuss each point in a specific paragraph, making your essay organized and understandable for the reader.

All paragraphs in the body section should cover the following components:

• Topic Sentence - A topic sentence is an opening sentence of a paragraph. This sentence is the claim or the important point that proves the thesis statement. Begin each of your paragraphs with a topic sentence. 
• Specific examples: Use concrete details, quotes, or scenes from the work you're analyzing.
• Data or statistics: If relevant, incorporate data or statistics to support your claims.
• Expert opinions: Opinions from credible sources can strengthen your analysis.
• Why is this evidence important?
• How does it illustrate the point you're making?
• What deeper meaning or insight does it reveal about the work being analyzed?

Note: Ea ch paragraph should be transitioned to make logical content. This transition will act as a bridge and will connect the previous paragraph with the next paragraph. 

Analytical Essay Conclusion 

The essay conclusion is the last section where all the discussion comes to an end. Here the writer restates the thesis statement and provides a short summary of the major points in the content. It will prove that the main argument is justified using the evidence for the readers.

For example, 

What is the Format of an Analytical Essay?

When it comes to formatting your analytical essay, adhering to specific guidelines is essential to ensure a professional presentation and clarity for your readers. Here are some key formatting guidelines to follow:

• Page Setup: Use standard letter-sized (8.5" x 11") paper with 1-inch margins on all sides.
• Font: Select a legible font, such as Times New Roman or Arial, and maintain consistency throughout the document.
• Font Size: Use a 12-point font size for the main text to ensure readability.
• Spacing: Double-space the entire essay, including the title, headings, and references.
• Title Page: Include a title page with the essay title, your name, course, instructor's name, and date. This information is typically centered and formatted according to your institution's guidelines.

By adhering to these formatting guidelines, you'll present your work professionally, making it easier for readers to engage with your analysis.

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Analytical Essay Outline Samples

An analytical essay is a little different than other types of essay . Therefore, to write a good analytical essay, students require essay examples to know what to produce and how to produce it. 

We have some free analysis essay outline samples for you to take assistance for your next assignment. Let’s take a look:

Analytical Essay Structure Sample

Critical Analytical Essay Outline Template

Literary Analytical Essay Outline

Macbeth Analytical Essay

Analytical Essay Outline Worksheet

Analysis Essay Outline College

5 Paragraph Analytical Essay Outline

Need more analytical essay samples? Check out our “ analytical essay examples ” blog and get the ideas!

Tips to Structure an Analytical Essay

Here are some essential tips to help you create a well-organized and effective analytical essay:

• Choose a Clear Analytical Essay Topic: Select a specific topic or idea to analyze. Make sure it's something you can dissect and discuss thoroughly. If you are looking for ideas read our blog on analytical essay topics to get inspiration.
• Begin with an Analytical Essay Outline: Start with a clear outline to organize your thoughts. Use an outline example or sample as a template.
• Introduction with a Strong Thesis: Your introduction should introduce the topic and contain a strong thesis statement that lays out your argument.
• Use Evidence to Support Thesis: Dedicate individual paragraphs to supporting evidence and arguments. Use the analytical essay structure to create a logical flow.
• Cite Sources Properly: If you're using references, ensure you follow the analytical essay format and cite sources correctly.
• Analyze and Interpret: Analyze text in detail and provide insights and interpretations.
• Conclusion with Restated Thesis: Summarize your main points and restate the thesis in the conclusion.
• Edit and Proofread: Review and edit your essay for clarity and coherence.

By following these tips and employing an analytical argument essay outline, you'll structure your essay for maximum impact.

In summary, we've covered the ins and outs of creating an analytical essay outline in our guide. With this, you should feel more confident in structuring your essays effectively. Remember, a well-structured outline is your dependable guide for successful essay writing so create one wisely!

If you're searching to get professional help, our analytical essay writing service is the answer. We provide free samples and custom essay help to guide you for all your academic assignments. 

Our essay writing service is affordable and ensures top academic quality.

Simply place your " write essay for me " request to get help from a qualified and experienced analytical essay writer.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is the formula for an analytical essay.

The formula for an analytical essay typically involves introducing a thesis statement, providing evidence to support the thesis, and analyzing that evidence to draw conclusions.

What is the outline of an analytical paragraph?

The outline of an analytical paragraph often includes a topic sentence introducing the main point, followed by evidence or examples to support that point, and analysis or interpretation of the evidence to connect it back to the thesis.

What are the three major parts of an analysis essay?

The three major parts of an analysis essay are the introduction, body paragraphs, and conclusion. The introduction sets up the thesis and provides context for the analysis. The body paragraphs present evidence and analysis to support the thesis. The conclusion summarizes the main points and restates the thesis in light of the analysis provided.

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Definition and Introduction

Journal article analysis assignments require you to summarize and critically assess the quality of an empirical research study published in a scholarly [a.k.a., academic, peer-reviewed] journal. The article may be assigned by the professor, chosen from course readings listed in the syllabus, or you must locate an article on your own, usually with the requirement that you search using a reputable library database, such as, JSTOR or ProQuest . The article chosen is expected to relate to the overall discipline of the course, specific course content, or key concepts discussed in class. In some cases, the purpose of the assignment is to analyze an article that is part of the literature review for a future research project.

Analysis of an article can be assigned to students individually or as part of a small group project. The final product is usually in the form of a short paper [typically 1- 6 double-spaced pages] that addresses key questions the professor uses to guide your analysis or that assesses specific parts of a scholarly research study [e.g., the research problem, methodology, discussion, conclusions or findings]. The analysis paper may be shared on a digital course management platform and/or presented to the class for the purpose of promoting a wider discussion about the topic of the study. Although assigned in any level of undergraduate and graduate coursework in the social and behavioral sciences, professors frequently include this assignment in upper division courses to help students learn how to effectively identify, read, and analyze empirical research within their major.

Franco, Josue. “Introducing the Analysis of Journal Articles.” Prepared for presentation at the American Political Science Association’s 2020 Teaching and Learning Conference, February 7-9, 2020, Albuquerque, New Mexico; Sego, Sandra A. and Anne E. Stuart. "Learning to Read Empirical Articles in General Psychology." Teaching of Psychology 43 (2016): 38-42; Kershaw, Trina C., Jordan P. Lippman, and Jennifer Fugate. "Practice Makes Proficient: Teaching Undergraduate Students to Understand Published Research." Instructional Science 46 (2018): 921-946; Woodward-Kron, Robyn. "Critical Analysis and the Journal Article Review Assignment." Prospect 18 (August 2003): 20-36; MacMillan, Margy and Allison MacKenzie. "Strategies for Integrating Information Literacy and Academic Literacy: Helping Undergraduate Students make the most of Scholarly Articles." Library Management 33 (2012): 525-535.

Benefits of Journal Article Analysis Assignments

Analyzing and synthesizing a scholarly journal article is intended to help students obtain the reading and critical thinking skills needed to develop and write their own research papers. This assignment also supports workplace skills where you could be asked to summarize a report or other type of document and report it, for example, during a staff meeting or for a presentation.

