Interpretation and Presentation: As with evidence, analysis appears in two stages of the writing process. Early in the process, you do analysis to form the basis on which to develop an argument. Later in the paper, you present analysis to communicate your argument to someone else. 

Doing Analysis

If the first step of the research process is to define your text, and the second is to identify, collect, and organize your evidence, the third step is to analyze that evidence. From the Greek ana, “throughout,” + lyein, “to unfasten,” analysis is the act of dissecting or loosening up a topic into evidence and then describing, unpacking, and considering the implications of the very particular meanings of each of those very specific bits and pieces of evidence.

Specificity: The success of your analysis will be proportional to its specificity. The more concrete, particular, exact you can be, the better. 

Originality: The quality of your analysis is all about its originality: you bringing fresh insight that you’ve come up with yourself. 

Technicality: Analysis should be technical if needed, using the vocabulary of the discipline you’re working in. One of the joys of reading academic writing is seeing someone with a strong command of a technical vocabulary mobilize that knowledge to elucidate something non-specialists may notice but not have the ability to talk about. 

Analysis as Explication: Analysis makes explicit what is implicit in a piece of evidence - the hidden things going on behind the scenes. Evidence is evident, but analysis is about explaining what isn’t apparent.

Analyses are the most basic building blocks of arguments. Think of argumentation as a pyramid. For each argument, there are multiple assertions; for each assertion there are multiple analyses; and for each analysis there are multiple pieces of evidence that support it. Evidence leads to analyses, analyses to assertions, and assertions to an argument.

If evidence tells us what is true (what happened or happens, what the facts are), analysis aims to explain why it is true (why something happened or happens in the way that it did or does, why certain facts come into existence).

From your work with evidence, you should have the facts you plan to work with organized into graphs, charts, timelines, etc. There are different ways to analyze this evidence, but I’ve found that the best way is to create a conceptual map.

From the Latin concipere, “to take in,” a concept is an abstract idea or term we use to characterize the things we experience and to form descriptions and judgments about them. If so, a conceptual map would be a map that shows the relationships between facts and the concepts to which they relate.

Practically speaking, a conceptual map is a bubble-and-arrow flowchart of evidence, ideas about that evidence, and the relationships that exist between evidence and ideas. A conceptual map weaves together facts and concepts in a sequence to tell a story with a beginning, middle, and end, a story that relates not only what is true (in its use of facts), but also why something is true (in its use of concepts).

Conceptual maps are about increasing the clarity and specificity of your thinking. Producing a conceptual map will allow you to see the complexity of the evidence you’re addressing with clarity because it will require you to think about very particular points of evidence in very specific analytical terms.

A conceptual map works the same whether one is dealing with statistics or examples or cultural histories.

To create a conceptual map, begin with a well-organized representation of evidence such as a spreadsheet, graph, chart, timeline, etc. Then work your way through this evidence listing out the concepts that occur to you as you consider the evidence.

In other words, you should try to produce two lists, one list of facts, and one list of concepts. Once you have your list of the evidence that is in play, and your list of the ideas that are in play, you’re ready to begin piecing facts together with concepts.

A conceptual map is all about causality: what causes something to happen, and what, in turn, does that something cause to happen. A conceptual map is an attempt to show which facts are related to which other facts, and – by including concepts – to explain the nature of those relationships. To create your map, attempt to determine what causes a fact to occur and what a fact causes to occur. Remember that sometimes multiple facts or concepts combine to produce a single fact or concept, and sometimes a single fact or concept can cause multiple other facts or concepts to occur.

Start piecing together your conceptual map by plotting facts into episodes that go together to form chapters, as it were, of the larger narrative you’re trying to tell. Keep in mind that just because one thing comes after another in a timeline does not mean that those two things are related, are part of the same episode. This is why it is necessary to create a map, as opposed to a strictly linear list, because you will probably find that you have multiple episodes occurring simultaneously but intersecting in some way(s).

As you start plotting out your facts and concepts, be aware that you will have to draw and redraw your map many times because you are actually figuring out your analysis of the evidence as you map it out. You are not putting together a puzzle the completed version of which is printed on the box as a guide to how you should put the pieces together. You are putting together a puzzle when you draw a conceptual map, yes, but when you begin you have no idea what the completed picture will look like. Thus you must work slowly and deliberately, fitting together the pieces of the puzzle first into small chunks, and then the chunks into the bigger picture, your pieces being the facts and concepts in play and your completed puzzle being your analysis of which facts go with which other facts? which concepts go with which facts? which groups of facts and concepts go with which other groups of facts and concepts? As you work to piece this puzzle together in fits and starts, you will have to draw and redraw your map many times; you will have to scratch out sequences that you thought would work but don’t; and you will have to begin again from scratch when things aren’t working; and you will have to do all of this until all the pieces in your puzzle finally click together and the bits and pieces of facts and concepts come together to form a coherent picture because you have placed them in cogent relationships with each other.

At the end of it all, a conceptual map should show the origin, structure, operation, and outcome of a set of evidence.

In my experience, it is better to do a conceptual map with pen and paper than on a computer, because your construction of this map requires absolute freedom to arrange, relate, and rearrange facts and concepts in ways that you see fit, ways that could be constricted by your computer program (this point, however, depends upon the power of your program and the extent of your computing ability).

Because a conceptual map is an argument (or part of an argument) in its infancy, your conceptual map is usually not something that anyone other than you can make sense of just by looking at it. I’ve found that the best use of a conceptual map is to help me “talk someone through” an analysis that I’m in the process of formulating and reformulating. For this reason, I find it helpful to include with a completed conceptual map a written statement that summarizes my analysis.

To start the process of turning analysis into argument, make as many conceptual maps as you can with the evidence you’ve collected, then look at the maps together. Look for similarities and patterns, but also for differences. Ask if there is a “master narrative” that seems to appear in multiple maps. If so, what is it? If not, why isn’t there one?

Presenting Analysis

Analysis as Photo Album: Let’s say you go on vacation and take 250 pictures. When you get home, you want to make a photo album. You don’t put all 250 of those pictures in the photo album. You pick the best 25. But here’s the thing: you wouldn’t have those 25 really great pictures if you hadn’t taken all 250. And you didn’t know, when you were taking the pictures, which 25 would be the best. Similarly, in the writing process, there will be a lot of analysis that you do along the way that may not make it into the final essay. Don’t think of that as wasted work. You don't know, while you're in the interpretive process, which analyses are going to be the ones that best display your argument. And often the analyses that make it into an essay wouldn’t have been possible without all of that earlier analysis. No one goes on vacation and takes only 25 pictures. 

Evidence and Analysis. Evidence and analysis go hand-in-hand. Evidence presented must be analyzed. Do the Work of Analysis: You have to do the work of analysis for your reader. That’s why she’s reading your essay: so that you can explain things to her. Don’t expect your reader to interpret something in the same way that you do. You’ve got to explain how we should think about the evidence you’ve presented to us.