Pre-writing a paper
Pre-writing is writing everything you want to write before you start the final drafting process. In order to start pre-writing follow some steps:
- Discover the objective of your paper- Once you get your assignment to write an analytical paper, you must understand the main objective of the assignment. Since you need to present your arguments and analyze them subsequently, you will have to understand the main aim of the study. In order to do so, you can conduct a brief research on your topic, to get a clear idea. You can also approach your professors, to understand the idea behind an assignment. Most students in order to complete the paper fast skip this step, and start writing their paper. This, in turn, affects the quality of content immensely. The students fail to understand the main essence of the topic and frame a paper that is not related. In order to avoid such a situation, understand your topic before you start writing.
- Decide your focal points- Under this step, you need to decide the highlights of your paper. You must list down, your arguments and the type of method you will be using to write the paper. By making a clear demarcation of your arguments, you can search information accordingly.
- Perform a genuine research- The key to writing good content is to have credible information on hand. You must conduct an original research, to know your topic better. You can start by brainstorming ideas on how to go about with the research. Alongside, you must also think about the thesis statement. While searching your information, you need to view the topic from as many angles as possible. Find information from credible sources, but beware of fraudulent websites. Collect examples to support your study from sources like government websites, reports, documents, and so on. The readers might cross-check the source of information in order to validate your work, thus include only those facts, figures, statistics that have been taken from authenticated websites/ books/ journals.
- Frame your thesis statement- Once you have completed your research, you can now frame your thesis statement which is also known as the central idea of your paper. The statement must not exceed more than two sentences. Make sure that the idea is concise and clear.
- Frame an outline of your paper- The outline for an analytical paper includes an introduction, main body, and conclusion.
The format to write an analytical paper
1. Introduction
You must first provide your readers brief background information, about your topic. This section will introduce your paper by not letting out the details. Make sure you do not use a first or second person in your paper. You must not use complicated sentences rather, keep it simple and concise. An introduction is the cover of your paper; if it is not attractive readers may skip your paper. In order to gather more audience make your introduction interesting by adding quotes, phrases, questions. Doing so would engage the readers, and convince them to read further.
2. Main body
This section has important elements that you must keep in mind while writing. Elements like clarity in content, an organization of sentences, and flow in content. If you have these in your content, you can score higher grades. In the main body, you need to first introduce your topic in detail. Second of all, you need to add evidence/ examples and analyze them. At last, you need to conclude your paragraph by writing sentences that would give way to the next paragraph. You must elaborate your thesis statement, in this section. You have to talk about your central idea, by using examples from credible sources. You can have more than three paragraphs, in the body section depending on the nature of the topic, and prescribed word limit that needs to be maintained.
3. Conclusion
This is the section that acts as a reminder, to your readers of how you have supported your argument in the paper. Sum up your entire paper briefly, and mention your opinion on the topic. You need not repeat the content that is there in the main body, instead rephrase and state your thesis statement. Avoid using words like in conclusion, or in the end.
4. Revise
Once you complete your writing, always revise your work. You might have some unseen grammatical errors, spelling errors, or technical errors. In order to rectify those, edit your paper. After the editing process, pass your paper through the plagiarism tests, to confirm the legitimacy of your work. Most students do not check their work for any kind of plagiarism, which gets detected during evaluation, which in turn, brings down their grades. In order to escape this situation, check your work. If you have used an idea or quote by some author, give recognition by properly citing them. Do not use someone else’s work as yours, as it is against the writing ethics.
By the end of this process, you can get the quality analytical paper without taking any stress.