There are two broadly defined ways that analyzing a scholarly journal article supports student learning:

Improve Reading Skills

Conducting research requires an ability to review, evaluate, and synthesize prior research studies. Reading prior research requires an understanding of the academic writing style , the type of epistemological beliefs or practices underpinning the research design, and the specific vocabulary and technical terminology [i.e., jargon] used within a discipline. Reading scholarly articles is important because academic writing is unfamiliar to most students; they have had limited exposure to using peer-reviewed journal articles prior to entering college or students have yet to gain exposure to the specific academic writing style of their disciplinary major. Learning how to read scholarly articles also requires careful and deliberate concentration on how authors use specific language and phrasing to convey their research, the problem it addresses, its relationship to prior research, its significance, its limitations, and how authors connect methods of data gathering to the results so as to develop recommended solutions derived from the overall research process.

Improve Comprehension Skills

In addition to knowing how to read scholarly journals articles, students must learn how to effectively interpret what the scholar(s) are trying to convey. Academic writing can be dense, multi-layered, and non-linear in how information is presented. In addition, scholarly articles contain footnotes or endnotes, references to sources, multiple appendices, and, in some cases, non-textual elements [e.g., graphs, charts] that can break-up the reader’s experience with the narrative flow of the study. Analyzing articles helps students practice comprehending these elements of writing, critiquing the arguments being made, reflecting upon the significance of the research, and how it relates to building new knowledge and understanding or applying new approaches to practice. Comprehending scholarly writing also involves thinking critically about where you fit within the overall dialogue among scholars concerning the research problem, finding possible gaps in the research that require further analysis, or identifying where the author(s) has failed to examine fully any specific elements of the study.

In addition, journal article analysis assignments are used by professors to strengthen discipline-specific information literacy skills, either alone or in relation to other tasks, such as, giving a class presentation or participating in a group project. These benefits can include the ability to:

• Effectively paraphrase text, which leads to a more thorough understanding of the overall study;
• Identify and describe strengths and weaknesses of the study and their implications;
• Relate the article to other course readings and in relation to particular research concepts or ideas discussed during class;
• Think critically about the research and summarize complex ideas contained within;
• Plan, organize, and write an effective inquiry-based paper that investigates a research study, evaluates evidence, expounds on the author’s main ideas, and presents an argument concerning the significance and impact of the research in a clear and concise manner;
• Model the type of source summary and critique you should do for any college-level research paper; and,
• Increase interest and engagement with the research problem of the study as well as with the discipline.

Kershaw, Trina C., Jennifer Fugate, and Aminda J. O'Hare. "Teaching Undergraduates to Understand Published Research through Structured Practice in Identifying Key Research Concepts." Scholarship of Teaching and Learning in Psychology . Advance online publication, 2020; Franco, Josue. “Introducing the Analysis of Journal Articles.” Prepared for presentation at the American Political Science Association’s 2020 Teaching and Learning Conference, February 7-9, 2020, Albuquerque, New Mexico; Sego, Sandra A. and Anne E. Stuart. "Learning to Read Empirical Articles in General Psychology." Teaching of Psychology 43 (2016): 38-42; Woodward-Kron, Robyn. "Critical Analysis and the Journal Article Review Assignment." Prospect 18 (August 2003): 20-36; MacMillan, Margy and Allison MacKenzie. "Strategies for Integrating Information Literacy and Academic Literacy: Helping Undergraduate Students make the most of Scholarly Articles." Library Management 33 (2012): 525-535; Kershaw, Trina C., Jordan P. Lippman, and Jennifer Fugate. "Practice Makes Proficient: Teaching Undergraduate Students to Understand Published Research." Instructional Science 46 (2018): 921-946.

Structure and Organization

A journal article analysis paper should be written in paragraph format and include an instruction to the study, your analysis of the research, and a conclusion that provides an overall assessment of the author's work, along with an explanation of what you believe is the study's overall impact and significance. Unless the purpose of the assignment is to examine foundational studies published many years ago, you should select articles that have been published relatively recently [e.g., within the past few years].

Since the research has been completed, reference to the study in your paper should be written in the past tense, with your analysis stated in the present tense [e.g., “The author portrayed access to health care services in rural areas as primarily a problem of having reliable transportation. However, I believe the author is overgeneralizing this issue because...”].

Introduction Section

The first section of a journal analysis paper should describe the topic of the article and highlight the author’s main points. This includes describing the research problem and theoretical framework, the rationale for the research, the methods of data gathering and analysis, the key findings, and the author’s final conclusions and recommendations. The narrative should focus on the act of describing rather than analyzing. Think of the introduction as a more comprehensive and detailed descriptive abstract of the study.

Possible questions to help guide your writing of the introduction section may include:

• Who are the authors and what credentials do they hold that contributes to the validity of the study?
• What was the research problem being investigated?
• What type of research design was used to investigate the research problem?
• What theoretical idea(s) and/or research questions were used to address the problem?
• What was the source of the data or information used as evidence for analysis?
• What methods were applied to investigate this evidence?
• What were the author's overall conclusions and key findings?

Critical Analysis Section

The second section of a journal analysis paper should describe the strengths and weaknesses of the study and analyze its significance and impact. This section is where you shift the narrative from describing to analyzing. Think critically about the research in relation to other course readings, what has been discussed in class, or based on your own life experiences. If you are struggling to identify any weaknesses, explain why you believe this to be true. However, no study is perfect, regardless of how laudable its design may be. Given this, think about the repercussions of the choices made by the author(s) and how you might have conducted the study differently. Examples can include contemplating the choice of what sources were included or excluded in support of examining the research problem, the choice of the method used to analyze the data, or the choice to highlight specific recommended courses of action and/or implications for practice over others. Another strategy is to place yourself within the research study itself by thinking reflectively about what may be missing if you had been a participant in the study or if the recommended courses of action specifically targeted you or your community.

Possible questions to help guide your writing of the analysis section may include:

Introduction

• Did the author clearly state the problem being investigated?
• What was your reaction to and perspective on the research problem?
• Was the study’s objective clearly stated? Did the author clearly explain why the study was necessary?
• How well did the introduction frame the scope of the study?
• Did the introduction conclude with a clear purpose statement?

Literature Review

• Did the literature review lay a foundation for understanding the significance of the research problem?
• Did the literature review provide enough background information to understand the problem in relation to relevant contexts [e.g., historical, economic, social, cultural, etc.].
• Did literature review effectively place the study within the domain of prior research? Is anything missing?
• Was the literature review organized by conceptual categories or did the author simply list and describe sources?
• Did the author accurately explain how the data or information were collected?
• Was the data used sufficient in supporting the study of the research problem?
• Was there another methodological approach that could have been more illuminating?
• Give your overall evaluation of the methods used in this article. How much trust would you put in generating relevant findings?

Results and Discussion

• Were the results clearly presented?
• Did you feel that the results support the theoretical and interpretive claims of the author? Why?
• What did the author(s) do especially well in describing or analyzing their results?
• Was the author's evaluation of the findings clearly stated?
• How well did the discussion of the results relate to what is already known about the research problem?
• Was the discussion of the results free of repetition and redundancies?
• What interpretations did the authors make that you think are in incomplete, unwarranted, or overstated?
• Did the conclusion effectively capture the main points of study?
• Did the conclusion address the research questions posed? Do they seem reasonable?
• Were the author’s conclusions consistent with the evidence and arguments presented?
• Has the author explained how the research added new knowledge or understanding?

