ESSAY WRITING
The fundamentals of essay writing (part 3)
Three key essay writing concepts you need to understand
This guide is part 3 of a 4-part series on the essay writing fundamentals that are not explicitly connected to one of our essay writing skills. It explains three key words that will be used throughout the later guides in this part of the website and which the teachers at SHSG will use in their feedback.
1. Identify: Recognise that something is present (by referring to it in your writing) [Year 7+]
Our first key word is identify. It’s the simplest to do and to understand. To identify something means to recognise that it is present in a text by referring to it in your writing. To identify something is essentially to point at it: “that thing is there,” you are saying when you identify it. That’s why we use a pointing icon to represent the skill of identifying relevant, meaningful evidence.
Identifying that different things are present in a text is the first step to writing a good essay, and something we’ve already discussed some earlier skill guides. There are lots of different things that you might need to identify when you’re writing an essay, and as you work your way up from Year 7 to GCSE you will be expected to identify more and more things.
In the box below there are some examples to make this clearer. The concept of identifying will also become clearer when you get to the sections about explaining and analysing as you’ll be able to see how identifying differs from those things.
Some things you might be expected to identify in your essays, including the year group in which you’ll be expected to do identify these things
Identify a piece of evidence [Year 7+]
You will do this by including it in your essay as a quotation. You should have read about this in our earlier guides to choosing and writing evidence.
Identify an aspect of meaning, like an inference [Year 7+]
You will do this in your paragraph points and in the analysis part of your PEA paragraphs (e.g. The writer presents Scrooge as a cold and heartless person). You should have read about this in our earlier guide to writing points.
Identify a similarity or difference between things [Year 7+]
You might do this in your analysis or in a comparison essay (e.g. This is very similar to the way Scrooge was presented at the start of the novel).
Identify a method that the writer has used [Year 8+]
If you want to discuss a method the first thing you’ll need to do is recognise that it is present in a piece of evicence (e.g. The writer uses the metaphor "sea" to describe the faces).
Identify the effect of a method [Year 8+]
After you’ve identified that a method has been used you’ll also need to identify its basic effect (e.g. This suggests that there are a lot of faces).
Identify a big idea in a text [Year 8+]
When you want to link a text to the big ideas that is conveys you’ll first need to identify what those big ideas are (e.g. This shows that power corrupts, especially when the power has not been earned).
In each of these examples something has been identified — and only identified. Each example shows that the person writing the essay has been able to recognise that these things are present in the text they are writing about. This is what it means to identify something.
Key things to understand about identifying
You will always identify first — you must point at the things you want to write about
There are lots of different things that you need to identify when writing an essay
You need to avoid stopping there
After you’ve identified something, you will usually (though not always) need to explain it, and sometimes you may also need to analyse it, which is where our next two key words come in
2. Explain: Make something clear by describing it in more detail [Year 7+]
Our second key word is explain. It’s the most important of the three words because you’ll be doing it so often. Having identified something, you almost always need to explain it. But what does that actually mean? What does it mean to explain something? So far, we’ve not been clear. We have identified an idea (i.e. that you need to explain things in your essays) but in order for the idea to be clear, we need to describe it in more detail. We need to explain it, in other words.
This whole section is an example of what it means to explain something. It’s an explanation of explaining. We are trying to make explaining clear by describing it in more detail.
How to explain something
Generally speaking, you will do some (or all) of the following things when you explain something:
Paraphrase what you have identified using different words to make it clearer, perhaps including simpler words if you’ve used some kind of abstract noun for a complicated concept (e.g. explanation, justice, power, love, etc).
Break down what you have identified into smaller parts — this may well be something you do as part of #1, and it will also be something you do if you analyse (see below).
Include simple examples of what you’ve identified to make it clearer, perhaps even comparisons to other things, called analogies.
If you were to look back over what we’ve said so far in this guide to explaining, you would see that we’ve done all three of these things already: we’ve paraphrased the meaning of ‘explain’ several times; we’ve broken down the idea of explanation into smaller chunks; and we’ve used the example of “explaining explanation” as a kind of analogy. To make this explanation even clearer, let’s look at some examples that are similar to what you’ll need to do in your essays.
