Ask ten students what “critical analysis” means and you will get ten polite versions of the same shrug. Most people were told to be more critical long before anyone explained what that involves. The red pen arrives; the technique does not. What follows is the technique, at the level of the sentence, because that is where essays are made and marked.

Description tells you what; analysis tells you what it means

Description is not the enemy. An essay with no description has no evidence, and a marker cannot credit an argument built on nothing. But description reports: it says what happens, what a source claims, what a passage contains. Analysis works on that material. It asks how the thing was done, why it matters, what follows if you accept it, and where its limits lie.

A useful shorthand: description answers “what?”, while analysis answers “so what?” and “how do you know?”. A paragraph that only answers the first question is usually accurate, readable and worth very little.

Critical does not mean negative

It is worth clearing this up early, because it causes a lot of unnecessary hedging. You can analyse a text you agree with completely, and you can be negative without being critical at all. Writing that a source “fails to consider the counter-argument” is only analysis if you then show what difference that omission makes to its conclusion. Otherwise it is a complaint with a citation attached.

Three tests you can run on any sentence

• The source test: could someone who had never read your source have written this sentence? If yes, it is description.
• The so-what test: does the sentence change anything about your argument, or does it merely sit beside it?
• The transplant test: could the sentence be lifted into a different essay on the same topic without edits? If so, it is too general to be doing any work.

None of these tests is foolproof, but they catch most weak sentences before a tutor does.

Upgrading sentences, line by line

Here are three pairs. In each, the first sentence is description and the second is analysis of the same material. Notice that the second is not longer for the sake of length. It earns its words by making a claim.

Example 1: a literary detail

Description: The narrator describes the house as empty and cold.

Analysis: Because the house is described as “empty and cold” before any of the family appear, absence becomes the first thing the reader meets. The description does structural work: it makes the loss feel prior to the people who suffer it, which is why the ending reads as confirmation rather than surprise.

Example 2: two sources that disagree

Description: Source A disagrees with Source B about the delay.

Analysis: The two sources disagree about motive rather than fact: where A reads the delay as incompetence, B reads it as a deliberate hedge against uncertainty. That distinction matters, because the essay question turns on intention, and only one of these readings gives the delay a defensible purpose.

Example 3: a figure in a report

Description: The report notes that part-time work has grown.

Analysis: If part-time work has grown while total hours remain flat, the growth is less about more people working than about how existing work is counted and divided. That reframing turns a neutral statistic into a claim about who benefits from the measurement.

The three moves behind those rewrites

1. Point at something specific. Not “the tone” but the particular word, figure, silence or omission.
2. Offer a reading, not a fact. Use verbs that show you are interpreting: suggests, implies, works to, depends on, is best explained as.
3. Carry it forward. Finish by connecting the reading to the question in your title. If nothing changes, the analysis was decoration.

Language that does the work, and language that pretends to

Analysis lives in verbs and connectives far more than in adjectives. “This is a powerful image” says very little; “the image withholds what the character most wants” says something. Useful moves include:

• “The effect is…”
• “This choice depends on…”
• “Read this way, the passage…”
• “The claim holds only if…”
• “What looks like X is better understood as Y.”

Two cautions. Hedging is not analysis: “it could perhaps be argued that this may possibly suggest” protects nothing and persuades no one. And adverbs of certainty — clearly, obviously, undeniably — are often placeholders where a reason should be.

Common substitutes for analysis

• Praise. “The author makes a compelling point” is a verdict with no criteria attached. Say what makes it hold.
• Complaint. “The author ignores…” needs a consequence. Ignored what, and to what cost?
• Reporting critics. Summarising what scholars think is not the same as taking a position among them.
• Opinion about the topic. Your view on school uniforms is not analysis of an article about school uniforms unless you engage with its reasoning.

What to do with your next draft

Take a single paragraph and underline every sentence that could have been written without reading your source. Those are your description sentences, and they are not wasted — they are raw material. Choose the two most important and rewrite each so that it makes a claim about how or why, rather than simply recording that something is there.

Then read the paragraph’s last sentence. Does it say what the claim means for the question you were set? If not, add one. That sentence is often the difference between a competent essay and a strong one.

Do this once per paragraph across a single draft and the habit tends to stick. Critical analysis stops being a mysterious quality that some writers have and becomes a move you know how to make — which is all a tutor means when they ask for more of it.

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