Practical Analytical Writing

Bill Blondeau

This article is another installment in a series. The series is a pragmatic overview of the best ways to get good-quality technical and scientific writing done.

The lead article in this series is What makes for good technical writing? You should read it first, if you haven't yet.

"Analytical Writing": which is what, exactly?

Scientific and technical writing belong to a discipline called analytical writing. Analytical writing is a narrowly constrained field:

The objective is to inform the reader concerning a fixed body of didactic information. There is generally no need to persuade or enlighten. The content is ordinarily emotionally neutral.
The reader's interest is externally established. She's usually got practical reasons for reading the work. The issue is not to draw the reader in by emotional enticement, but to avoid making her read difficult; to avoid driving her away.
The content is typically information-dense and critically interdependent—the reader can't be satisfied with a partial reading, or partial comprehension.
This quality of information loading presents cognitive challenges for the reader.

This article looks at three practical aspects of analytical writing:

The Reflexes of Incomprehension: the failure modes of your readers when you don't do your job right. (Or, to be fair, when the nature of the material is inherently overwhelming.)
Outlining Analytical Composition: sketching out the structure of an analytical work—which is very different from accepted norms of essay or article composition;
Cognitive Wordsmithing: the uses of written language to avoid worsening the already high cognitive burden of analytical subjects.

Know the reflexes of incomprehension

Poor organization, wordsmithing and page/text formatting can cause three undesirable reflex behaviors in the reader:

She might start skimming, trying to get past a bad patch so she can land on something comprehensible. Skimming is typically a reflection of underlying anxiety about whether the material is worth the reader's time. Of the three reflexes of incomprehension, skimming is the least bad: she's at least still looking for an entry point into the material.
She might glaze over, which is the sad situation in which she is sort of pretending to read, but is really only droning subvocally through the words without any useful level of comprehension at all. She's not learning anything useful; she might be gleaning a rudimentary sense of organization or terms, but only by accident.
She might just bog down. This is the state at which reading grinds to a halt: the reader simply gives up. She really doesn't want to read any more of your miserable attempts at explanation. Once a reader bogs down, you're probably not getting her back.

Stop.

Reread the list. You need to keep these failure modes in mind. Knowing them will help you avoid provoking them in the first place; and it will help you understand how to rescue a reader that you have marooned.

The first thing to understand about the craft of analytical writing is that it's organized in a particular way.

Outlining Analytical Composition: Not your English teacher's essay form.

There's a generic way to write essays. It's the conventional form for expository and persuasive writing. It has stood the test of time, and it works pretty well.

However, the essay form is not useful for analytical writing. It's described here for purposes of contrast. So you know what not to do.

The Essay outline: not the form you're looking for.

Introduction: Explains the reason for the essay, outlines the subject, frames the coming arguments or exposition, and—crucially—attempts to grab the reader's interest.
Topic: A discussion of a specific part of the subject.
Topic
[Topic...]
Conclusion: Very important: a satisfying wrap-up that ties it all together. This is a key part of the reward system that keeps the reader engaged until the end: the Introduction sets it up, and the Conclusion brings it home.

Note the emphasis on holding the reader's interest. The essayist needs to engage and hold the reader, because that's the nature of an essay. The reader is typically not obliged to read it; but an essay is best consumed by starting at the beginning, reading attentively all the way through, and then thinking about it.

This isn't the case with an analytical article.

The Analytical outline: THIS is how you do it.

At first glance, the outline of an analytic article seems sort of like an essay outline: beginning with an overview, followed by individual topics.

Summary: In business writing, often called an "Executive Summary"; in less formal documents, it's often useful to call it a "TL;DR". It's basically a statement of scope, and a recapitulation of everything in the document—but with no details. The Summary assumes as little as possible about the reader's prior understanding.
Contents / Index: A listing, ordinarily with links, of the different pieces offered in the work. This should always be easily accessed.
Topic
- Summary
- Breakout of details
[Topic...]

Despite the similarities, there are notable differences.

Summary != Introduction. Unlike an essay's Introduction, which creates a sense of unfinished business that will hopefully hold the reader's curiosity and interest, the analytical outline's Summary is self-contained, and a complete description.
It omits detail; but at its level of abstraction, the Summary leaves nothing out. For some readers, the Summary alone is sufficient for their purpose. A Summary that can't stand alone—that can't be read in isolation—is a weak Summary.
Topics contain an internal structure: Topic summary and Topic details. This reflects the overall structure of the document; that's no accident. This is a good way to write self-contained descriptions.
This structure can, and should, be carried down into lower levels: Sub-Topics, Sub-Sub-Topics, etc.
There is no "Conclusion". This may seem weird, especially if you're familiar (as writer or reader) with the essay form. But there it is: the analytical form does not require closure. It never sets up an unresolved promise of an emotional conclusion, because there would be no point in doing so.
An analytical document is not written to lure the reader into continuing, the way an essay is. It's written to facilitate a wide range of uses—which will vary from reader to reader.

