Informative Tutorial on How Do You Write a Critical Analysis Essay

Critical analysis is regarded as a subjective expression of someone’s point of view. The main aim of such writing is to share your own opinion about another piece of writing, movie or theatre play, etc. While preparing a critical analysis, we may distinguish two phases: critical reading (if we deal with a book or other written form) and critical writing.

Critical reading should involve the following stages:

• Identification of the main author’s ideas and analysis of the structure of his or hers piece of writing. The most important is to recognize the purpose of author's work (why the specified text was created after all). Among the most widely used writing intentions, we can distinguish persuasive function (convincing the reader about some event, phenomenon etc.), informative function (to give information about something), and entertaining function (something is written for reader’s pleasure).
• Having analysed the purpose of writing and found the principal ideas, it is necessary to state whether this reason was accomplished successfully or not. The best way of doing so, is by looking up the corresponding stylistic devices used in the text. For example, if the purpose was to persuade the reader, the author would definitely have used logical reasoning and provided some evidences for his or hers statements.
• Final stage of critical reading is creating a short outline of the analysed piece of writing (usually a plan or a short summary).

When the analysis is over and the text is thoroughly studied, you can move further to your own critical writing. This stage also involves several steps. They are as follows:

• It is recommended to start the essay with some information that is not directly linked to the main topic of the writing piece. This could be an author’s biography, some significant moments of his or her life (preferably those that affected his writing style) and even some publication data. It would be also wise to state the idea of the writing and one’s own attitude towards it.
• Second part should be completely dedicated to the summary of the text (play, movie etc.). There should be expressed no evaluation, but just a factual material.
• The concluding part, unlike the previous one, is a mere evaluation and analysis of the text. You may stress attention on several aspects: use of stylistic devices, structural organisation, means of expressing your ideas, fulfilment of the purposes of writing. It is important to provide “strong” examples which could emphasize your opinion. Finally, another important issue is to remain fair and avoid any prejudices towards the author, the work or any means used in it.