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attempts to define and explain a writer’s feelings, reactions, and experiences. And analysis is a form of self-expression since it inevitably reflects the ways a writer’s experiences have taught him or her to think about the world. But even though expressive writing and analysis necessarily overlap, they also differ significantly in both method and aim. In expressive writing, your primary subject is your self, with other subjects serving as a means of evoking greater self-understanding. In analytical writing, your reasoning may derive from your personal experience, but it is your reasoning and not you or your experiences that matter. Analysis asks not just “what do I think?” but “how good is my thinking? how well does it fit the subject I am trying to explain?“

In its emphasis on logic and the dispassionate scrutiny of ideas (“what do I think about what I think?”), analysis is a close cousin of argument. But analysis and argument are not the same.

FIGURE 3.1

Diagram of Communication Triangle

ANALYSIS AND ARGUMENT

Analysis and argument proceed in the same way. They offer evidence, make claims about it, and supply reasons that explain and justify the claims. In other words, in both analysis and argument, you respond to the questions “what have you got to go on?” (supply evidence) and “how did you get there?” (supply the principles and reasons that caused you to conclude what you did about the evidence).

Although analysis and argument proceed in essentially the same way, they differ in the kinds of questions they try to answer. Argument, at its most dispassionate, asks, “what can be said with truth about x or y?” In common practice, though, the kinds of questions that argument more often answers are more committed, directive, and should-centered, such as “which is better, x or y?,” “how can we best achieve x or y?,” and “why should we stop doing x or y?”

Analysis, by contrast, asks, “what does x or y mean”? In analysis of the evidence (your data) is something you wish to understand, and the claims are assertions about what that evidence means. The claim that an analysis makes is usually a tentative answer to a what, how, or why question; it seeks to explain why people watch professional wrestling or what a rising number of sexual harassment cases might mean, or how certain features of government health care policy are designed to allay the fears of the middle class.

The claim that an argument makes is often an answer to a “should” question: for example, readers should or shouldn’t vote for bans on smoking in public buildings, or they should or shouldn’t believe that gays can function effectively in the military. The writer of an analysis is more concerned with discovering how each of these complex subjects might be defined and explained than with convincing readers to approve or disapprove of them.

Analysis Versus Debate-Style Argument

A factor that sometimes separates argument and analysis is the closer association of argument with the desire to persuade. When the aim of argument is persuasion—to get the audience to accept the writer’s position on a given subject—argument is likely to differ significantly from analysis. For one thing, a writer concerned with persuading others may feel the need to go into the writing process with considerable certainty about the position he or she advocates. The writer of an analysis, on the other hand, usually begins and remains for an extended period in a position of uncertainty.

Analytical writers are frequently more concerned with persuading themselves, with discovering what they believe about a subject, than they are with persuading others. The writer of an analysis is thus more likely to begin with the details of a subject he or she wishes to better understand, rather than with a position he or she wishes to defend.

Many of you may have been introduced to writing arguments through the debate model—arguing pro or con (for or against) on a given position, with the aim of defeating an imagined opponent and convincing your audience of the rightness of your position. The