Example 1: Explaining the meaning of some evidence [Year 7+]
For this example, we’ll use a short extract from A Monster Calls by Patrick Ness. In this extract, the protagonist, Conor, is talking to his grandmother about his mum who is very ill. Conor tries to argue that she has medication for her pain, but his grandmother responds like this:
"It's not working, Conor," she said crisply, and it seemed like she was looking just over his head rather than looking at him. "It's not working."
In this extract we have a very meaningful clause that requires some explanation. We’ll look at how we might explain it now.
Identifying meaning and evidence
If we wanted to write about this part of the text, we would first need to identify things through the point and evidence parts of a paragraph. That might look like this:
Patrick Ness suggests that Grandma is struggling to cope with Conor’s mother’s illness. When she tells Conor that his mother’s medication isn’t working, she seems like she’s “looking just over his head rather than at him.”
Here we have a point that identifies some inferred meaning based on the evidence. At the moment, though, it’s not clear why this evidence implies that meaning. To make this clear we need to describe it in more detail. We need to explain it, in other words.
Explaining meaning
Why does the direction that Conor’s grandma is looking suggest that she is struggling to cope with her daughter’s illness? It definitely does, but to make this clear we need more detail to explain this inference. We could start our explanation with this sentence:
The fact she can’t look him in the eye, or even at his head, suggests that Grandma isn’t in full control of her emotions at this point.
This is definitely true, and it helps a bit to explain the inference we made in the point (i.e. that she’s struggling to cope), but it’s still not clear enough. Why does the fact she’s can’t look him in the eye suggest this? We need more detail to make this totally clear. We could add this:
She is trying to be the grown-up here, explaining “crisply” the facts of the situation, but her eyes betray her true feelings. This act implies that she fears, were she to look at Conor, she would start to cry, and this would only make things worse for him, and so she looks away from him to help her keep it together. All of this suggests that she is struggling to cope with her daughter’s illness.
This is much clearer! Now, whether or not you’ve read this novel, you should be able to understand why we made the inference in the point based on this evidence. It should be clear to you why the direction Grandma is looking suggests that she’s struggling to cope with her daughter’s illness.
This is what it means to explain the meaning of some evidence. We made it clear by describing it in detail.
Example 3: Explaining a big idea [Year 8+]
For this example, we’ll look at a short passage from the novel Flesh by David Szalay, in which the protagonist, Istvan, who broke his hand in a fight, has just had the broken hand plastered by a doctor who he happened to go to school with:
“[The doctor] doesn't ask any more questions, and Istvan doesn't ask him anything about what he's doing now. He's obviously a doctor. That's what he's done with the last decade or whatever — turned himself into a doctor. Ten years ago he and this doctor were the same, Istvan thinks. They were the same. And now the doctor's a doctor and he's … whatever he is. From the same starting point, this enormous space has opened up between them, is how it feels. They seem to be on opposite sides of some fundamental divide now. The plaster is already starting to dry, at least on the surface. It feels chalkily matt in places. It feels solid, fixed. His hand feels trapped in it.”
Identifying a big idea
The first thing we’d need to do is identify what the big idea is that we intend to write about. What is the writer, David Szalay, suggesting about the human condition in this passage? We might identify a big idea in the following way:
Here, Szalay explores growing up and the idea that people grow apart as they get older, which can lead to regret.
This sentence does a reasonable job of identifying what the big idea in the passage is, but it does not explain it. What exactly is the writer saying about growing up and regret and so on? This is not clear from this sentence. It points at the big idea, but it doesn’t explain it.
Explaining a big idea
To explain the big idea we need to make it clear and that means describing it in more detail. There is so much more to say about this passage than just the sentence above. We can still start with that sentence to identify the big idea, but then we need to explain it. If we do both together (identify and explain) it would look like this:
Here, Szalay explores growing up and the idea that people grow apart as they get older, which can lead to regret. We all start on what seems to be the same path — school, essentially — but then adulthood begins and we diverge, with all kinds of chance life circumstances pushing us in different directions, on different paths. And when things like this happen — seeing an old school friend who happens to be a doctor now — they can bring home to us the other paths we might have taken, the other possibilities that might have been in our future but which, as adults now, are gone forever. We are stuck being who we are now, fixed, trapped, like Istvan’s hand in the plaster, and this can be painful to realise.
