A step-by-step guide to literary analysis, writing an analysis essay.

Writing an analysis essay

In a play, you might consider how relationships between characters are built up through different scenes, and how the setting relates to the action. Watch out for dramatic irony, where the audience knows some detail that the characters don’t, creating a double meaning in their words, thoughts, or actions.

Say you’re analyzing the novel Frankenstein. You could start by asking yourself:

If you do write the introduction first, you should still return to it later to make sure it lines up with what you ended up writing, and edit as necessary.

Your thesis in a literary analysis essay is the point you want to make about the text. It’s the core argument that gives your essay direction and prevents it from just being a collection of random observations about a text.

Step 2: Coming up with a thesis

Sometimes you’ll be given freedom to choose your own topic

What word choices stand out as interesting or unusual? Are words used figuratively to mean something other than their literal definition? Figurative language includes things like metaphor (e.g. “her eyes were oceans”) and simile (e.g. “her eyes were like oceans”).

Franz Kafka’s “Before the Law” is not a religious parable, but a story about bureaucratic alienation.

Writing an analysis essay

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

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

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

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

Analysis Essay Conclusion

Writing an analysis essay

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.

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.

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.

Writing an analysis essay

The typical definition of an analytical essay is a piece of writing, in which an author analyzes, critiques, and interprets a certain event, situation, or even a work of art. Analytical writing in general tends to dissect a topic into multiple components/ subtopics, to analyze these in detail, and then synthesize all this information to formulate conclusions or to extract main points (the essence).

The safest solution for a successful introduction in your analytical essay is to pose a bold statement, provide an interesting idea, or pose a rhetorical question that will inspire your audience.

An answer to this question should be placed in your thesis statement. If this is not the case, return to the beginning and change the thesis.

The most typical analytical essay is around 500 words (introduction, three body paragraphs, and conclusion). However, your analysis essay may differ based on your subject and original instructions.

What Is an Analytical Essay?

Writing an analysis essay

Every academic assignment can be difficult to implement. But that doesn’t mean it is impossible to do it at all. Applying a step-by-step approach, you can handle the toughest task. Pick up some helpful ideas in this simple guide to analytical essay writing. If after all you need help, ask our analysis cheap essay writer for it.

Most importantly, you should not forget that descriptive writing should offer an explanation of an event while analytical writing must analyze this particular event.

Connect with our top analytical essay writers and receive an essay sample crafted to your needs.

Writing an analysis essay

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.

When writing a critical analysis essay, you will need to follow certain steps:

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Example of an Analytical Essay Introduction

Writing an analysis essay

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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.

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.

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

Writing an analysis essay

  • Rephrase the thesis statement
  • Summarize key points
  • Overall concluding statement

  • Topic Sentence: Introduce the main point of the body paragraph in one straightforward and effective sentence.
  • Analysis: Analyze your supporting evidence. Explain how the evidence supports your thesis statement. This part should take up about one or two sentences and is arguably the most important part of the entire analytical essay writing.
  • Evidence: The analysis is created from the supporting evidence that you find (facts, statistics, etc.), so they should always go hand in hand. Make sure that these two parts link together in a straightforward manner.
  • Concluding Sentence: Restate to the reader your analysis and its significance to the point in hand.

To end the entire essay, it’s necessary to create an overall concluding statement. This can be either what you have learned from writing the essay, or what the audience should take away from your work.

The thesis statement is the central argument of an essay. It’s a claim created to prove an assumption created by the writer, using facts, statistics, examples, and research findings. For certain topics, it's important to introduce the outside forces that contributed to the creation of your thesis statement. The purpose of the thesis is to present the most significant information at the very beginning. It sets the reader in the direction of the essay topic and concentrates the attention to the main point.

General Tips & Advice

Writing an analysis essay

The thesis is a statement that lets your reader know what your stance on the issue you are writing about is. It has to be precise and to the point. You should avoid any ambiguity in your statement because it might confuse the reader. An example of a proper thesis statement would be: “The characters of “To Kill a Mockingbird” suffer great injustice because of racism and prejudice”. Here you would analyze how characters’ lives were influenced by the racist society that discriminates against people and judges them based on the color of their skin.

So, if you are wondering how to pick a proper analytical essay topic, the steps below will help you:

Here are a couple of examples of thesis statements that showcase how important a strong statement can be.

Check the facts. Check the names of the people you are referencing, list of characters of the book you are analyzing, and correct spelling of the places and events. It is important to be thorough with these things to show your professionalism and attention to detail.

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