Deciding between synergistic/chronological (terms which I made up for the English study guide; so if others are reading this and have no idea what he's talking about, don't worry) shouldn't affect your ability to analyse. If you're being too ambiguous, then you need to head back to to basics of technique-purpose-effect and aim to nail that first because that is the main determinate of your marks in language analysis. The chronological approach is likely to make your life easier and I do recommend it for most people. I'm not sure where you get the idea from that the chronological approach involves analysing everything available, but it doesn't. Just like you would for the synergistic method, pick out what you like (based on quality, quantity, complexity as usual), and analyse just those. Except now, you just do them in the order they come. Jumping around isn't as much of an issue as you seem to think it is. As long as you go in order and just chain things together with linking words such as 'afterwards', 'subsequently', 'next' etc, then it'll be fine. You just need some basis for your organisation. As for writing a better synergistic essay, I wouldn't bother at the moment. Get your basics right first with the chronological method, and aim to step it up to the synergistic method if you really want later. It's not necessary at all though to get a good mark. Plenty of people just use the simple chronological method and get very high marks.