Overall Writing Style

• If the article included tables, figures, or other non-textual elements, did they contribute to understanding the study?
• Were ideas developed and related in a logical sequence?
• Were transitions between sections of the article smooth and easy to follow?

Overall Evaluation Section

The final section of a journal analysis paper should bring your thoughts together into a coherent assessment of the value of the research study . This section is where the narrative flow transitions from analyzing specific elements of the article to critically evaluating the overall study. Explain what you view as the significance of the research in relation to the overall course content and any relevant discussions that occurred during class. Think about how the article contributes to understanding the overall research problem, how it fits within existing literature on the topic, how it relates to the course, and what it means to you as a student researcher. In some cases, your professor will also ask you to describe your experiences writing the journal article analysis paper as part of a reflective learning exercise.

Possible questions to help guide your writing of the conclusion and evaluation section may include:

• Was the structure of the article clear and well organized?
• Was the topic of current or enduring interest to you?
• What were the main weaknesses of the article? [this does not refer to limitations stated by the author, but what you believe are potential flaws]
• Was any of the information in the article unclear or ambiguous?
• What did you learn from the research? If nothing stood out to you, explain why.
• Assess the originality of the research. Did you believe it contributed new understanding of the research problem?
• Were you persuaded by the author’s arguments?
• If the author made any final recommendations, will they be impactful if applied to practice?
• In what ways could future research build off of this study?
• What implications does the study have for daily life?
• Was the use of non-textual elements, footnotes or endnotes, and/or appendices helpful in understanding the research?
• What lingering questions do you have after analyzing the article?

NOTE: Avoid using quotes. One of the main purposes of writing an article analysis paper is to learn how to effectively paraphrase and use your own words to summarize a scholarly research study and to explain what the research means to you. Using and citing a direct quote from the article should only be done to help emphasize a key point or to underscore an important concept or idea.

Business: The Article Analysis . Fred Meijer Center for Writing, Grand Valley State University; Bachiochi, Peter et al. "Using Empirical Article Analysis to Assess Research Methods Courses." Teaching of Psychology 38 (2011): 5-9; Brosowsky, Nicholaus P. et al. “Teaching Undergraduate Students to Read Empirical Articles: An Evaluation and Revision of the QALMRI Method.” PsyArXi Preprints , 2020; Holster, Kristin. “Article Evaluation Assignment”. TRAILS: Teaching Resources and Innovations Library for Sociology . Washington DC: American Sociological Association, 2016; Kershaw, Trina C., Jennifer Fugate, and Aminda J. O'Hare. "Teaching Undergraduates to Understand Published Research through Structured Practice in Identifying Key Research Concepts." Scholarship of Teaching and Learning in Psychology . Advance online publication, 2020; Franco, Josue. “Introducing the Analysis of Journal Articles.” Prepared for presentation at the American Political Science Association’s 2020 Teaching and Learning Conference, February 7-9, 2020, Albuquerque, New Mexico; Reviewer's Guide . SAGE Reviewer Gateway, SAGE Journals; Sego, Sandra A. and Anne E. Stuart. "Learning to Read Empirical Articles in General Psychology." Teaching of Psychology 43 (2016): 38-42; Kershaw, Trina C., Jordan P. Lippman, and Jennifer Fugate. "Practice Makes Proficient: Teaching Undergraduate Students to Understand Published Research." Instructional Science 46 (2018): 921-946; Gyuris, Emma, and Laura Castell. "To Tell Them or Show Them? How to Improve Science Students’ Skills of Critical Reading." International Journal of Innovation in Science and Mathematics Education 21 (2013): 70-80; Woodward-Kron, Robyn. "Critical Analysis and the Journal Article Review Assignment." Prospect 18 (August 2003): 20-36; MacMillan, Margy and Allison MacKenzie. "Strategies for Integrating Information Literacy and Academic Literacy: Helping Undergraduate Students Make the Most of Scholarly Articles." Library Management 33 (2012): 525-535.

Writing Tip

Not All Scholarly Journal Articles Can Be Critically Analyzed

There are a variety of articles published in scholarly journals that do not fit within the guidelines of an article analysis assignment. This is because the work cannot be empirically examined or it does not generate new knowledge in a way which can be critically analyzed.

If you are required to locate a research study on your own, avoid selecting these types of journal articles:

• Theoretical essays which discuss concepts, assumptions, and propositions, but report no empirical research;
• Statistical or methodological papers that may analyze data, but the bulk of the work is devoted to refining a new measurement, statistical technique, or modeling procedure;
• Articles that review, analyze, critique, and synthesize prior research, but do not report any original research;
• Brief essays devoted to research methods and findings;
• Articles written by scholars in popular magazines or industry trade journals;
• Academic commentary that discusses research trends or emerging concepts and ideas, but does not contain citations to sources; and
• Pre-print articles that have been posted online, but may undergo further editing and revision by the journal's editorial staff before final publication. An indication that an article is a pre-print is that it has no volume, issue, or page numbers assigned to it.

Journal Analysis Assignment - Myers . Writing@CSU, Colorado State University; Franco, Josue. “Introducing the Analysis of Journal Articles.” Prepared for presentation at the American Political Science Association’s 2020 Teaching and Learning Conference, February 7-9, 2020, Albuquerque, New Mexico; Woodward-Kron, Robyn. "Critical Analysis and the Journal Article Review Assignment." Prospect 18 (August 2003): 20-36.

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Critical Writing Fall 2024: Library guide for Dr. Fayyaz Vellani's Class: Researching the White Paper

• Getting started
• News and Opinion Sites
• Academic Sources
• Grey Literature
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• Chicago Manual of Style: Citing Images
• Researching the Op-Ed
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Research the White Paper

Researching the white paper:.

The process of researching and composing a white paper shares some similarities with the kind of research and writing one does for a high school or college research paper. What’s important for writers of white papers to grasp, however, is how much this genre differs from a research paper.  First, the author of a white paper already recognizes that there is a problem to be solved, a decision to be made, and the job of the author is to provide readers with substantive information to help them make some kind of decision--which may include a decision to do more research because major gaps remain. 

Thus, a white paper author would not “brainstorm” a topic. Instead, the white paper author would get busy figuring out how the problem is defined by those who are experiencing it as a problem. Typically that research begins in popular culture--social media, surveys, interviews, newspapers. Once the author has a handle on how the problem is being defined and experienced, its history and its impact, what people in the trenches believe might be the best or worst ways of addressing it, the author then will turn to academic scholarship as well as “grey” literature (more about that later).  Unlike a school research paper, the author does not set out to argue for or against a particular position, and then devote the majority of effort to finding sources to support the selected position.  Instead, the author sets out in good faith to do as much fact-finding as possible, and thus research is likely to present multiple, conflicting, and overlapping perspectives. When people research out of a genuine desire to understand and solve a problem, they listen to every source that may offer helpful information. They will thus have to do much more analysis, synthesis, and sorting of that information, which will often not fall neatly into a “pro” or “con” camp:  Solution A may, for example, solve one part of the problem but exacerbate another part of the problem. Solution C may sound like what everyone wants, but what if it’s built on a set of data that have been criticized by another reliable source?  And so it goes. 

