A workshop on “Analytical Writing” was arranged by National Institute of Management Lahore on Thursday, 29^th August, 2024, Dr. Saima Jabeen, enlightened the audience with valuable insights into analytical writing and its structuring.

The guest speaker, in the very beginning, explained that in order to write analytically, it is essential to understand and learn effective writing. Hence, she divided the session irf two parts. The first session was about effective writing and the second session was on analytical writing. Discussing effective writing, the guest speaker explained that effective writing should be purposeful to solve problems and convey information, economical in presenting ideas clearly but concisely and audience oriented so as to concentrate on looking at a problem from the perspective of the audience instead of seeing it from our own angle. Effective writing leads to communicative competence. The features of an effective piece of writing, as enunciated by the guest speaker, are readability with shorter but clear sentences, clarity of ideas and simple structure of sentences.

In the second session of the workshop, the guest speaker, while discussing analytical writing, explained that analysis in itself leads to critical thinking and problem solving. In critical thinking, the thinker does not take anything for granted but does purposeful, goal-directed thinking, makes judgments based on evidence/fact rather than guesswork/opinion, does reflective and reasonable thinking that focuses on what to believe and what to do. An analytical piece of writing provides information based on facts and includes encoding, comparison, opposing arguments/rebuttals, corroborating sources and reasonable assumptions, but does not have ambiguity, bias, doubt, filtering, loaded/hyperbole language and simplistic generalizations. The guest speaker mentioned some barriers to analytical thinking and writing like overestimating one’s own reasoning ability, lack of methods, strategies and practice, reluctance to critique experts, affective reasons (acknowledging that there is more than one way of looking at an issue), mistaking information for understanding, insufficient focus or attention to details and deflective language.

The guest speaker explained that summary writing and policy briefs are the kind of effective analytical writings that civil servants are doing on daily basis and they should try to make these writings as effective and as meaningful as possible.