You should be able to see that we have now explained the big idea, rather than just identifying it. We have made it clear by describing it more detail.
Example 2: Explaining the effect of a method [Year 8+]
For this example we’ll use the simile at the end of this extract from Golden Hill by Francis Spufford:
“Tabitha was dressed in dark red silk which became her, and had garnets in her ears, but rather than taking pleasure in the gown as a new and formal skin, she stood there inside it as if it were no part of her, like a tall pole which in the wind happens to have become entangled in a cloth.”
Identifying the simile and identifying its effect
If we want to write about this simile then the first thing we need to do is identify it clearly, including identifying its effect, like this:
Here, Spufford uses the simile of a tall pole entangled in a cloth to describe Tabitha’s attitude to her clothes, suggesting that she doesn’t care about them.
We’ve correctly identified that the writer has used a simile and we’ve correctly identified the basic meaning of that simile, but we mustn’t stop here as the meaning isn’t clear yet. We need to explain it.
Explaining the effect of the simile
To make it clear we need to explain why the simile means this and we need to describe the meaning of the simile in more detail. To do this, we might add the following additional detail after the sentence above:
It is as if she is just a passive, inanimate object — like a pole — and the clothes she is so beautifully wearing are just hanging off her, leaving her as oblivious to their beauty as the pole would be to the cloth that has entangled it. She has no idea how beautiful she looks, nor does she have any interest in her beauty.
All we’ve done here is add a couple of sentences, but this makes the meaning of the simile a lot clearer, and, just as importantly, it makes it clear that the writer of this explanation (i.e. you, if you’d written this in an essay) really understands what this simile means.
What we haven’t done here is analyse this simile, though. We’ve only explained it. We’ll look at analysing in the final section of this guide.
These are just some of the things you might need to explain in an essay, and they are not intended to be examples of how you should explain something, necessarily (we do that more explicitly in the skill guides on the website). However, they should help you to understand what it means to explain something, and, just as importantly, what it means NOT to explain something (i.e. to just identify it), which is what you need to avoid.
How much explanation to include
How detailed should your explanations be, though? This is a bit tricky. We’ve obviously spent a long time explaining what it means to explain something in this part of the guide. We could have spent even longer, providing even more examples, or we could have stopped earlier, hoping that you would have fully understood the concept of explanation after just one example, or without the need for any examples at all. We had to make a judgement call on how much explanation to include. We had to decide how much detail it would take to make the idea clear (to you).
This is what you’ll need to do in your essays. How much explanation does what you’ve identified require to be clear to your reader? Imagine a person who doesn’t know what you know. Imagine a person saying to you, “Alright, but what do you mean by that?” What detail would they need to know for what you have said to be as clear to them as it is to you? That’s what you need to ask yourself.
It might require just one more sentence, or it might require three or four sentences, depending on what you’re explaining. It’s unlikely to require more than this, and the examples above should have given you a sense of how much explanation is required for some different things. You’ll also find more examples in the skill guides.
It’s worth saying, though, that sometimes you’ll get this wrong, especially to start with: your explanations may be too short (i.e. not clear enough) or too long (i.e. you’ll waffle and explain the obvious when it was clear what you meant earlier). This is unavoidable, unfortunately, especially when you’re learning. And that’s totally fine. It’s the attempt that matters.
Have we explained explanation clearly enough here? Should we have included more examples? Or did you understand what we meant eight paragraphs ago and have we just been waffling on since then? Only you can say. The important thing, though, is that we know what it means to explain something, and we have tried our best to explain what it means to explain something here. That’s all we could do, and that’s all you can do in your essays.
Key things to understand about explaining
Explaining something means making it clear by adding more detail
You will have to explain most of the things you have identified in an essay, though not all of them (e.g. you don’t have to explain what a simile is — you just have to identify that one has been used)
You will generally explain through paraphrasing, chunking and exemplification
It’s hard to know how much explanation is required but the key is that you try to make what you have identified clear
It’s safer, especially to start with, to provide too much explanation, rather than too little
3. Analyse: Explain something methodically, generally by breaking it down into its component parts [Year 8+]
Our final key word is analyse. When you analyse something you explain it methodically. This generally means breaking it down into its component parts and explaining each of those parts one at a time. As such, analysing something also involves explaining it.
