14.5 Analysis

Analysis is the act of breaking something down to its chief components and figuring out how those components work. This is a common type of assignment in college because it is a natural part of the learning process for any subject. To better learn writing, you will take time to analyze other essays, articles, and books.

You will encounter all sorts of analytical assignments in your various college courses, each changing with the subject. How to handle each of those is dependent on the specific subjects and what you learn in those courses.

Analysis Steps

1. Introduce the context of what you are analyzing. This means to explain what the original circumstances and intentions were, regarding the thing you are analyzing, and it means to offer a summary of the overall subject and claim, if applicable. It also means to explain how you plan on viewing it or handling it as something to be analyzed. Sometimes this step can be completed once for an entire analysis and therefore does not need to be repeated, as might be the case with an essay in which you might contextualize what you are analyzing in the first couple of paragraphs only.
2. Name and clarify the part you are analyzing. This means using the precise term for the component you’re attempting to analyze, defining what that term means as a category itself, and explaining why the part fits the term you are using for it.
3. Give examples. This means to show a specific moment or instance from the source you are analyzing to show the component you named above (in step 2) as it functions. When analyzing text, giving examples or showing means to summarize paraphrase, or quote (see more details on this in the section Summary, Paraphrasis, and Quotation).
4. Explain how it functions in its context. This is typically the bulk of the analysis. It means to describe what the component is doing to work, why or how it is working as it does, and even to evaluate how effective it is. In other words, you to say what the effect is, and why or how it has that effect.

The above steps can guide you through many types of analysis in many different college subjects, but for analysis particular to English classes and composition courses, especially analyses of written works (articles, essays, books, etc.), there are more particular strategies for the types of assignment you will encounter: critical analysis, rhetorical analysis, and literary analysis.

Critical Analysis

For an analysis that covers critical thinking or for an analysis of a reading, here are the components that you should cover and/or analyze:

• The author, especially anything directly relevant to the piece of writing itself
• The purpose or intention, possibly including its perspective, orientation, or worldview
• The context, such as its social or historical situation, its original publication circumstances, or its publication history since
• The audience, such as its original intended audience, its audience since, its original reception, or its consensus opinion since
• The main subject, issue, and/or question it handles
• The thesis or main claims
• The main points and pieces of support for its thesis or main claims
• The strategies used to convey its ideas
• The style of writing it uses
• The primary concepts, theories, models, or schools of thought it uses or participates in
• The assumptions and biases it uses or relies on
• The critiques of its ideas, approach, or expression

Rhetorical Analysis

A rhetorical analysis is a breakdown of the strategies and appeals a written work employs to convey its ideas. The phrase “rhetorical strategies and appeals” means how the author wrote and explained the idea to be clearer, more persuasive, and more effective. So a rhetorical analysis tries to figure out which kinds of techniques the writing uses to achieve its purpose for its audience, and how, why, or to what effect those techniques are used. These elements are important to remember for a good rhetorical analysis, and they fit into the general analysis steps like so:

Analysis Step 1. Introduce Context: What is the writing’s subject, main claim/thesis, purpose, and/or intended audience?

Analysis Step 2. Name and Explain: Which rhetorical strategies or appeals does it use? And why do you think your examples fit those types of strategies or appeals?

Analysis Step 3. Give an Example: Where do these strategies or appeals appear specifically? Show them.

Analysis Step 4. Explain Functions with Examples: How does it use them? Or why does it use them? Or to what effect does it use them?

Rhetorical analysis is vital for improving writing skills because it is essentially a close look at how writing works, using a specific example of writing to do so. Students who feel confused, lost, or hesitant about such assignments often feel this way for the following reasons:

1. The idea that writers use strategies is new to such students. Some students come to college thinking that all writing is spontaneously produced by the emotions or wisdom of a writer, or that something said in a written work is the only way the author could have said it. The sooner students exorcise these bad ideas from their heads, the better, for these are wildly incorrect assumptions. Indeed, their opposites are true: good writing is deliberate and conscious of its choices, and every expression, approach, appeal, or strategy is one option out of an astronomic number of possibilities.
2. Such students confuse facts with insights. Students are afraid to make claims that aren’t confirmed pieces of data. For instance, a student might be hesitant to say that in the essay “Politics and the English Language,” author George Orwell used morbid humor, even if the student finds examples and can explain them, and the hesitation is only because the student never met Orwell long enough to get the author’s answer about whether he intended morbid humor. This would be an attempt to ruin an insight (actually, a very good point of rhetorical analysis) just because it is not a confirmed fact or data point. Facts are not insights and indeed cannot offer insights without critical interpretation, or analysis. So the quicker students understand that insights are the aim of analysis, the better.

Literary Analysis

You might be asked to write about a novel, a short story, or a poem as a work of literature. This means you are assigned to engage in literary analysis. The strategy of critical analysis applies here as well but with the addition of features particular to the literature.

Here is a brief list of what your topics could be in a literary analysis essay. Your instructor might have more suggestions or restrictions.

• Plot: the events
• Characters: the participants
• Point-of-view/Voice/Narration: the mode of telling
• Setting: the time and place
• Symbols/Metaphors: the specific images or words that have deeper or connected meanings
• Themes: the major concepts, subjects, morals, or questions
• Form/Style: the technical features of choices with words, phrases, sentences, sounds, meter, etc.

In a literary analysis, it is important to understand the text you are writing about. Similar to our other essays, the thesis statement should clearly state your main idea, be interesting to your audience, and be debatable. Your essay should include examples from the text that support your claim and can even include outside sources from experts.