Quite a few of your readers will not read an analytical article to the end. They will read the parts they think they need for present purposes, and go away. Support them in this.

The above will give you a minimal, but helpful, way to arrange your content for an analytical piece.

Now, of course, you have to actually... you know... write that content.

Cognitive Wordsmithing

This topic is the hands-on discipline of writing, and formatting, low-friction prose.

Disclaimer: this is not a style guide.

Not as such, anyway. This topic is mechanistic, not intuitive. It covers issues in analytic writing, and explicit practices that help address them.

Supply plentiful safe landing zones

Your responsibility as a writer is to be careful not to trigger the reflexes of incomprehension. You will anyway, sometimes. Therefore:

Your other responsibility as a writer is to provide lots of escape mechanisms for readers who have lapsed into these responses of bewilderment. The best way to do this is to structure your text to provide safe landing zones for the reader's drifting attention.

What's a safe landing zone?

A safe landing zone is:

A break in visual format that signals the end of the dense thickets the reader has been traversing:
- A new short paragraph
- A bold or italic or underlined phrase
- A new heading / subheading
An obvious textual statement telling the reader Hey, that's done! This lets her know that she has a fair chance to start from scratch, without being irreparably ruined by her prior skimming / glazing. It can even help with a bogdown, if she's forlornly glancing ahead at what she's abandoning.

This text can be a recapitulation coupled with a topic switch, e.g. "So, we've just seen that elementary particles can have mass, charge, and spin. What other properties might they exhibit?" It can also be a straightforward jump: "Now, turning to the question of thermodynamic entropy as a proxy for our real-world perceptions of 'deterioration',..."

These things are pure gold. Using formatting to catch the wayward reader's attention, and specific statements of topic change to reorient her comprehension, is like a bright white & green beacon in the night for a lost pilot who's running low on fuel.

Practical rules for cognitive wordsmithing

There are an awful lot of principles to follow if you want to get cognitive wordsmithing right. Here are the ones that will give you the most bang for the buck.

Don't string lots of clauses together in a sentence. The confusion introduced by multiple sequential clauses scales up so quickly. The reader will get disoriented—then glaze over, bog down, or start skimming.
Especially don't string prepositional phrases together. These are worse than ordinary clauses. Seriously: don't even start.
You have paragraphs. Use them. Paragraphs form strong visual demarcations between different ideas or contexts, and make natural safe landing points for the hapless skimmer. As such, they are extremely helpful and should be used frequently. Now... yes. Skilled writers of English prose such as J.R.R. Tolkien (his essay "On Fairy Stories" (PDF) is a good example of this kind of writing) can include very long paragraphs in their works without being confusing. But Tolkien wrote for an educated audience that was used to that kind of presentation; besides, they generally had a lot of patience and a contemplative approach. He wasn't obliged to employ the density of concept, exposition, and context shifts that technical writing usually entails. In technical writing, shorter paragraphs are better. (Besides, really, Dear Writer: you're nowhere close to being the wordsmith that Tolkien was.)
Use orienting constructions. There's amazing benefit in putting simple logical prefacing words and phrases into your text: "on the other hand", "in contrast", "similarly", "confusingly", "as you'd expect", "This is very different from", "however", and so on.
These expressions signal a transition between logically related contexts—and they describe the sense of that logical relationship. They will keep the reader from losing the sense of your explanation; they will also help save her when she does go astray.

Orienting constructions are worth every penny.
Don't stack negatives. (This includes implicit negatives.) Not even the least logically challenged among us wouldn't feel reluctant to deny that there's no possible doubt about likelihood of logical reversals of sense when one is insufficiently careful to restrict oneself to non-confusing Boolean constructs.
Minimize jargon. Technical content does often rely on jargon for clarity and concision. Unfortunately, many technical writers seem to feel that lots and lots of jargon lends gravitas to the work. Which, no, it doesn't. Use jargon sparingly, and only when it's meaningful and efficient. Otherwise, favor standard English.
Lists are better than a sentence or paragraph riddled with conjunctions.
Bold, italic, and underline formatting, properly applied to emphasize key ideas or phrases, can really help the reader as she makes her way through dense technical wording. A bolded essential phrase also makes a nice landing zone for someone caught in the skim reflex.

There. Three key rules for basic analytical writing.

Know the Reflexes of Incomprehension. Try to bear in mind that your reader can slip into them very easily.
Use the Analytical Outline. (And don't try to mix it with an essay outline.)
Develop the habits of Cognitive Wordsmithing. Check your drafts for violations or failures.

These things aren't hard. They do not depend on Talent, or Genius, or any other wrongfooted ideas you might have about prerequisites for analytical writing. They depend on methodical, focused attention. And, on staying awake.

From this point forward, you're starting with an advantage.

And so are your readers.