The line between explaining and analysing isn’t totally clear and bright. Sometimes, when trying to explain something, you might also analyse that thing (i.e. explain it methodically). That’s perfectly fine. Although these three concepts (identify, explain, analyse) are notionally distinct (i.e. they mean different things from one another), they are also closely related, which means that, at the extremes, identifying can become explaining and explaining can become analysing. Don’t stress about this. Nothing in English is totally straightforward. If you want clear, bright lines, study maths instead.
Analysing as zooming in
Perhaps the easiest way to think about what it means to analyse something is through the idea of zooming in. That is why we use a microscope icon to represent the skill of analysing language, form and structure. If you want to analyse a section of a text, instead of just explaining what it means, you will generally need to zoom in to the component parts of the text which will allow you to explain it methodically (i.e. one thing at a time).
Let’s look at a couple of examples to make this a bit clearer.
Example 1: Analysing a simile [Year 8+]
For this example, we’ll use the following simile, which comes from Bring Up The Bodies by Hilary Mantel:
“[Cromwell’s] expression is as carefully blank as a freshly painted wall.”
Identifying and explaining the simile (but not analysing it)
Earlier in this guide we included examples of how to identify and explain methods. Let’s start by doing those two these things for this simile. Then we’ll look at how analysing requires more.
Mantel uses the simile “as carefully blank as a freshly painted wall” to describe Cromwell’s facial expression. This suggests that he is giving nothing away — his emotions are concealed from the people looking at him, and he appears blank and expressionless, like the wall.
There’s nothing wrong with any of this. We have clearly identified the method (i.e. a simile) and identified its effect (i.e. that he’s giving nothing away), and we’ve even explained that effect in a bit of detail after that. However, we haven’t analysed it yet. We haven’t explained the simile methodically or zoomed into its component parts. Let’s look at how that would work.
Analysing the simile
The first thing to say here is that we don’t need to change anything from the example above — all of that can stay exactly the same. We just need to add some analysis. We need to zoom into some of the component parts of the simile. In the simile, the character’s expression is not just blank but “carefully blank”, and the wall it is compared to has been “freshly painted”. These two adverbs (carefully and freshly) are component parts of the simile and they convey additional meaning beyond its core meaning, which is why they are worth zooming into. This will give us some analysis. Below is how it would look if we combined identifying, explaining AND analysing for this particular simile:
Mantel uses the simile “as carefully blank as a freshly painted wall” to describe Cromwell’s facial expression to suggest that he is giving nothing away — his emotions are concealed from the people looking at him, and he appears blank and expressionless, like the wall. Moreover, Cromwell’s expression is “carefully” blank, and this adverb suggests that this is intentional, that it is the work of a master deceiver, someone who can control his facial expressions with care. Mantel also describes the wall as “freshly” painted, suggesting it is pristine, perfect, with no blemishes at all, as if Cromwell has pulled this off perfectly. The fresh paint also suggests that something is being concealed, like it’s been painted over, covered up to look pristine, but with the blemish — his true feelings — totally hidden.
Now we have some proper analysis to go along with the identification and explanation. This is a fairly detailed example of analysis, and you won’t always need to analyse in this much detail (see example 2 below), but this first example is designed to illustrated how analysing something differs from just explaining it. Instead of just explaining the simile (i.e. making it clear by adding more detail), we have also broken it down into some of its component parts and zoomed into them to make the explanation methodical. This is what it means to analyse something
Example 2: Analysing a single word [Year 8+]
Not all analysis needs to be as detailed as the previous example. For this example we’ll just look at a single word from this sentence, taken from The Sense of An Ending by Julian Barnes:
“I've been turning over in my mind the question of nostalgia, and whether I suffer from it.”
This sentence does not contain a simile or metaphor, or any other juicy method for us to analyse in lots of detail, but it does contain a single word we can zoom into to turn our explanation into some analysis: the verb ‘suffer’. This verb is a component part of the sentence above that conveys a fair amount of meaning, and as such it is something we might want to analyse.
