Critical analysis: You give the interpretation of the work and explain why. Include supportive evidence from the work to establish a connection between your ideas and the work itself. When writing an analysis you need to use third person and present verb tense. Make sure that you can support your ideas and that the work does not have more evidence to contradict than support the ideas your paper includes.

Writing a Critical Analysis

In an analysis, you try to understand something better by breaking it down into its component parts, studying those parts, and seeing how they relate to each other and to the work as a whole. Before you can make any judgments about something, you have to be sure you thoroughly understand it. When writing a critical analysis you are critiquing a work, which is simply evaluating and judging the work.

Analysis vs. Personal Taste

It is important to distinguish between making a critical judgment and expressing an opinion based on personal taste. You can acknowledge an opera singer’s skill and voice even if you don’t personally care for opera. In the same way, you can analyze and critique an essay or other literary work even if the subject matter and writing style are not to your personal taste.

Getting Started

The more systematically you go about analyzing the assigned literary work and writing about it, the more successful you will be.

Begin by reading the assigned literary work. Make a photocopy of it to write on. Mark unfamiliar words and look up their meanings. Also mark and look up any references to unfamiliar people, places or things.

Read the literary work first for a basic understanding of its main idea or theme and the supporting ideas. Next, read through the work again carefully, answering questions and looking for aspects or elements to critique.

Summarize the work, if possible. Even if you don’t plan on using the summary in your paper, writing a summary will help to clarify in your own mind a literary work’s main ideas. Try to summarize the literary work without looking at it.

Reread the essay as often as necessary. If your instructor has assigned specifics aspects of the work for you to write about, pay attention to those. Write notes on your copy of the literary work or on a separate sheet of paper. Try to comment on as many things as possible in the literary work. You may not mention everything in your essay, but considering the aspects of the literary work will help you understand it.

Do some prewriting (listing or freewritng). Take this prewriting and begin to arrange it around a thesis statement. The thesis should give the reader a clear sense of what will be analyzed in the critical essay.

Writing Your Analysis

When you are sure that you thoroughly understand the literary work being analyzed, you are ready to plan your critical analysis of it. With the essay you must first decide on the following aspects of your paper:

· Your Purpose – In general, to write a critical analysis of a work, but narrow it down to what you want to analyze about.

· Your audience – The audience will either be someone familiar with the work or someone who has not read the work. An unfamiliar audience requires you to spend time summarizing and explaining the work before you can actual begin analyzing it for your audience.

· Your tone – Serious, objective and thoughtful. Use third person and present tense when writing the analysis.

· Your thesis – Your thesis should do more than indicate the content of the literary work; it should indicate something about how it is written and what elements appear in it. It should also express your evaluation of the literary work or of some aspects of it.

Examples of thesis statements:

A thesis that deals only with content: In “Bringing Back Flogging,” Jeff Jacoby argues that incarceration of criminals is not effective or humane, and it would be better to bring back corporal punishment.

This thesis states Jacoby’s main idea and indicates that the paper will summarize the article. It doesn’t indicate any analysis. You need to go beyond this for a successful analysis.

A thesis that analyzes and critiques: In “Bringing Back Flogging,” Jeff Jacoby uses both logical and emotional appeals very effectively to try to convince readers to agree with him.

This thesis both explains what the author does and claims that he does it well. In a critique, your purpose is not to just explain how the article is written; it is also to persuade your reader that your opinion about the work is correct. This is the type of thesis statement that should be used when writing a critical essay.

Tips for Writing an Analysis:

Writing The Opening:

Your opening paragraph needs to grab the readers’ attention and identify the focus/direction of your analysis.

Summarize your subject very briefly. Include the title of the work and author.

Start with a quotation from the literary work and then comment upon its importance.

Begin with an explanation of the author’s purpose and how well you think he/she achieves this purpose.

Open with a few general statements about life and relate to the focus of your analysis.

Begin with a general statement about the type of literature you are analyzing and then discuss your subject within this context.

Writing The Body:

Develop and support you focus in the body of the essay.

State each main point so that it clearly relates to the focus/thesis of your analysis.

Support each main point with specific details and direct quotations from the literary work you are analyzing.

Explain how each of these specific details/quotations helps to prove your point.

Writing The Closure:

Give your readers something to think about after they have finished reading your analysis.

Tie all of the important points together.

Make a final statement about the main focus of your analysis.

– Who are the people? Are they upper or middle class? What is their background, what is their current life like? Knowing that stuff will help you to uncover plot details, why he or she did this or that.

– What are they doing? Where are they doing it? Is there only one location in the story, or multiple locations?

– When are they doing it? Time period, etc.

– Why and how are they doing it? Financial reasons? Revenge? Loneliness?

All this depends on the plot and the books, but it’s a general guide. Hopefully it helps. Telling us the books would’ve been helpful.