For example, if you are trying to write a white paper on the opioid crisis, you may focus on the value of  providing free, sterilized needles--which do indeed reduce disease, and also provide an opportunity for the health care provider distributing them to offer addiction treatment to the user. However, the free needles are sometimes discarded on the ground, posing a danger to others; or they may be shared; or they may encourage more drug usage. All of those things can be true at once; a reader will want to know about all of these considerations in order to make an informed decision. That is the challenging job of the white paper author.     
 The research you do for your white paper will require that you identify a specific problem, seek popular culture sources to help define the problem, its history, its significance and impact for people affected by it.  You will then delve into academic and grey literature to learn about the way scholars and others with professional expertise answer these same questions. In this way, you will create creating a layered, complex portrait that provides readers with a substantive exploration useful for deliberating and decision-making. You will also likely need to find or create images, including tables, figures, illustrations or photographs, and you will document all of your sources. 

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Drilling for Superhot Geothermal Energy: A Technology Gap Analysis

Technical Paper #2024-6

Version Number: 1.0

September 9, 2024

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Rebecca pearce, tony pink.

This report reviews state-of-the-art deep geothermal drilling and well-construction technologies, identifies existing technology gaps, and suggests strategies to overcome these gaps. The technologies include conventional drill bits, hybrid conventional drill bits, direct energy drilling systems, high-temperature downhole tools, insulated drill pipe, low-heat coefficient coatings, supercritical CO 2 , drilling fluid, drilling muds, and mud coolers. Each technology is assessed and given a technology readiness level between 1-9, from theoretical to commercially scalable.

The report focuses on the technology frontier for drilling and well construction in the context of the superhot rock (SHR) geothermal energy systems: the production of renewable, baseload electricity by circulating water in deep (>5 km) rock that is more than >374˚C . While the Cascade Institute’s Ultradeep Geothermal Program covers a broader range of next-generation geothermal systems (including lower-temperature systems), the technology assessment in this report is relevant to all ultradeep geothermal projects.

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GPT-fabricated scientific papers on Google Scholar: Key features, spread, and implications for preempting evidence manipulation

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Academic journals, archives, and repositories are seeing an increasing number of questionable research papers clearly produced using generative AI. They are often created with widely available, general-purpose AI applications, most likely ChatGPT, and mimic scientific writing. Google Scholar easily locates and lists these questionable papers alongside reputable, quality-controlled research. Our analysis of a selection of questionable GPT-fabricated scientific papers found in Google Scholar shows that many are about applied, often controversial topics susceptible to disinformation: the environment, health, and computing. The resulting enhanced potential for malicious manipulation of society’s evidence base, particularly in politically divisive domains, is a growing concern.

Swedish School of Library and Information Science, University of Borås, Sweden

Department of Arts and Cultural Sciences, Lund University, Sweden

Division of Environmental Communication, Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences, Sweden

Research Questions

• Where are questionable publications produced with generative pre-trained transformers (GPTs) that can be found via Google Scholar published or deposited?
• What are the main characteristics of these publications in relation to predominant subject categories?
• How are these publications spread in the research infrastructure for scholarly communication?
• How is the role of the scholarly communication infrastructure challenged in maintaining public trust in science and evidence through inappropriate use of generative AI?

research note Summary

• A sample of scientific papers with signs of GPT-use found on Google Scholar was retrieved, downloaded, and analyzed using a combination of qualitative coding and descriptive statistics. All papers contained at least one of two common phrases returned by conversational agents that use large language models (LLM) like OpenAI’s ChatGPT. Google Search was then used to determine the extent to which copies of questionable, GPT-fabricated papers were available in various repositories, archives, citation databases, and social media platforms.
• Roughly two-thirds of the retrieved papers were found to have been produced, at least in part, through undisclosed, potentially deceptive use of GPT. The majority (57%) of these questionable papers dealt with policy-relevant subjects (i.e., environment, health, computing), susceptible to influence operations. Most were available in several copies on different domains (e.g., social media, archives, and repositories).
• Two main risks arise from the increasingly common use of GPT to (mass-)produce fake, scientific publications. First, the abundance of fabricated “studies” seeping into all areas of the research infrastructure threatens to overwhelm the scholarly communication system and jeopardize the integrity of the scientific record. A second risk lies in the increased possibility that convincingly scientific-looking content was in fact deceitfully created with AI tools and is also optimized to be retrieved by publicly available academic search engines, particularly Google Scholar. However small, this possibility and awareness of it risks undermining the basis for trust in scientific knowledge and poses serious societal risks.

Implications

The use of ChatGPT to generate text for academic papers has raised concerns about research integrity. Discussion of this phenomenon is ongoing in editorials, commentaries, opinion pieces, and on social media (Bom, 2023; Stokel-Walker, 2024; Thorp, 2023). There are now several lists of papers suspected of GPT misuse, and new papers are constantly being added. 1 See for example Academ-AI, https://www.academ-ai.info/ , and Retraction Watch, https://retractionwatch.com/papers-and-peer-reviews-with-evidence-of-chatgpt-writing/ . While many legitimate uses of GPT for research and academic writing exist (Huang & Tan, 2023; Kitamura, 2023; Lund et al., 2023), its undeclared use—beyond proofreading—has potentially far-reaching implications for both science and society, but especially for their relationship. It, therefore, seems important to extend the discussion to one of the most accessible and well-known intermediaries between science, but also certain types of misinformation, and the public, namely Google Scholar, also in response to the legitimate concerns that the discussion of generative AI and misinformation needs to be more nuanced and empirically substantiated  (Simon et al., 2023).

Google Scholar, https://scholar.google.com , is an easy-to-use academic search engine. It is available for free, and its index is extensive (Gusenbauer & Haddaway, 2020). It is also often touted as a credible source for academic literature and even recommended in library guides, by media and information literacy initiatives, and fact checkers (Tripodi et al., 2023). However, Google Scholar lacks the transparency and adherence to standards that usually characterize citation databases. Instead, Google Scholar uses automated crawlers, like Google’s web search engine (Martín-Martín et al., 2021), and the inclusion criteria are based on primarily technical standards, allowing any individual author—with or without scientific affiliation—to upload papers to be indexed (Google Scholar Help, n.d.). It has been shown that Google Scholar is susceptible to manipulation through citation exploits (Antkare, 2020) and by providing access to fake scientific papers (Dadkhah et al., 2017). A large part of Google Scholar’s index consists of publications from established scientific journals or other forms of quality-controlled, scholarly literature. However, the index also contains a large amount of gray literature, including student papers, working papers, reports, preprint servers, and academic networking sites, as well as material from so-called “questionable” academic journals, including paper mills. The search interface does not offer the possibility to filter the results meaningfully by material type, publication status, or form of quality control, such as limiting the search to peer-reviewed material.

