How to Write an Analytical Essay – Be a Lawyer

How to Write an Analytical Essay – Be a Lawyer

What is it that attorneys do in the courtroom? They make a claim and then they support it with evidence. And that is just what writing an analytical essay does. You will have to present a claim about something you have read or seen, or about an idea or concept, break it down into parts and provide the evidence to support the claim you are making.

Steps to Write a Good Analytical Essay

Let’s take a very basic example – analyzing the causes of something. You might be asked to write this type of essay in many different courses:

1. The causes of the Great Depression

2. The causes of a character’s behavior in a major work of fiction – book or movie

3. The causes of poverty in America

4. The causes of the recent outbreak of the disease pertussis

5. The causes of depression or another mental illness

6. The causes of cardiovascular disease

Once you have your topic, the rest of the steps are as follows and this should give you the help writing an essay that you need:

1. Develop a thesis statement. If, for example, you were to analyze the causes of the Great Depression, it might be something like this: “While the Great Depression was caused by many risky financial activities, the overriding cause was the lack of regulations to control the financial industry.” I have laid out my claim.

2. Find supporting evidence. The supporting evidence will be each of those risky financial activities which were allowed to occur with any government oversight – wild and risky lending practices on the part of banks and other financial institutions, allowing margin buying in the stock market, banks keeping woefully small amounts of cash reserves in their vaults, consumer spending on credit, corporations inflating their truth value, etc.

3. Organize Your Sub-Topics: Each of the underlying causes that you have identified will be given a paragraph in your essay. Some of them may be combined. For example, you may want to combine the risky lending and the failure to keep cash reserves on the part of banks, since they are somewhat related. So, you will need to describe the specific activity that was allowed to occur in the absence of any government oversight.

4. Write Your Body Paragraphs: Be certain that you have a good topic sentence for each paragraph and a transition to the next paragraph.

5. Write Your Introduction: Try to grab the reader’s attention in the beginning. For an analysis of the causes of the Great Depression, for example, you might start with something like this: “The financial crisis of 2008 could have turned in to a wholesale depression had there not been immediate government intervention. This was not the case in 1929, when America was plunged into a Depression that lasted for an entire decade.”

6. Write Your Conclusion: Your conclusion should dovetail back to your thesis statement and reinforce your claim that government oversight could have prevented the Great Depression.

Writing an analytical essay need not be scary – don’t let the term “analytical” throw you off – just think like a lawyer!