Critical analysis essay helpful tips

A critical analysis essay is a college assignment that is given to students to interpret a piece of art. A critical analysis essay is not limited to only literary writing and rather encompasses other forms of art works as well, such as photography, music, buildings, dance, advertisements and memorials. However, writing a critical analysis essay demands excellent critical skills and writing expertise.

Source: Unsplash

To understand the nitty-gritty details of writing a critical analysis essay, you should read on the following tips:

Introduction

Start your paper with an interesting hook. In this context, you will provide an interesting anecdote or pose a surprising question before the readers», says Daniel Wade, an editor from essaywriter.nyc company. The idea is to instantly engage the readers with the essay so that they feel compelled to read on the full essay. Give background information of your subject here.

State your topic and describe how you are going to argue it. Here you will introduce your thesis that will serve as a “claim” of your paper. Your entire paper will focus on this claim and will mold your writing accordingly.

Body

The body is where you will elaborate on the claim of your subject. Each of the body paragraphs of your essay should be based on a topic sentence – the sub-claims – of your essay. The entire paragraph will aim to prove or disprove the topic sentence.

Support your sub-claim with a quote, fact or statistics from the piece of work. This will reinforce the statements you used from the work and will solidify your claim. Look at your notes for information to write in a body paragraph.

Explain the evidence in relation with the sub-claim. You will use the examples in regards with your sub-claim and interpret its meaning in the light of evidence. You will provide here a thorough analysis of your subject.

However you write your points, they must relate back with the thesis of your essay.

Conclusion

Summarize your analysis in the conclusion. But it must not be a word-by-word rephrasing of your introduction and rather conclude the discussion with something thoughtful and contemplative.

Tie up all the points discussed in the body paragraphs while concluding your paper.

Give your final comment on why your analysis is significant and how it is going to make a difference for the readers.

Discuss anything missing in the analysis, such as an overlooked fact or evidence that was not mentioned in the body paragraph.

Finish up the essay by making a general statement.

Remember

Always pick a topic that you have a fascination for and that you enjoy reading. Doing a critical analysis is a boring task. So unless you choose something really inspiring, you will later find yourself in a state of apathy.

Use a five-paragraph format to organize your essay. Writing a critical analysis essay takes more space than writing a regular essay.

Give a fair and analysis. Be objective and provide an unbiased interpretation of a work.
Make use of appropriate transitional words to connect different ideas.

Once you have finished with your planning and outline you may start searching information. Here your computer user skills are extremely necessary because present days libraries, encyclopedias, reviews, critiques, articles and other support materials are available online. Such large online libraries as Encyclopaedia Britannica, Wikipedia and others contain continuously updated and extensive information in almost all areas of study and research. However, use online encyclopedias for searching definitions and explanations only. If you are willing to use encyclopedia articles do not copy them, try to use your own phrases and express your own understanding of the terms.  For more information try search engines which provide immediate search results from hundred thousand of sources available online. At present times such search engines as google and yahoo work well for extensive and useful search results. Once you have got search results do not download everything you open onto your computer! There will be thousands of results when you need just a few to support your essay. To find out which sources will be needful start reading the online material the search engine has found for you. Here good reading skills come.

Before start reading remember the assignment task, topic and description, and review your outlines. Then open the sources offered by search engines as a result of your words and phrases search.  To find useful information quickly do not read the whole article or a book chapter. For articles you may use headlines and first-and-last sentences reading. Online books often have outlines, summaries and reviews which help you find the very chapter, paragraph or sentence to be used. Once you have found interesting and useful abstracts download them on your computer in one file – you will have a one document which will contain quotes, abstracts and comments to support your essay. While reading what you have gathered highlight the most important statements and leave your own comments in brackets (outlines will help you find out which statement should be used in each paragraph of your own essay). Then read the support materials document again to interpret collected material in your own statements and phrases. If you feel the author presented ideas better than you did, use quotes and cite this author properly in your essay.

Leave a Comment

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.

Scroll to Top