To understand the occurrence of ChatGPT (co-)authored work in Google Scholar’s index, we scraped it for publications, including one of two common ChatGPT responses (see Appendix A) that we encountered on social media and in media reports (DeGeurin, 2024). The results of our descriptive statistical analyses showed that around 62% did not declare the use of GPTs. Most of these GPT-fabricated papers were found in non-indexed journals and working papers, but some cases included research published in mainstream scientific journals and conference proceedings. 2 Indexed journals mean scholarly journals indexed by abstract and citation databases such as Scopus and Web of Science, where the indexation implies journals with high scientific quality. Non-indexed journals are journals that fall outside of this indexation. More than half (57%) of these GPT-fabricated papers concerned policy-relevant subject areas susceptible to influence operations. To avoid increasing the visibility of these publications, we abstained from referencing them in this research note. However, we have made the data available in the Harvard Dataverse repository.

The publications were related to three issue areas—health (14.5%), environment (19.5%) and computing (23%)—with key terms such “healthcare,” “COVID-19,” or “infection”for health-related papers, and “analysis,” “sustainable,” and “global” for environment-related papers. In several cases, the papers had titles that strung together general keywords and buzzwords, thus alluding to very broad and current research. These terms included “biology,” “telehealth,” “climate policy,” “diversity,” and “disrupting,” to name just a few.  While the study’s scope and design did not include a detailed analysis of which parts of the articles included fabricated text, our dataset did contain the surrounding sentences for each occurrence of the suspicious phrases that formed the basis for our search and subsequent selection. Based on that, we can say that the phrases occurred in most sections typically found in scientific publications, including the literature review, methods, conceptual and theoretical frameworks, background, motivation or societal relevance, and even discussion. This was confirmed during the joint coding, where we read and discussed all articles. It became clear that not just the text related to the telltale phrases was created by GPT, but that almost all articles in our sample of questionable articles likely contained traces of GPT-fabricated text everywhere.

Evidence hacking and backfiring effects

Generative pre-trained transformers (GPTs) can be used to produce texts that mimic scientific writing. These texts, when made available online—as we demonstrate—leak into the databases of academic search engines and other parts of the research infrastructure for scholarly communication. This development exacerbates problems that were already present with less sophisticated text generators (Antkare, 2020; Cabanac & Labbé, 2021). Yet, the public release of ChatGPT in 2022, together with the way Google Scholar works, has increased the likelihood of lay people (e.g., media, politicians, patients, students) coming across questionable (or even entirely GPT-fabricated) papers and other problematic research findings. Previous research has emphasized that the ability to determine the value and status of scientific publications for lay people is at stake when misleading articles are passed off as reputable (Haider & Åström, 2017) and that systematic literature reviews risk being compromised (Dadkhah et al., 2017). It has also been highlighted that Google Scholar, in particular, can be and has been exploited for manipulating the evidence base for politically charged issues and to fuel conspiracy narratives (Tripodi et al., 2023). Both concerns are likely to be magnified in the future, increasing the risk of what we suggest calling evidence hacking —the strategic and coordinated malicious manipulation of society’s evidence base.

The authority of quality-controlled research as evidence to support legislation, policy, politics, and other forms of decision-making is undermined by the presence of undeclared GPT-fabricated content in publications professing to be scientific. Due to the large number of archives, repositories, mirror sites, and shadow libraries to which they spread, there is a clear risk that GPT-fabricated, questionable papers will reach audiences even after a possible retraction. There are considerable technical difficulties involved in identifying and tracing computer-fabricated papers (Cabanac & Labbé, 2021; Dadkhah et al., 2023; Jones, 2024), not to mention preventing and curbing their spread and uptake.

However, as the rise of the so-called anti-vaxx movement during the COVID-19 pandemic and the ongoing obstruction and denial of climate change show, retracting erroneous publications often fuels conspiracies and increases the following of these movements rather than stopping them. To illustrate this mechanism, climate deniers frequently question established scientific consensus by pointing to other, supposedly scientific, studies that support their claims. Usually, these are poorly executed, not peer-reviewed, based on obsolete data, or even fraudulent (Dunlap & Brulle, 2020). A similar strategy is successful in the alternative epistemic world of the global anti-vaccination movement (Carrion, 2018) and the persistence of flawed and questionable publications in the scientific record already poses significant problems for health research, policy, and lawmakers, and thus for society as a whole (Littell et al., 2024). Considering that a person’s support for “doing your own research” is associated with increased mistrust in scientific institutions (Chinn & Hasell, 2023), it will be of utmost importance to anticipate and consider such backfiring effects already when designing a technical solution, when suggesting industry or legal regulation, and in the planning of educational measures.

Recommendations

Solutions should be based on simultaneous considerations of technical, educational, and regulatory approaches, as well as incentives, including social ones, across the entire research infrastructure. Paying attention to how these approaches and incentives relate to each other can help identify points and mechanisms for disruption. Recognizing fraudulent academic papers must happen alongside understanding how they reach their audiences and what reasons there might be for some of these papers successfully “sticking around.” A possible way to mitigate some of the risks associated with GPT-fabricated scholarly texts finding their way into academic search engine results would be to provide filtering options for facets such as indexed journals, gray literature, peer-review, and similar on the interface of publicly available academic search engines. Furthermore, evaluation tools for indexed journals 3 Such as LiU Journal CheckUp, https://ep.liu.se/JournalCheckup/default.aspx?lang=eng . could be integrated into the graphical user interfaces and the crawlers of these academic search engines. To enable accountability, it is important that the index (database) of such a search engine is populated according to criteria that are transparent, open to scrutiny, and appropriate to the workings of  science and other forms of academic research. Moreover, considering that Google Scholar has no real competitor, there is a strong case for establishing a freely accessible, non-specialized academic search engine that is not run for commercial reasons but for reasons of public interest. Such measures, together with educational initiatives aimed particularly at policymakers, science communicators, journalists, and other media workers, will be crucial to reducing the possibilities for and effects of malicious manipulation or evidence hacking. It is important not to present this as a technical problem that exists only because of AI text generators but to relate it to the wider concerns in which it is embedded. These range from a largely dysfunctional scholarly publishing system (Haider & Åström, 2017) and academia’s “publish or perish” paradigm to Google’s near-monopoly and ideological battles over the control of information and ultimately knowledge. Any intervention is likely to have systemic effects; these effects need to be considered and assessed in advance and, ideally, followed up on.

Our study focused on a selection of papers that were easily recognizable as fraudulent. We used this relatively small sample as a magnifying glass to examine, delineate, and understand a problem that goes beyond the scope of the sample itself, which however points towards larger concerns that require further investigation. The work of ongoing whistleblowing initiatives 4 Such as Academ-AI, https://www.academ-ai.info/ , and Retraction Watch, https://retractionwatch.com/papers-and-peer-reviews-with-evidence-of-chatgpt-writing/ . , recent media reports of journal closures (Subbaraman, 2024), or GPT-related changes in word use and writing style (Cabanac et al., 2021; Stokel-Walker, 2024) suggest that we only see the tip of the iceberg. There are already more sophisticated cases (Dadkhah et al., 2023) as well as cases involving fabricated images (Gu et al., 2022). Our analysis shows that questionable and potentially manipulative GPT-fabricated papers permeate the research infrastructure and are likely to become a widespread phenomenon. Our findings underline that the risk of fake scientific papers being used to maliciously manipulate evidence (see Dadkhah et al., 2017) must be taken seriously. Manipulation may involve undeclared automatic summaries of texts, inclusion in literature reviews, explicit scientific claims, or the concealment of errors in studies so that they are difficult to detect in peer review. However, the mere possibility of these things happening is a significant risk in its own right that can be strategically exploited and will have ramifications for trust in and perception of science. Society’s methods of evaluating sources and the foundations of media and information literacy are under threat and public trust in science is at risk of further erosion, with far-reaching consequences for society in dealing with information disorders. To address this multifaceted problem, we first need to understand why it exists and proliferates.

