Writing an analytical essay may be a new experience for you. Up until this point in your career, much of the writing you have done may have been narrative (telling a story) or descriptive (telling what something looks like, what it does, or how it works). Making the transition from simply telling WHAT to explaining WHY that "what" is the way it is can be a bit daunting at first. Remember that writing is a process, and learning to do it well takes time and lots of practice.

Remember that when you write Writing Tip #4, your descriptive thesis is a restatement of the author's main point. But when you write an analytical thesis, you make an assertion of your own about that author's position. Perhaps you assert that the position is untenable for some reason or other, or perhaps you claim that new evidence has invalidated the author's thesis, in which case you're moving toward argument, or refutation of that author's position. Generally, it's much easier to analyze a phenomenon from your own perspective than it is to write a response to another piece of writing.

When you analyze an issue, a situation, an item, or an idea, you must consider why it is important and to whom. Ask yourself: "So what?" Why does this issue or situation matter to you and to your audience?Ask yourself: "What's at stake?" "Who's at risk?" "What's right/wrong and in what way?" Try to pin down the issues that cause an effect, or ask yourself why the issues caused a certain effect and not another. Serious analysis means that you know what is going on, and how the situation or issue appears; your analysis seeks to determine WHY those things behave as they do. Once you 've reached a conclusion about the situation or the issue, you have a thesis about it. And your logical reasoning, the considerations you made en route to your conclusion, provide the evidenced to support your thesis.

Whatever you claim in your analytical thesis, you must be prepared to tell WHY your thesis is correct, to tell WHY your readers should believe you. After you write your analytical thesis, put yourself in your reader's shoes. Does the thesis make you ask "Why?" It should. A good analytical thesis asserts the writer 's point of view and makes the reader wonder why it is true. The projected organization then outlines the evidence that will tell WHY the thesis is true. You want to form an assertive thesis that causes the reader to wonder why it's true; then you will provide a projected organization that shows the reader why it is.

Since analytical writing fundamentally depends on answering WHY, you may want to print out a few signs and post them on the refrigerator, your mirror, or your monitor screen. Remind yourself that you are going to explain not only WHAT the evidence is or HOW it works, but WHY it does so. And you're going to connect the "what" and "how" to the "why" with the help of transition signals for comparison and contrast and analysis.