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DIY Guides for Analytical Writing Assignments

In the section for TFs and TAs, there's advice on how to approach the most common steps of typical analytical writing assignments. The advice includes sequences of so-called formative assignments, i.e., lower stakes opportunities to practice and get feedback on steps of an assignment before turning it in. If you've taken Expos, these formative assignments should be familiar: developing analytical questions, writing response papers before drafting, doing reverse/paragraph outlines after drafting, etc.

Maybe these kinds of assignments feel less familiar, or only vaguely familiar? Or maybe you haven't taken Expos. Doesn't matter. The goal of this section is to give you a tool for working your way, step by step and on your own, through the major steps of most writing assignments. These tools will help you:

  • clarify the relationship between your assignment prompt and the kind of argument you're making
  • organize your ideas in alignment with your thesis
  • structure analytical paragraphs and the transitions between them, and
  • take a lower-stakes, iterative approach to revising as you go.

Using any of the guides below will improve your writing—using them all together will help you improve as a writer:

  • Self-Guided Analytical Writing How-To: From Prompt to Revised Draft. This self-guided workshop will walk you through the steps of doing a typical analytical writing assignment, that is, the kind you did (or are doing, or will do) in your first-year expository writing seminar. 
     
  • Body Paragraphs: How to Build Them and How to Connect Them. This handout will give you a general framework for building and connecting paragraphs (with topic sentences/transitions) in analytical essays.
     
  • Paragraph Outlining: Overview and How-to (with Templates). This resource will give you a reliable technique—along with templates for using it—for self-assessing just about any essay you're writing. It will allow you to take stock of what each paragraph is doing at every step of the writing process, how well the structure aligns with the thesis, and what the most effective next steps of drafting/revising should be.