Finding 1: 139 GPT-fabricated, questionable papers were found and listed as regular results on the Google Scholar results page. Non-indexed journals dominate.

Most questionable papers we found were in non-indexed journals or were working papers, but we did also find some in established journals, publications, conferences, and repositories. We found a total of 139 papers with a suspected deceptive use of ChatGPT or similar LLM applications (see Table 1). Out of these, 19 were in indexed journals, 89 were in non-indexed journals, 19 were student papers found in university databases, and 12 were working papers (mostly in preprint databases). Table 1 divides these papers into categories. Health and environment papers made up around 34% (47) of the sample. Of these, 66% were present in non-indexed journals.

Finding 2: GPT-fabricated, questionable papers are disseminated online, permeating the research infrastructure for scholarly communication, often in multiple copies. Applied topics with practical implications dominate.

The 20 papers concerning health-related issues are distributed across 20 unique domains, accounting for 46 URLs. The 27 papers dealing with environmental issues can be found across 26 unique domains, accounting for 56 URLs.  Most of the identified papers exist in multiple copies and have already spread to several archives, repositories, and social media. It would be difficult, or impossible, to remove them from the scientific record.

As apparent from Table 2, GPT-fabricated, questionable papers are seeping into most parts of the online research infrastructure for scholarly communication. Platforms on which identified papers have appeared include ResearchGate, ORCiD, Journal of Population Therapeutics and Clinical Pharmacology (JPTCP), Easychair, Frontiers, the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineer (IEEE), and X/Twitter. Thus, even if they are retracted from their original source, it will prove very difficult to track, remove, or even just mark them up on other platforms. Moreover, unless regulated, Google Scholar will enable their continued and most likely unlabeled discoverability.

A word rain visualization (Centre for Digital Humanities Uppsala, 2023), which combines word prominences through TF-IDF 5 Term frequency–inverse document frequency , a method for measuring the significance of a word in a document compared to its frequency across all documents in a collection. scores with semantic similarity of the full texts of our sample of GPT-generated articles that fall into the “Environment” and “Health” categories, reflects the two categories in question. However, as can be seen in Figure 1, it also reveals overlap and sub-areas. The y-axis shows word prominences through word positions and font sizes, while the x-axis indicates semantic similarity. In addition to a certain amount of overlap, this reveals sub-areas, which are best described as two distinct events within the word rain. The event on the left bundles terms related to the development and management of health and healthcare with “challenges,” “impact,” and “potential of artificial intelligence”emerging as semantically related terms. Terms related to research infrastructures, environmental, epistemic, and technological concepts are arranged further down in the same event (e.g., “system,” “climate,” “understanding,” “knowledge,” “learning,” “education,” “sustainable”). A second distinct event further to the right bundles terms associated with fish farming and aquatic medicinal plants, highlighting the presence of an aquaculture cluster.  Here, the prominence of groups of terms such as “used,” “model,” “-based,” and “traditional” suggests the presence of applied research on these topics. The two events making up the word rain visualization, are linked by a less dominant but overlapping cluster of terms related to “energy” and “water.”

The bar chart of the terms in the paper subset (see Figure 2) complements the word rain visualization by depicting the most prominent terms in the full texts along the y-axis. Here, word prominences across health and environment papers are arranged descendingly, where values outside parentheses are TF-IDF values (relative frequencies) and values inside parentheses are raw term frequencies (absolute frequencies).

Finding 3: Google Scholar presents results from quality-controlled and non-controlled citation databases on the same interface, providing unfiltered access to GPT-fabricated questionable papers.

Google Scholar’s central position in the publicly accessible scholarly communication infrastructure, as well as its lack of standards, transparency, and accountability in terms of inclusion criteria, has potentially serious implications for public trust in science. This is likely to exacerbate the already-known potential to exploit Google Scholar for evidence hacking (Tripodi et al., 2023) and will have implications for any attempts to retract or remove fraudulent papers from their original publication venues. Any solution must consider the entirety of the research infrastructure for scholarly communication and the interplay of different actors, interests, and incentives.

We searched and scraped Google Scholar using the Python library Scholarly (Cholewiak et al., 2023) for papers that included specific phrases known to be common responses from ChatGPT and similar applications with the same underlying model (GPT3.5 or GPT4): “as of my last knowledge update” and/or “I don’t have access to real-time data” (see Appendix A). This facilitated the identification of papers that likely used generative AI to produce text, resulting in 227 retrieved papers. The papers’ bibliographic information was automatically added to a spreadsheet and downloaded into Zotero. 6 An open-source reference manager, https://zotero.org .

We employed multiple coding (Barbour, 2001) to classify the papers based on their content. First, we jointly assessed whether the paper was suspected of fraudulent use of ChatGPT (or similar) based on how the text was integrated into the papers and whether the paper was presented as original research output or the AI tool’s role was acknowledged. Second, in analyzing the content of the papers, we continued the multiple coding by classifying the fraudulent papers into four categories identified during an initial round of analysis—health, environment, computing, and others—and then determining which subjects were most affected by this issue (see Table 1). Out of the 227 retrieved papers, 88 papers were written with legitimate and/or declared use of GPTs (i.e., false positives, which were excluded from further analysis), and 139 papers were written with undeclared and/or fraudulent use (i.e., true positives, which were included in further analysis). The multiple coding was conducted jointly by all authors of the present article, who collaboratively coded and cross-checked each other’s interpretation of the data simultaneously in a shared spreadsheet file. This was done to single out coding discrepancies and settle coding disagreements, which in turn ensured methodological thoroughness and analytical consensus (see Barbour, 2001). Redoing the category coding later based on our established coding schedule, we achieved an intercoder reliability (Cohen’s kappa) of 0.806 after eradicating obvious differences.

The ranking algorithm of Google Scholar prioritizes highly cited and older publications (Martín-Martín et al., 2016). Therefore, the position of the articles on the search engine results pages was not particularly informative, considering the relatively small number of results in combination with the recency of the publications. Only the query “as of my last knowledge update” had more than two search engine result pages. On those, questionable articles with undeclared use of GPTs were evenly distributed across all result pages (min: 4, max: 9, mode: 8), with the proportion of undeclared use being slightly higher on average on later search result pages.

