A1-d: Analyzing to demonstrate your critical thinking (written texts)

A1-dAnalyze to demonstrate your critical thinking.

Whereas a summary most often answers the question of what a text says, an analysis looks at how a text conveys its main idea. As you read and reread a text—previewing, annotating, and conversing—you are forming a judgment of it. When you analyze a text, you say to readers: “Here’s my reading of this text. This is what the text means and why it matters.”

Balancing summary with analysis

If you have written a summary of a text, you may find it useful to refer to the main points of the summary as you write your analysis. 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.

Here is an example of how student writer Emilia Sanchez balances summary with analysis in her essay about Betsy Taylor’s article (see A1-a). Before stating her thesis, Sanchez summarizes the article’s purpose and central idea.

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Drafting an analytical thesis statement

An effective thesis statement for analytical writing responds to a question about a text or tries to resolve a problem in the text. Remember that your thesis isn’t the same as the text’s thesis or main idea. Your thesis presents your judgment of the text’s argument.

If student writer Emilia Sanchez had started her analysis of “Big Box Stores Are Bad for Main Street” (see A1-a) with this thesis statement, she merely would have repeated the main idea of the article.

ineffective thesis statement

Big-box stores such as Wal-Mart and Home Depot promote consumerism by offering endless goods at low prices, but they do nothing to promote community.

Sanchez wrote the following thesis statement, which offers her judgment of Taylor’s argument.

effective thesis statement

By ignoring the complex economic relationship between large chain stores and their communities, Taylor incorrectly assumes that simply getting rid of big-box stores would have a positive effect on America’s communities.

MORE HELP IN YOUR HANDBOOK

When you analyze a text, you integrate words and ideas from the source into your own writing.

Quoting or paraphrasing: MLA-3a, APA-3a, and CMS-3a

As you draft your thesis, try asking what, why, and how questions to form a judgment about a text you are reading.