Analytical Essay Outline: Write It Easily

Start with your key statement, or hold it for the body part? Which argument must be written first? There are many questions to puzzle on, when you start your analytical essay. You can take your time and plan your work, or just get right into writing, and more questions will appear. We have a solution for you. According to many successful writers, all you need is to write an outline, it will simplify your task significantly.

What an Analytical Essay Is?

First of all, let’s define what an analytical essay is, so we could consider all the dos and don’ts. Obviously, an analytical essay is a type of papers that analyzes a certain text. However, such a definition is too broad, so maybe it would be easier to understand what this type of paper isn’t. It’s not a summary. If you’re going to just briefly retell the book, then it won’t be an analytical essay. The point is that you don’t need to just summarize a book, you have to explain methods used by author, how the author described characters, and how he or she developed a topic throughout the book. Generally, you consider particular parts of the book in order to describe the essence of the entire book. Thus, this task is somewhat more difficult than just a brief summary, but writing an outline, you can easily cope with it.

Outline for Analytical Essay

Generally, a proper structure of an analytical essay consists of three major parts, which are introduction, body, and conclusion. The introduction is a first part of the essay, which starts with a hook – the very first phrase, which must grab readers’ attention, and motivate them to learn more. It may be a controversial statement, or an interesting question; what you choose depends on your topic. Your main goal is to make readers want to read further.

Once you hooked your readers, you can move straight to your key statement. Tell them what exactly you are going to write about. This is your thesis, your main idea, and you don’t need to fully explain it now, just introduce it. And then, at the end of the introduction, tell your readers how you’re going to prove your point. You can tell which parts of the book you’re going to consider in more detail, so that your readers would prepare for your arguments, and understand what your ideas are based on.

The next part of the essay is the body. It’s the biggest section. For example, writing a classical five-paragraph essay, the body part must be three paragraphs long. You can also make it longer or shorter, depending on a format of a particular essay. Each paragraph of the body has its own structure, which consists of a topic, claims, and evidences. Thus, you start a paragraph with a topic, and then you write your claim related to the topic, and support your claim with evidences. Then you go to the second claim, and so on. Writing an analytical essay, you have to support your claims with quotes from the book, or just mention certain episodes. Finally, you have to explain how your evidence is related to the topic written at the beginning of the paragraph. This is an important moment, since without it your essay may be more similar to a summary.

The conclusion is the last part of your analytical essay. Here you have to recall your thesis statement, taking into account all claims and evidences. Make sure that you don’t copy your thesis from the introduction; conclusion must connect all your ideas and evidences, making your essay clear and holistic.