To understand how the papers making fraudulent use of generative AI were disseminated online, we programmatically searched for the paper titles (with exact string matching) in Google Search from our local IP address (see Appendix B) using the googlesearch – python library(Vikramaditya, 2020). We manually verified each search result to filter out false positives—results that were not related to the paper—and then compiled the most prominent URLs by field. This enabled the identification of other platforms through which the papers had been spread. We did not, however, investigate whether copies had spread into SciHub or other shadow libraries, or if they were referenced in Wikipedia.

We used descriptive statistics to count the prevalence of the number of GPT-fabricated papers across topics and venues and top domains by subject. The pandas software library for the Python programming language (The pandas development team, 2024) was used for this part of the analysis. Based on the multiple coding, paper occurrences were counted in relation to their categories, divided into indexed journals, non-indexed journals, student papers, and working papers. The schemes, subdomains, and subdirectories of the URL strings were filtered out while top-level domains and second-level domains were kept, which led to normalizing domain names. This, in turn, allowed the counting of domain frequencies in the environment and health categories. To distinguish word prominences and meanings in the environment and health-related GPT-fabricated questionable papers, a semantically-aware word cloud visualization was produced through the use of a word rain (Centre for Digital Humanities Uppsala, 2023) for full-text versions of the papers. Font size and y-axis positions indicate word prominences through TF-IDF scores for the environment and health papers (also visualized in a separate bar chart with raw term frequencies in parentheses), and words are positioned along the x-axis to reflect semantic similarity (Skeppstedt et al., 2024), with an English Word2vec skip gram model space (Fares et al., 2017). An English stop word list was used, along with a manually produced list including terms such as “https,” “volume,” or “years.”

• Artificial Intelligence
• / Search engines

Cite this Essay

Haider, J., Söderström, K. R., Ekström, B., & Rödl, M. (2024). GPT-fabricated scientific papers on Google Scholar: Key features, spread, and implications for preempting evidence manipulation. Harvard Kennedy School (HKS) Misinformation Review . https://doi.org/10.37016/mr-2020-156

• / Appendix B

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This research has been supported by Mistra, the Swedish Foundation for Strategic Environmental Research, through the research program Mistra Environmental Communication (Haider, Ekström, Rödl) and the Marcus and Amalia Wallenberg Foundation [2020.0004] (Söderström).

Competing Interests

The authors declare no competing interests.

The research described in this article was carried out under Swedish legislation. According to the relevant EU and Swedish legislation (2003:460) on the ethical review of research involving humans (“Ethical Review Act”), the research reported on here is not subject to authorization by the Swedish Ethical Review Authority (“etikprövningsmyndigheten”) (SRC, 2017).

This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License , which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided that the original author and source are properly credited.

Data Availability

All data needed to replicate this study are available at the Harvard Dataverse: https://doi.org/10.7910/DVN/WUVD8X

Acknowledgements

The authors wish to thank two anonymous reviewers for their valuable comments on the article manuscript as well as the editorial group of Harvard Kennedy School (HKS) Misinformation Review for their thoughtful feedback and input.

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Writing a Research Paper Introduction | Step-by-Step Guide

Published on September 24, 2022 by Jack Caulfield . Revised on September 5, 2024.

The introduction to a research paper is where you set up your topic and approach for the reader. It has several key goals:

• Present your topic and get the reader interested
• Provide background or summarize existing research
• Position your own approach
• Detail your specific research problem and problem statement
• Give an overview of the paper’s structure

The introduction looks slightly different depending on whether your paper presents the results of original empirical research or constructs an argument by engaging with a variety of sources.

The five steps in this article will help you put together an effective introduction for either type of research paper.

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Table of contents

Step 1: introduce your topic, step 2: describe the background, step 3: establish your research problem, step 4: specify your objective(s), step 5: map out your paper, research paper introduction examples, frequently asked questions about the research paper introduction.

The first job of the introduction is to tell the reader what your topic is and why it’s interesting or important. This is generally accomplished with a strong opening hook.

The hook is a striking opening sentence that clearly conveys the relevance of your topic. Think of an interesting fact or statistic, a strong statement, a question, or a brief anecdote that will get the reader wondering about your topic.

For example, the following could be an effective hook for an argumentative paper about the environmental impact of cattle farming:

A more empirical paper investigating the relationship of Instagram use with body image issues in adolescent girls might use the following hook:

Don’t feel that your hook necessarily has to be deeply impressive or creative. Clarity and relevance are still more important than catchiness. The key thing is to guide the reader into your topic and situate your ideas.

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This part of the introduction differs depending on what approach your paper is taking.

In a more argumentative paper, you’ll explore some general background here. In a more empirical paper, this is the place to review previous research and establish how yours fits in.

Argumentative paper: Background information

After you’ve caught your reader’s attention, specify a bit more, providing context and narrowing down your topic.

Provide only the most relevant background information. The introduction isn’t the place to get too in-depth; if more background is essential to your paper, it can appear in the body .

Empirical paper: Describing previous research

For a paper describing original research, you’ll instead provide an overview of the most relevant research that has already been conducted. This is a sort of miniature literature review —a sketch of the current state of research into your topic, boiled down to a few sentences.

This should be informed by genuine engagement with the literature. Your search can be less extensive than in a full literature review, but a clear sense of the relevant research is crucial to inform your own work.

Begin by establishing the kinds of research that have been done, and end with limitations or gaps in the research that you intend to respond to.

The next step is to clarify how your own research fits in and what problem it addresses.

Argumentative paper: Emphasize importance

In an argumentative research paper, you can simply state the problem you intend to discuss, and what is original or important about your argument.

Empirical paper: Relate to the literature

In an empirical research paper, try to lead into the problem on the basis of your discussion of the literature. Think in terms of these questions:

• What research gap is your work intended to fill?
• What limitations in previous work does it address?
• What contribution to knowledge does it make?

You can make the connection between your problem and the existing research using phrases like the following.

Now you’ll get into the specifics of what you intend to find out or express in your research paper.

The way you frame your research objectives varies. An argumentative paper presents a thesis statement, while an empirical paper generally poses a research question (sometimes with a hypothesis as to the answer).

Argumentative paper: Thesis statement

The thesis statement expresses the position that the rest of the paper will present evidence and arguments for. It can be presented in one or two sentences, and should state your position clearly and directly, without providing specific arguments for it at this point.

Empirical paper: Research question and hypothesis

The research question is the question you want to answer in an empirical research paper.

Present your research question clearly and directly, with a minimum of discussion at this point. The rest of the paper will be taken up with discussing and investigating this question; here you just need to express it.

A research question can be framed either directly or indirectly.

• This study set out to answer the following question: What effects does daily use of Instagram have on the prevalence of body image issues among adolescent girls?
• We investigated the effects of daily Instagram use on the prevalence of body image issues among adolescent girls.

If your research involved testing hypotheses , these should be stated along with your research question. They are usually presented in the past tense, since the hypothesis will already have been tested by the time you are writing up your paper.

For example, the following hypothesis might respond to the research question above:

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The final part of the introduction is often dedicated to a brief overview of the rest of the paper.

In a paper structured using the standard scientific “introduction, methods, results, discussion” format, this isn’t always necessary. But if your paper is structured in a less predictable way, it’s important to describe the shape of it for the reader.

If included, the overview should be concise, direct, and written in the present tense.

