Analytical It’s rare for a university-level text to be purely descriptive. Most academic writing is also analytical. Analytical writing includes descriptive writing, but also requires you to re-organise the facts and information you describe into categories, groups, parts, types or relationships. Sometimes, these categories or relationships are already part of the discipline, while in other cases you will create them specifically for your text. If you’re comparing two theories, you might break your comparison into several parts, for example: how each theory deals with social context, how each theory deals with language learning, and how each theory can be used in practice. The kinds of instructions for an analytical assignment include: 'analyse', 'compare', 'contrast', 'relate', and 'examine'. To make your writing more analytical: spend plenty of time planning. Brainstorm the facts and ideas, and try different ways of grouping them, ac...