Explaining the meaning first
Though we are demonstrating how to analyse in this example, we do still need to identify and explain first (we can’t just analyse). We could do this using the PEA structure:
Barnes suggests that nostalgia is a powerful emotion. After a traumatic experience that reminds him of his youth, the narrator finds himself “turning over in [his] mind the question of nostalgia, and whether [he] suffer[s] from it.” Here, Barnes conveys the narrator’s introspection — his self-awareness and even self-criticism; he is going through something traumatic but cannot help but interrogate his own feelings and what they reveal about him as a person. This is the power that nostalgia can bring. It can cause us to question ourselves and to wonder who we are.
In this example we’ve identified an inference in the point (i.e. that nostalgia is a powerful emotion) and identified a relevant, meaningful bit of evidence for this (i.e. the quotation), and then we’ve briefly explained both what the evidence tells us about the narrator and what it tells us about a big idea. We could have done both of these things in more detail, but we wanted to keep this part of the example fairly brief.
Analysing the verb
Now we’re going to add the analysis, using our chosen verb. We’ll zoom in to this component part of the evidence and explain it:
Furthermore, Barnes uses the verb “suffer” to describe the feeling of nostalgia. This suggests that it is not a neutral emotion; it is something we have to suffer, like pain or heartbreak. For some people nostalgia is sweet, or at least bittersweet, but this verb suggests that, for the narrator, it is just bitter — an emotion to be endured.
This analysis is considerably less detailed than in the previous example, but it shows how even small bits of analysis can better illustrate the depth of your understanding of a text, which is what this essay writing stuff is all about.
Doing analysis well is complicated and challenging, and we go into much more detail about how to do it in our four guides to analysing methods, but as with the other key words in this guide, it’s important that you understand what it means to analyse something, and how it is different to just explaining it. When we analyse a method, we explain it methodically, generally by zooming in to some of its component parts.
Key things to understand about analysing
Analysing is a form of explaining — don’t get too hung up on when one stops and the other begins
The simplest way to think of the difference is through the idea of zooming in — when you analyse you zoom in (like a microscope) to the component parts of what you’re explaining and explain some of them methodically
This is the most complex of the three key terms — you should look at the guides to analysing language, form and structure to better understand how to do it well
SIDEBAR: Why do we use PEA and not PEE for paragraph structure?
All this discussion of the difference between explaining and analysing raises a worthwhile question: why do use the PEA structure (Point, Evidence, Analysis) for paragraphs when often the Analysis part won’t involve any actual analysis (i.e. breaking something down into its component parts) but will involve a lot of explanation (i.e. making things clear by adding more detail)? Why don’t we use PEE instead?
The answer to this is boring, sadly, but we’ve including it here just in case anyone is confused or curious. Please feel free to skip this section if you’re not interested in the answer: it doesn’t matter, especially if you’re a student.
The answer is this: we use PEA and not PEE because it’s simpler. In Year 7 all our students are expected to do is explain, so really their paragraphs are PEE paragraphs, not PEA paragraphs, but from Year 8 onwards we expect students to actually analyse in most of the Analysis sections of their PEA paragraphs, and doing proper detailed analysis is essential for GCSE and A Level. Because we centralise all our essay writing guidance on this website, which is for students in all year groups, we decided it was simpler to avoid using different initialisms for different year groups (e.g. PEE for Year 7 and PEA for Year 8) because this might be confusing and involve us writing “PEE/PEA” or “Explanation/Analysis” in these guides, which is clunky. As such, we opted to use PEA for all year groups, even though sometimes the Analysis part won’t involve any actual analysis.
It’s not an ideal solution, but it’s the best one we could come up with in the circumstances.
Summing up – key things to remember with identify / explain / analyse
It’s essential that you know the difference between identifying something, explaining it and analysing it
You will need to do all three of these things in your essays
Identifying something means just recognising that it is present — it is the first thing you’ll need to do with things you notice and want to write about in an essay
Explaining something means you make it clear by describing it in more detail — imagine someone who doesn’t know what you mean and think about what you’d need to do to make them understand what you understand
Analysing something means breaking it down into its component parts and methodically explaining them — this is something you’ll do most often when you analyse the methods that a writer uses