what makes a good analytical essay

The steps involved in an introductory paragraph for an analytical essay on a.
The following Graduation Writing Proficiency Examination essays were written by HSU students during a regularly scheduled GWPE.  Except for the elimination of cross-outs, the essays are reproduced here exactly as written.  Insofar as possible, the essays were chosen to represent the entire range of possible scores.  The majors represented by the authors of these essays are, in alphabetical order, Art, Biology, Business Administration, Environmental Resources Engineering, Fisheries, Geography, Geology, Industrial Arts, and Resource Planning and Interpretation. Analytical Essay Prompt You have 45 minutes to write on the following topic. Please read and think about the following two quotations: Organized charity is doing good for good-for-nothing people. Charity is a helping hand stretched out to save some from the inferno of their present life. Write an essay on the above two statements in three parts as follows: Compare the statements. Explain what the two statements have in common and how they overlap. Contrast the statements. Explain how the two statements differ. Take a position with regard to the two statements by choosing one or mediating between them, and support your view with an example from your own observation or experience. jump to scores: six | five | four | three | two | one Sample Essay Score: Six The two statements address an identical topic.  That is, they address charity, which might be defined as--the act of giving something of value, without the expectation of something in return.  Further, the two statements address the receiver, the person or persons to whom the charity is directed. That the two statements both give equal weight to the meaning of charity is evidenced by the descriptions doing good, and hand stretched out to save.   These descriptions both illustrate the benificence of the act of charity, that it is in one act, both a recognition of.
How to develop and write an analytic essay Argument: Writing an analytic essay requires that you make some sort of argument. The core of this argument is called a thesis. It is your claim, succinctly stated in a single sentence. What do budding literary critics such as yourselves argue about? You make a pervasive, persistent case that a certain thing is true about a piece of literature. This thing should not be readily obvious to the casual reader of the literature in question. It is what you draw out of the book or essay, how you interpret it. It is a claim that must be supported by specific evidence from the text. Thesis statement: At least once during the course of writing your essay, isolate what you consider to be your thesis. Is your proposition both arguable and reasonable? If it is obvious (i.e. Mary Rowlandson used the Bible for comfort during her captivity) you don’t have an argument. Argument requires analysis (i.e. taking things apart and explaining them). One test that may help is asking yourself what the opposite side of your argument would be. A good, complicated thesis (which was proposed by one of your classmates) is that Although Mary Rowlandson says she often used the Bible as a source of comfort during her captivity, a closer reading of her narrative suggests her faith may have been more troubled by her experience than she lets on. One useful structure for writing thesis statements is the although form used above: Although x seems to be true about this piece of literature, y is in fact more true (or makes our thinking about x more complex). In this form you present both sides of your argument at once and show which side you’re on. Your job in the paper is to convince your reader to join you. Another way to write an effective thesis statement is to use the form If we look closely at x (e.g. how Bradford defines freedom) we discover y (that ). In.