From Description to Analysis

You might read about the need to demonstrate critical thinking, writing or analysis in your academic feedback, but remain unsure as to how to make the change from description to critical analysis. Some description is usually necessary to set the scene in each paragraph, but you need to make sure that you aren’t just telling the story of other people’s findings and theories. Things that you could could express in your writing include: is this research or evidence credible? How could it be improved? Have other people made opposing claims? How does it relate to the other evidence in your argument?

Here are some examples illustrating the differences between descriptive and critical analytical writing:

Adapted from: Cottrell, S., (2008) The Study Skills Handbook, Hampshire: Palgrave Macmillan, p286.

Have a go at identifying how descriptive or critical you have been in your own writing. Have a look at the Descriptive or Critical Writing template and use it to explore an example of your work - have you found the right balance of description and critical analysis?

How do the experts do it?

The University of Manchester Academic Phrasebank is the output of a project that examined published academic writing from across disciplines and areas of study and broke it down into the most commonly used phrases. These phrases are organised around categories such as 'being critical', 'comparing and contrasting' and 'giving examples'. Visit the Academic Phrasebank to get some ideas on how to organise and structure your critical writing.

Socratic Questioning

Socratic questioning is a rigorous evaluation technique that can be used to test claims and assumptions. It is named after the Ancient Greek philosopher Socrates, who encouraged his students to reach their own conclusions by questioning and examining ideas, rather than accepting ideas and information at face value. 

Socrates was sentenced to death by drinking the poison hemlock for daring to challenge the authority of the Athenian state, or in the words of his disciple Plato, for "not believing in the gods of the state". His legacy is an approach that foregrounds the importance of seeking evidence before making assumptions and being willing to question authority. 

Types of Socratic Question

There are six categories of Socratic question set out below, with prompts on how you might apply these to your own evaluation of sources and evidence. 

"So how might I use this in my writing?"

Each time you locate and read a source, these questions will help you to interpret it and evaluate its strengths and weaknesses. It is your role, as a critical writer, to report on the evidence accurately in your writing. Some of the following phrases taken from Manchester University's Academic Phrasebank might help:

• Previous studies have not dealt with...
• The research to date has tended to focus on...
• The research does not take into account...
• The main weakness of the study is...
• The main limitation of this argument is...
• The study overlooks...
• However, more recent studies suggest...
• A further question that needs to be asked, however, is...

Legitimation Code Theory

Critical reading and writing are important skills to help you draw out key information from a text and use it critically in your own writing. Legitimation Code Theory (LCT) is a useful way to think about the process in a visual way.

What is LCT?

LCT is a theory that can be applied to a wide range of academic situations, and uses what is known as a semantic wave. This wave represents the different stages of understanding and applying academic sources of information, as well as how you then apply these sources to your own academic work.

It is useful for helping to visualise the critical reading of a text, as well as for structuring essay paragraphs.

Unpacking

This involves taking an academic text, being able to identify the important points, and transferring this into more accessible language. This encompasses:

• Description: How you would describe what you have read/are writing about to demonstrate that you understand
• Evidence: What evidence or examples could be used in support of the description? This shows you understand the context

By the end of the unpacking section, you should have reached the bottom of the semantic wave (see graph above). 

Repacking

This is where critical analysis comes in. Visually seeing that you need to complete the wave can be really useful in helping you to understand if you have critically analysed or not. This includes thinking about:

• Why what you have read/written in the unpacking section is important to your work. This means putting the context-independent topic introduced during the unpacking stage into the context of your reading/essay/assignment. Detailing this shows that you understand why including the points you have raised are important and relevant.
• To finish the wave, think about concluding and drawing together all of the information you have explored, and summarising it so that it leads nicely onto the next piece of reading/essay paragraph.

Applying LCT in Practice

When critical analysis is lacking in a piece of writing, it's structure will often look like the incomplete wave below. The sources have been described (unpacked) but have not been effectively analysed (repacked). It is easy to visualise how a lack of critical analysis means that the flow of your essay looks disjointed and incomplete. You can check your work by identifying the different sections of the wave in each of your paragraphs using the LCT writing framework.

In contract, a critical essay or piece of reading will typically follow a wave pattern like the one below. Ideas are unpacked, evidence and examples are explored, then the ideas are repacked using your own words to summarise and connect. It is easy then to visualise how all your paragraphs fit together, and how the essay has a coherent connecting thread that runs through it.

The following model maps the LCT wave onto a typical critical paragraph structure: