Balancing summary with analysis for a written text
A-12
Your readers may or may not be familiar with the text you are analyzing, so you need to summarize the text briefly to help readers understand the basis of your analysis. The following strategies will help you balance summary with analysis.
- Remember that readers are interested in your ideas about a text.
- Pose questions that lead to an interpretation or a judgment of a text rather than to a summary.
- Focus your analysis on the text’s thesis and main ideas or some prominent feature of the reading.
- Pay attention to your topic sentences to make sure they signal analysis.
- Ask reviewers to give you feedback: Do you summarize too much and need to analyze more?
Notice how student writer Emilia Sanchez balances summary with analysis in her essay about the article on big-box stores. Before stating her thesis in the last sentence, Sanchez summarizes the article’s purpose and central idea.
