How to Analyze an Essay – the basics
Essays can be a great source of information; these are especially popular since they come with the huge advantage of allowing you to choose the level of depth you would like to delve into the topic. If you are going to College or writing a College Entrance Test, you are going to deal with a lot of essays. Irrespective of how deep an author has preferred to go into while covering a topic, by selecting portions that you deem necessary and ignoring other parts where there are intricate details, you can control the amount of information that is being bombarded at you. However, in order to figure out exactly what you would like to make use of and what you would prefer to ignore, it is necessary to analyze the essay first. There are a few easy steps that will enable you to do this quickly and efficiently.
The first of these is to skim through the entire essay once. Glance through the pertinent points that the essay covers and read through quickly so as to get an idea as to which part of the essay covers what. This will help you come straight to the portions that you would like to take excerpts from while using the essay.
It also helps to keep a pencil handy; this way you can highlight the parts that you find interesting. You can also mark words that you probably are not familiar with so that they can be looked up in a dictionary, later. By the end of this brisk reading session, you will have a vague idea as to what the author has attempted to convey by the entire essay.
Next, it is the turn to take a more detailed look at the essay by reading through it more slowly and carefully. Take time to soak up the exact meaning of the different parts of the essay that you had highlighted earlier. Look up the dictionary for the unfamiliar words too; this is a great way to improve your vocabulary as well. It helps to make notes in your own words on a rough sheet of paper so that it becomes easier to assimilate the contents of the essay. Now comes the time to ponder about the central underlying idea behind the essay – the thesis.
Once this is done you are almost done with the elementary analysis of the essay and any further variations of the central underlying theme can be explained using the analyst’s personal style and flair. This general rule can be kept in mind to decipher the seemingly most complexly authored essays using the toughest of words that ever existed in any language. Using a structured approach such as the one mentioned above, it is possible to break the essay down into smaller and more easily comprehensible sections which can easily be understood.
this did nothing.
LOL
Do you have more great artilces like this one?
LOL!
At last! Someone who understands! Thanks for posting!