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The article analysis essay examples in this collection demonstrate how to analyze different types of articles, including opinion pieces, news reports, research-based articles, and feature writing. Each sample shows how to identify the author’s main argument, evaluate supporting evidence, examine structure and tone, and discuss the effectiveness of the author’s approach.
Explore the examples below to learn how successful article analysis essays are organized, how key points from the source are incorporated, and how critical evaluation is developed. Whether you are analyzing a newspaper article, academic publication, or online feature, these samples provide practical models for understanding the structure of article analysis and developing stronger analytical writing skills.
Table of contents
5 Free Article Analysis Examples and Writing Samples
Each of the five samples below analyzes a different type of article, and each one is followed by a short list of what the writing does well.
Use them as models for the moves, not for the wording. Read a sample once for the shape of its argument, then close it and try the same moves on the article you were assigned.
What you shouldn’t do is borrow the sentences themselves.
Note
These samples are published teaching material, so plagiarism software will flag them the same way it flags any other published text. Study the structure and the kinds of judgments each writer makes, then write your own analysis, in your own words, about your own article.
Journal Article Analysis Example
A journal article analysis deals with peer-reviewed research, so the questions are about design rather than style.
You look at the research question, the method, the results, and the fit between them. Your job is to say what the study can support and where its conclusion reaches past its own data.
Here is what that looks like on a study about peer feedback in writing courses:
Example of a Journal Article Analysis
Hartley and Nwosu (2022) examine whether structured peer feedback improves the quality of revision in first-year composition courses. Their central claim is that students revise more substantively when reviewers work from a guided protocol than when they respond freely. The study draws on 214 students across eight course sections at a single public university, and revised drafts were scored against a shared scoring guide by two independent raters.
The argument is strongest in its treatment of the intervention itself. Because the guided protocol is reproduced in full in the appendix, other researchers can replicate the condition rather than approximate it. The reported effect on substantive revision (d = 0.41) is modest, but it holds across all eight sections, which makes one teacher’s classroom an unlikely explanation.
The weakness lies in the outcome measure. Revision quality is scored only at the level of the whole draft, so the study cannot show which kinds of feedback produced which kinds of change. Hartley and Nwosu acknowledge this, yet their conclusion still recommends the protocol for “all stages of the writing process” (p. 47), a claim that a single post-revision measurement does not support.
Three moves do most of the work in that sample:
It names the study’s central claim before judging anything
It praises one specific design feature, the reproduced protocol, rather than the study in general
It separates what the data can show from what the authors say it shows.
Those same three moves are usually the ones missing when this assignment goes wrong.
Watch out for these common problems:
- Walking through the article section by section instead of arguing a point
- Judging the findings by whether you agree with them
- Repeating the authors’ stated limitations as though they were your own analysis
- Quoting long passages in place of your own explanation.
News Article Analysis Example
A news article claims to report rather than argue, so a news article analysis works on what the reporting chose.
You look at the headline, the people quoted, the order the information appears in, and what the article leaves out. A report can be accurate in every sentence and still leave a false impression.
This sample takes apart a short local report on a city council vote:
Example of a News Article Analysis
The Riverton Ledger’s report on the March 14 city council vote, “Council Approves Downtown Housing Plan,” presents the decision as settled and largely uncontested. That framing begins in the headline, where “approves” carries none of the information that the vote was 4–3.
The sourcing points the same direction. Four of the five people quoted are council members or city staff who supported the ordinance, and the one opposing voice appears in the twelfth paragraph, well past the point where most readers stop. No resident of the affected neighborhood is quoted at all.
What the article reports, it reports accurately. The vote count, the date, and the provisions of the ordinance all match the public record, and no quotation is misrepresented.
The omission is the two-year dispute that preceded the vote. The Ledger covered that dispute in several earlier articles, and it explains why three members voted no. Leaving it out produces a report that is factually correct and still misleading about how the community received the decision.
Four things make that sample stronger than a general complaint about media bias:
It treats the headline as a choice the paper made, not as a neutral label
It counts and describes the people quoted instead of calling the piece biased
It says what the article gets right before saying what it leaves out
It ends with a judgment that follows from the evidence it just gave.
For your own version, a local planning or school board decision is close to ideal. The public record is easy to check, and the story is short enough to read line by line. You don’t need any specialist knowledge to see who got quoted and who didn’t.
Article Analysis Essay Example
An article analysis essay is the long form of the same assignment, and the extra length changes the structure more than it changes the content.
A short response can state a judgment and support it once. An essay needs a thesis in the introduction, body paragraphs that each carry one point, and a conclusion that returns to the thesis instead of adding a new idea.
The summary also gets shorter. In an essay, a reader needs only enough of the article’s content to follow your argument about it.
The sample below runs the full arc on an article about remote work:
Article Analysis Essay Example
In “The Quiet Cost of Flexible Work,” Delgado (2023) argues that remote arrangements shift the work of coordination from managers onto individual employees. The article is persuasive about the problem it names, but it treats a narrow sample of knowledge workers as evidence about employment in general. Delgado’s argument is strongest where the evidence is most detailed and least convincing wherever it reaches past that evidence.
The account of coordination itself is the best part of the article. Delgado tracks the scheduling, follow-up, and status reporting that 52 employees at three software firms performed outside their formal duties, and shows that this work rose at each firm after it adopted a remote-first policy. The detail is specific: the median employee in the sample spent forty minutes a day on coordination that a manager or an office layout had previously handled. Because the measure comes from daily time diaries rather than from recall surveys, the figure is difficult to dismiss.
