When I write essays, it always seems like i'm just writing down facts and not really doing anything with them. I think I could score better if I know how to analyze. None of my teachers have ever properly taught us how to write essays so at the moment I'm trial and error.

For example, the essay I just wrote a few hours ago for english doesn't have a lot of analyzing. All we had to do was compare and contrast these two stories using some element from the story (The Outcasts of Poker Flat by Harte and To Build a Fire by Jack London). I chose to write about how the authors showed people and their ways of survival and their natural instinct to survive. What I ended up doing was just picking details from the story and saying that it's an example of how they survive...and well that's pretty much it.

I'm horrible at analyzing. I've been reading so many essay-tutorial type things that I could write an essay on that, but none of them ever seem to tell you how to handle your data. It's always just 'and in this paragraph you write...' It doesn't tell how you should look at your data and how to interpret it and how to pull something out of it.

If anybody has a few pointers that'd be really helpful! I want to make my essays more between-the-lines sort of thing not a summary of the story (or well, in history's case, facts.)

I guess what I really need help with is interpreting and analyzing the data. I don't know how to do it well. Help anyone!