Building paragraphs in argument analysis is a challenge. There’s so much to think about! How do you make your analysis detailed without making things over-complicated? How do you know when you’ve written enough?
Fortunately, argument analysis is very formulaic, and it can be learned. Even in the weeks before your final exam, there are still heaps of improvements you can make.
So, without further ado, what steps should you be following for flawless paragraphs?
1. Write simply and clearly. Keep things in short sentences. This is the best way to communicate your thoughts, and the examiner will be so grateful to have something easy to read for a change.
2. Focus your topic sentences on the author’s argument. Doing this checks off the ‘understanding of argument’ box.
3. Pick around 7-15 persuasive techniques (I go for around 10-12) to analyse per paragraph. Try to make each of them different (i.e., don’t analyse more than one or two rhetorical questions per essay, especially because most rhetorical questions can be analysed the same way).
4. Follow a formula for your analysis. This could be a whole post on its own, but in short you want your analysis to include the persuasive device, the audience it’s most likely to affect, and how it would change that audience’s thoughts or feelings about the topic.
Thinking through this and writing it out will probably be very painful and slow at first (especially if you don’t have much practice), but I promise it gets easier!
5. Have a limit for how long a paragraph takes you. For me (and I scored a study score of 50), this was 15 minutes (and I NEVER exceeded this). I also made each of my handwritten paragraphs around a page long. This will prevent your writing from blowing out and becoming complicated and unbalanced.
6. Don’t panic if you don’t cover everything! Articles are designed to have at least three times as much material as you can analyse in the hour. This is to give everyone the chance to find persuasive techniques they can write about. However, it means you will never be able to write the ‘perfect’ analysis. As such, the best you can do is your 1000 words or so under time pressure.
7. Slowly and carefully, write a couple of essays using the above tips. Make sure to think about what you are writing. Be sure to adhere to all the tips. Really be conscious of every step in your analysis. This is the best way to learn the thought process behind writing good analysis.
8. After you are a bit more comfortable with the above process, and have written a few slower essays, start writing essays or paragraphs exclusively to time. This will teach you to speed this thinking process up, so you’ll be able to replicate it in an exam.
Let me know in the comments if there’s anything you want explained in more detail!
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