Analytical Essays play a prime part in your college life. It is one way to gauge your skills in research as well as knowledge of the subject. It is far ahead of writing any other assignments as an analytical essay needs a lot of critical reasoning to substantiate a claim or an argument based on your research. Let us go step by step in understanding how to write an analytical essay.

What is an Analytical Essay?

An essay that critically analyses a topic which can be a text or a film. It substantiates an argument or a claim with the help of supporting pieces of evidence that you may find it in other resources. An analytical essay contains these three elements

1. Thesis
2. Detailed Analysis of the topic
3. Proper Evidence that supports your analysis.

Keeping these things in mind, an analytical essay needs to be sketched. Let us divide the entire process into three phases

1. Research Phase
2. Writing Phase
3. Review Phase

These three phases come one after the other. Let us take a look at the step by step process of completing all three phases successfully.

Research Methodology

• Research Phase

This is the phase that is highly crucial in your entire pathway to write an amazing analytical essay. This sets the foundation for your essay to come out very well. This phase must be taken seriously and executed every step in it diligently. It must be approached systematically and followed chronologically too. At the same time, be flexible in multi-tasking.

Step 1: Topic Selection: Most of the time, you are given the topic. If that is the case, you can skip this step but watch out for the topic and read it carefully to understand what is needed from the essay. It is highly recommended to understand the topic critically. If needed raise questions to your lecturer to gain more clarity.

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If you are not given the topic and you are asked to select the topic of your own choice, then this step becomes essential for a massive start. For an amazing analytical essay, you will require an amazing topic. As a student of varied disciplines, you will be asked to write essays mainly on

• Fiction – Stories
• History
• Scientific Research

If it is fiction, focus on a certain character and why that character has been depicted that way. You can also focus on a particular part of the story and analyse why is it important in the entire work of fiction. If you are going to write on history, find out events of your choice and analyse the reasons behind such an event to happen in the past. At the same time, look at the scientific methods used to come up with a particular invention or a discovery. In any which way, what you are doing here is to identify a suitable topic for your analysis. Select 4 to 5 topics and finalise the one that sounds concrete for you. At the same time, you must choose a topic that has a wide area of analysis that can be discussed in the essay.

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Step 2: Intense Research: Now that you know the topic, you must dive deep into the ocean of research. Find out information about the plot that you analysing. Compare it with other sources. You can go online for research. You can also refer to books. Check with your lecturers also. It is a must that you must know a lot of information before writing the essay. There are two major aspects you must be focusing on while you research.

1. Collect Supporting Evidences: Without this, there is no analysis at all. You must be voracious in reading to find as many pieces of evidence as possible to stand your point. These shreds of evidence must be relevant to the topic as well as to the situation.
2. Take Notes: As you research, you may attempt to learn from a lot of resources. It is highly suggested to take notes time and again to remember the facts and figures. More importantly, this note-taking book can aid you till the end of your essay.

This phase and especially this step sets the foundation for you. Don’t miss any opportunity to gather information and also cross verify the sources for authenticity.

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As the evidence-primarily should revolve around the primary sources, ensure that you stick to it. At the same time, if your essay allows you to bring relevance to secondary sources of evidence, well and good. It all depends on what your lecturer has given as guidelines. If the guideline says, no secondary sources, stick to it. 

Step 3: Make a Thesis Statement: Based on the topic and research come up with a thesis statement. It should not be vague, the thesis statement must be concrete and must give the claim or argument. Of course, thesis statements are optional unless it is asked for.

Step 4: Organise the pieces of evidence: As the evidence is procured and the notes you have taken. Organize the entire evidence one by one. It saves a lot of time later. It is suggested to do this in this phase because if you find a missing link, you can rightly go back and patch the gap. Once you have organized the evidence, please read through it and see if there is any gap that you identify.

These are 4 steps that you will be following and once the 4th step is done, you can move on to the next phase.

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• Writing Phase

Step 1: Rough Outline: The rough outline depends on what is required of your teacher. Read through the question properly to understand how lengthy the essay is required. At times it may be said to have a 5 paragraph essay. That means, it must have an introduction, 3 body part paragraphs and one conclusion. If there are staff members who want lengthier ones, get ready for that too. Either way, you will make a rough outline. It gives you the skeleton of the entire essay. This shall be useful to you once you start typing the essay in detail. Use hints and short forms, as this is the layout upon which you will build the essay separately. The below mentioned are the ones it must contain.

• Essay Title
• Introduction 
• Body of the essay
• Conclusion 

Step 2: Fit all the required details in the Rough Outline: You have already organized the evidence. Add the relevance to your body part and fill in the evidence appropriately. 

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Step 3: Write the Essay now: Using all the details in the rough outline start typing your essay. Ensure you use simple language and avoid high sounding words. This shall help the readers to understand the essay very well. At the same time, use paragraphs and bullet points in tandem. This shall improve the clarity of your essay.  Always follow the order of an essay. Be it the introduction, body and conclusion or the subheadings. Follow a flow, do not mix and match a lot of information.

Step 4: Divide the body into equal parts: As it is an analytical essay, divide the paragraphs equally and substantiate one or two examples or evidence in each. Make a clear statement to substantiate your argument and follow a proper flow

Step 4: Conclusion: Give an apt conclusion to the essay. You can highlight some of the evidence and add value to the essay. Also mention how much you learned from the research work.

These 4 steps mark the end of the 2nd phase and the last phase is again essential.

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• Review Phase

This phase must be given equal importance like the others. This is one phase that shall determine your work. A lot of times, students have the mentality to submit it without even proofreading. Please read through the essay louder. Check for grammatical errors and statement construction. Check for the missing links anywhere. Check for the flow. If something is not good about the essay, attempt to rewrite the same. 

The review phase shall give rise to a lot of thoughts too. Read through the essay more than 5 times at different timeframes in a day. Identify if anything needs to be changed or added. If you feel there is something to be changed, make a quick rough draft of it along with the previous one and check how does it sound now. Ideally, the essay must have a free flow with information synchronized to offer the right sense. That makes the perfect essay. Analytical essays shall be critical in many aspects of explanation. Check if the words used are subtle and not intense. 

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Writing an analytical essay is sheet art. It requires a student to be thorough on the subject of research. It also requires him to put the essay in a good flow. More importantly, the evidence should be concrete to substantiate the argument. The entire effort must be yours and it is lauded when it turns out to be the best essay. All the best!!!