• This paper will first discuss several examples of survey-based research into adolescent social media use, then will go on to …
• This paper first discusses several examples of survey-based research into adolescent social media use, then goes on to …

Scribbr’s paraphrasing tool can help you rephrase sentences to give a clear overview of your arguments.

Full examples of research paper introductions are shown in the tabs below: one for an argumentative paper, the other for an empirical paper.

• Argumentative paper
• Empirical paper

Are cows responsible for climate change? A recent study (RIVM, 2019) shows that cattle farmers account for two thirds of agricultural nitrogen emissions in the Netherlands. These emissions result from nitrogen in manure, which can degrade into ammonia and enter the atmosphere. The study’s calculations show that agriculture is the main source of nitrogen pollution, accounting for 46% of the country’s total emissions. By comparison, road traffic and households are responsible for 6.1% each, the industrial sector for 1%. While efforts are being made to mitigate these emissions, policymakers are reluctant to reckon with the scale of the problem. The approach presented here is a radical one, but commensurate with the issue. This paper argues that the Dutch government must stimulate and subsidize livestock farmers, especially cattle farmers, to transition to sustainable vegetable farming. It first establishes the inadequacy of current mitigation measures, then discusses the various advantages of the results proposed, and finally addresses potential objections to the plan on economic grounds.

The rise of social media has been accompanied by a sharp increase in the prevalence of body image issues among women and girls. This correlation has received significant academic attention: Various empirical studies have been conducted into Facebook usage among adolescent girls (Tiggermann & Slater, 2013; Meier & Gray, 2014). These studies have consistently found that the visual and interactive aspects of the platform have the greatest influence on body image issues. Despite this, highly visual social media (HVSM) such as Instagram have yet to be robustly researched. This paper sets out to address this research gap. We investigated the effects of daily Instagram use on the prevalence of body image issues among adolescent girls. It was hypothesized that daily Instagram use would be associated with an increase in body image concerns and a decrease in self-esteem ratings.

The introduction of a research paper includes several key elements:

• A hook to catch the reader’s interest
• Relevant background on the topic
• Details of your research problem

and your problem statement

• A thesis statement or research question
• Sometimes an overview of the paper

Don’t feel that you have to write the introduction first. The introduction is often one of the last parts of the research paper you’ll write, along with the conclusion.

This is because it can be easier to introduce your paper once you’ve already written the body ; you may not have the clearest idea of your arguments until you’ve written them, and things can change during the writing process .

The way you present your research problem in your introduction varies depending on the nature of your research paper . A research paper that presents a sustained argument will usually encapsulate this argument in a thesis statement .

A research paper designed to present the results of empirical research tends to present a research question that it seeks to answer. It may also include a hypothesis —a prediction that will be confirmed or disproved by your research.

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Caulfield, J. (2024, September 05). Writing a Research Paper Introduction | Step-by-Step Guide. Scribbr. Retrieved September 12, 2024, from https://www.scribbr.com/research-paper/research-paper-introduction/

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A MEGA REVISION 'JEKYLL AND HYDE' BUNDLE! (Digital + Printable PDFs, PPTs and worksheets!)

This bundle contains everything you need to teach or study Stevenson's novella 'The Strange case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde' in the form of digital and printable PDF documents. It’s perfect for students aged 14+. **This bundle is currently available at a 50% discount! ** Preview this document for free, to check whether the whole bundle is right for you [Jekyll and Hyde: Character Breakdown / Analysis](https://www.tes.com/teaching-resource/resource-13110830) With this bundle, students will be able to: * Understand the structural elements and key moments of the plot * Deepen their knowledge of characters, including understanding the deeper messages behind each one * Integrate the significance of the setting into their analyses and interpretations of the play as a whole * Memorise a range of carefully chosen key quotations for use in essays and analysis * Develop their language, structure and form analysis skills, with guided support and examples * Identify and analyse the thematic and contextual details * Learn approaches to a range of essay question types: discursive, argumentative, close reading * Become confident with extract interpretation and analysis * Develop their knowledge of tragic conventions and apply them to the novella * Expand their critical aptitude via exposure to key critical frameworks and critics’ quotations (for higher-level students) * Write their essays on Jekyll and Hyde, after support with planning help and example A* / top grade model answers Reasons to love this bundle: * Downloadable PDF documents, graphically designed to a high level, PowerPoints (ppts) and worksheets * Visual aids (photographs and drawings) to support learning * Organised categories that simplify the text for students * Print and digital versions - perfect for any learning environment * The unit has everything you need to start teaching or learning - starting with the basic story summary, going right up to deep contextual and critical wider readings * Lots of tasks and opportunities to practice literary analysis skills - students will be guided through writing a literary analysis response to the novella -This is what you’ll get with this bundle: (each document includes digital + printable revision guide + PowerPoint + worksheet)- THE COMPLETE JEKYLL AND HYDE COURSE: 1. [Character Analysis / Breakdown](https://www.tes.com/teaching-resource/resource-13110830) 2. [Plot Summary / Breakdown](https://www.tes.com/teaching-resource/resource-13110836) 3. [Context Analysis](https://www.tes.com/teaching-resource/resource-13110842) 4. [Genre](https://www.tes.com/teaching-resource/resource-13110856) 5. [Key Quotations](https://www.tes.com/teaching-resource/resource-13110868) 6. [Narrative Voice](https://www.tes.com/teaching-resource/resource-13110978) 7. [Setting](https://www.tes.com/teaching-resource/resource-13110874) 8. [Themes](https://www.tes.com/teaching-resource/resource-13110893) 9. [Critical Interpretation / Critics' Quotations](https://www.tes.com/teaching-resource/resource-13110848) 10. [Essay Help](https://www.tes.com/teaching-resource/resource-13110934) 11. [Essay Planning](https://www.tes.com/teaching-resource/resource-13110950) 12. [PEE Paragraph Practise](https://www.tes.com/teaching-resource/resource-13110997) 13. [Essay Practise (Gothic Atmosphere)](https://www.tes.com/teaching-resource/resource-13110962) 14. [L9 / A* Grade vs L7 / A Grade Example Essays + Feedback (Frightening Outsider)](https://www.tes.com/teaching-resource/resource-13110990) 15. [L9 / A* Grade Essay Example (Tension and Mystery)](https://www.tes.com/teaching-resource/resource-13110904) 16. [L8 / A Grade Essay Example + Feedback (Unnatural and Threatening)](https://www.tes.com/teaching-resource/resource-13110972) 17. [L6 / B Grade Essay Example + Feedback (Suspicious Atmosphere)](https://www.tes.com/teaching-resource/resource-13110984) 18. [L4 / C Grade Essay Example (Secrecy and Reputation)](https://www.tes.com/teaching-resource/resource-13110923) 19. [Study Questions / Exercises](https://www.tes.com/teaching-resource/resource-13110884) 20. [Essay Questions + Passage-based Questions](https://www.tes.com/teaching-resource/resource-13111001) Please review our content! We always value feedback and are looking for ways to improve our resources, so all reviews are more than welcome. Check out our [shop](https://www.tes.com/teaching-resources/shop/Scrbbly) here.

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