The argument overreaches when it moves from these three firms to a claim about “flexible work” as a category. Software firms are unusual employers, with unusually autonomous staff and unusually heavy meeting schedules. Delgado offers no evidence from manufacturing, healthcare, or retail, yet the conclusion recommends policy changes for all of them. The article’s own data supports a narrower claim that would still be worth making: in knowledge work with heavy meeting loads, remote policies push coordination downward.
Delgado has identified a real and under-measured cost, and the time-diary method is a genuine contribution to a literature that relies too heavily on self-report. The article would be more convincing if its conclusion matched the reach of its sample.
Read that sample again for its structure, and four decisions stand out:
The first paragraph ends with a judgment, not with a summary
Each body paragraph carries one point and one piece of support
The praise comes before the objection, which makes the objection harder to dismiss
The conclusion returns to the thesis rather than introducing a new one.
Getting that first judgment right is usually the hardest part, and it’s easier if you write it last.
Quick Tip
Write your body paragraphs first, then look for the sentence in them that states your actual judgment. In a first draft it is usually in the third or fourth paragraph. Move that sentence to the end of your introduction and delete whatever you wrote there originally.
Scientific Article Analysis Sample
A scientific article analysis holds the paper to the standard its own method sets.
That means checking the sample size, the control condition, the measures, and the statistical test. Then ask whether the stated conclusion matches the size of the reported effect. A result can be statistically significant and still be too small to matter.
Two rules matter most here. Report the numbers as the paper reports them, and keep the authors’ claims separate from your judgment of those claims.
The sample below applies both rules to a trial of a mindfulness program:
Example of a Scientific Article Analysis
Okonjo et al. (2021) test whether a four-week mindfulness program reduces self-reported anxiety in undergraduate students. The design is a randomized controlled trial with 180 participants assigned either to the program or to a waitlist condition, and anxiety is measured at baseline, at four weeks, and at a three-month follow-up.
The randomization and the follow-up are the study’s strengths. Allocation was concealed, attrition was reported at 11% and was balanced across the two conditions, and the three-month measurement addresses the short time horizon that limits much of this literature.
The measurement is weaker. Anxiety is captured by self-report alone, and participants in the treatment condition knew which group they were in, so expectancy effects cannot be separated from the effect of the program. A physiological measure or a blinded clinician rating would have addressed this.
The reported result is a reduction of 3.2 points on a 21-point scale at four weeks (p = .03), which the authors describe as “a substantial reduction in student anxiety.” The result is statistically significant, but the paper never reports whether a 3.2-point change crosses the scale’s clinical threshold. Without that, “substantial” is the authors’ judgment rather than a finding.
The method in that sample gets judged on four specific points:
How students were assigned to groups, and how many dropped out, are both reported rather than assumed
The comparison group is treated as a control, not as a placebo
The single self-report measure is named as a limit on what the design can show
The follow-up window is judged against what comparable studies use.
Editorial Article Analysis Example
An editorial states its position openly, so asking whether it is biased answers nothing.
The real question is whether the argument is honest. Does the writer describe the other side accurately, does the evidence support a claim that strong, and does the emotional appeal illustrate the evidence or stand in for it?
Here is that test applied to a campus editorial on textbook costs:
Example of an Editorial Article Analysis
Ferreira’s editorial “Stop Charging Students for Textbooks They Never Open” argues that universities should replace required textbook purchases with open-access materials. She states her position in the first sentence and never disguises it, which makes the piece easy to hold to its own standard.
Her strongest decision is to concede the publishers’ case before answering it. Ferreira grants that commercial textbooks are professionally edited and regularly updated, then argues that neither advantage justifies a price that keeps some students from buying the book at all. The concession makes the rest of the argument harder to dismiss as one-sided.
The weakest passage is the opening anecdote about a student choosing between a chemistry text and a week of groceries. The story is vivid, and it makes the cost concrete for readers who have never faced that choice. But Ferreira then treats the anecdote as though it settled the question of how common the problem is, and one student is not a rate.
Her evidence improves in the second half, where she cites her own university’s published course-material costs and the adoption rate of open textbooks in its mathematics department. That evidence is local and easy to verify, which suits a campus editorial better than national figures would. The argument would be stronger if the anecdote arrived as support for that evidence rather than in place of it.
Four choices carry the argument in that editorial, and the analysis names each one:
Stating the position in the first sentence instead of building toward it
Granting the strongest point on the other side before answering it
Leading with one student’s story to make an abstract cost concrete
Drawing evidence from the reader’s own campus rather than from national data.
Those choices point to a few principles you can apply to any editorial you are assigned:
- You judge an editorial by its reasoning, not by the position it takes
- A fair description of the other side is a sign of a strong argument, not a weak one
- An emotional appeal works when it supports evidence instead of replacing it
- Local evidence a reader can check is more persuasive than a large number with no source.
Final Thoughts on Article Analysis Examples
One habit does more for an article analysis than any other: write your judgment of the article in a single sentence before you write anything else.
If you can’t finish that sentence, you don’t have an analysis yet, only a summary waiting for a point.
So pick whichever of the five samples matches your assignment and read it once for its shape. Then open your own article and write your one sentence.
Everything after that is the work of showing why the sentence is true.