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Understanding the Analysis Essay
An Analysis essay obliges the writer to examine their reaction to, and views about a particular reading they have encountered. To make an effective analysis essay, the writer must collect the information that is crucial to the case that he or she is investigating. These include the claims, evidence, and the assumptions drawn from the subject matter involved.
This essay focuses primarily on the writer's skill to use various types of evidence and assumptions to support their claim or argument. However, these types of articles will, on occasion, include a discussion of the hidden arguments and the inherent contradictions within the text under examination. Often an analytical essay contains the following sections, albeit not always in this exact order;
A summary of the original pieces (usually an abstract) is a common way to begin. It is actually conventional to write as if your reader is unfamiliar with the original work because it helps them gets a sense of how you interpret the arguments you are reading.
Your reaction/response to the reading you have completed. You will support your assertion and your interpretation of the different sides in the debate with the particulars of your analysis of the assumptions and data used in the argument.
Analysis of assumptions - you illustrate and evaluate the necessary and the unnecessary, the clear and the hidden assumptions.
Analysis of text - you explain how the assumptions make a different implied argument, the hidden argument.
Analysis of inherent contradictions - if the original authors make statements that contradict your knowledge of the world or your ideas, then explain those differences.
Analysis of intended audience.
Analysis of evidence.
- Rational appeal or logos, this means more than logic or reasoning alone. It means "thought plus action," "thought" being the ideas themselves and "action" being the way in which those ideas are presented to the audience. Logos appeals to patterns, conventions, and modes of reasoning that the audience finds convincing and persuasive.
- Emotional appeal or Pathos, also called the pathetic appeals, persuades audiences by arousing the emotions.
- Ethical appeal or Ethos, the degree of credibility or trustworthiness that authors establish with the audience through their writing. Ethos is one of the three types of persuasion along, with logos and pathos. Ethos, a Greek term from which the word ethics derives, refers to the ethical appeal of the rhetor.
Much can be learned from the ways of argumentation development of writers. The writer should consider the audience for whom the writings are intended for. Writers will do a lot of explaining to disprove or prove the main idea of the argument.
In an analysis essay writers attempt to communicate to a specific audience. Generally, the writers will modify everything in their work to meet the needs and expectations of that audience, who in a very real sense, control the writer's vocabulary, sentence structure – essentially the whole essay for that matter.
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