People who read analyses are intelligent, curious people. They want to know more than just what you think of a subject; they want to know how you arrived at your interpretation and why your analysis is reasonable. Your readers won’t always agree with your interpretation, and that’s fine — but even if you can’t persuade them to accept your analysis, you do want to convince readers that your take on the subject is insightful and well considered.

Provide relevant reasons for your interpretation. Build on your interpretive claim by presenting reasons for your readers to accept your analysis. The overall results of your analysis form your main point, and the reasons to accept your analysis become your supporting points.

Look over the results of your analysis, and ask yourself why readers should agree with your interpretation. You might come up with more reasons than you can possibly use — or you might find yourself struggling to find enough reasons to support your claim. Either way, try to generate as many potential reasons as possible, taking care not to rule out any at first, no matter how trivial or ridiculous they might seem.

Once you have generated a substantial list of potential reasons, select the ones that seem most likely to convince your readers that your analysis is sound. Some reasons will be more relevant than others. Rather than list every possible reason to accept your analysis, identify those reasons that are most directly related to your interpretive claim. The reasons you choose should also be consistent with the interpretive framework you’ve decided to follow. For example, you might find several reasons to support your analysis of a new novel’s significance, among them comments published in literary journals such as Proceedings of the Modern Language Association and endorsements by celebrities such as Oprah Winfrey and Gwyneth Paltrow. If you are using text analysis as your interpretive framework, you might find commentary offered by authorities in the field of literary studies more useful than celebrity endorsements.

Support your reasons with evidence. No matter which reasons you choose, each of them must be supported by evidence. Analytical essays tend to rely on a mix of evidence from the subject itself (particularly in the case of text analyses and rhetorical analyses), from the writer’s reflections and personal experience, and from published or field sources. Evidence can include the following:

You can use evidence to provide examples and illustrations, to define ideas and concepts, to illustrate processes, and to associate particular ideas and concepts with authorities, such as political leaders, subject-matter experts, or people who have been affected by the subject.

To organize your evidence, list all the reasons you will use to support your overall analysis, review your notes to find evidence that supports each reason, and then list the evidence below each reason. You might need to review your sources to locate additional evidence, or even obtain additional sources. If you are conducting a text analysis, be careful to avoid cherry-picking your evidence. If you are conducting another type of analysis, make sure that you haven’t relied too heavily on a single source of evidence.

You can read more about how to use evidence to support your analysis in Chapter 14.

Establish the context. It’s quite possible — even likely — that others involved in a conversation will have conducted their own analyses of your subject. Be sure to check for those analyses so that you can place your analysis in a larger context. Ideally, you’ll be able to present your interpretation as a contribution to a growing understanding of the subject, rather than simply as an isolated set of observations.

As you draft your analytical essay, keep in mind the other interpretations you’ve encountered. Review the sources you consulted as you learned about your subject and conducted your analysis. If you find reasonable interpretations that support — or contradict — yours, consider how to address them in your essay. You might offer similar interpretations to back up one or more of your reasons, or you might explain why another writer’s analysis is less adequate than your own. In either case, you should briefly define significant existing analyses for your readers and explain how your interpretation complicates or improves upon what’s been said before. You might also need to draw on evidence from other sources or from the subject itself.