Composition II – Spring Semester 1999 – Critical Review – McWard

During class on Wednesday, March 31, 1999 (and possibly April 2, 1999) you will write a critical review of an opinionated essay that you might incorporate into your argumentative synthesis essay and/or your research paper. You must show me the opinionated essay you want to review, and I must approve it. If you don’t have an opinionated essay today, then you must review the essay "'People Don't Know Right From Wrong Anymore'" from your book. For more information regarding an evaluative essay, see pages 148-165 in Writing in the Disciplines.

This essay is an in-class essay. Do not bring a prewritten draft to class with you. That will be considered cheating and will result in a failing essay. You may only bring the essay you are reviewing and a brief outline of what you hope to cover in your critical review.

Your critical review should be around 500 words in length. It should have an introduction, body, and conclusion. For in-class essay, I would prefer that you write on every other line of your notebook paper and write on only one side of the page. Be sure to turn in a copy of the essay you are reviewing.

What are the features of a good critical evaluation?

1. A good critical review will emphasize evaluation over summary. While it is still important to give your reader some understanding of what the original essay is about, it is more important to let the reader know what you think of that essay.
2. A good critical review of an essay evaluates the manner in which the original writer conveys and supports his or her arguments; it does not evaluate the arguments themselves. As you read the essay you will be reviewing, you may not agree with the writer’s politics or interpretation of issues. However, for the purposes of this assignment, your disagreement should not matter when you write your review. You want to overlook you disagreements and instead concentrate upon how well the writer supports his or her arguments. You also want to consider the style of the essay. What techniques does the writer use, for example, to keep the reader interested in the essay?
3. A good critical review supports its evaluative points with well-developed explanations and careful reasoning. Throughout your essay, you will express your opinion about various aspects of the article you are reviewing; however, it is not sufficient simply to state your like or dislike of some point and then move on to the next opinion you have. For each evaluative point you make, you must fully explain why you hold that particular opinion.

Being able to clearly evaluate a piece of work is an important skill to understand not just for your college work but for your professional work as well. In college, a critical evaluation of a subject often times will demonstrate to the professor that you have a clear understanding of the material. Later, in the workplace, you may be asked to evaluate any number of things from products to other employees. As with this assignment, your supervisors will not only want to know your opinions, but they will also be interested to understand why you feel the way you do, so fully developed explanations will be the norm in the workplace as well.

Writing Process: The information below should help you plan and organize your essay for class. Remember, while you may work on your essay all you want at home, you can only bring an outline to class when you write your essay.

While there are many ways to structure an argument, at the basis of most effective argumentative essays are Aristotle’s three principles of rhetoric.

• The first principle is pathos or the appeal to the reader’s emotion. With this appeal the writer tries to engage readers by appealing to their pity, fear, or pride. For example, a writer who argues for a reduction in fossil fuels may begin his essay with a story about what the earth might be like if the greenhouse effect continues to raise the temperature. He would begin with this story to appeal to a reader’s sense of worry or fear, hoping that the reader will continue with the essay to find out what can be done to slow down or halt the greenhouse gas effect.
• The second principle is logos or the appeal the reader’s sense of logic. Appealing to the readers’ emotions at the start of an essay may be a good way of grabbing their attention, but writers cannot rely solely upon emotion to sway readers. Ultimately, readers want to see whether there is any basis for the claims being made. Therefore, a writer must also appeal to a reader’s head. A writer appeals to logic by using rational arguments and by explaining them clearly. The writer also must do a good job of integrating factual statements to substantiate the arguments.
• The third principle is ethos or the use of the writer’s credibility. Readers need to trust writers if they are going to accept their arguments, and this is where ethos comes in. Writers may establish a certain voice or make use of personal experience to lend more credibility to their arguments. For example, if an essay argues for stricter day care regulation, the argument may have more weight with a reader if he or she knew the writer was a parent. If a writer does not have any personal experience to relate, however, this does not mean that he or she must discount this third principle. Instead, these writers simply need to locate and integrate sources that are trustworthy. If a journalist is writing about doctor-assisted suicide and has never taken medical classes nor known anyone with a terminal illness, then he or she could integrate information from sources found in medical journals, for example.

Planning Step 1: Consider the essay that you will be critically reviewing. Write down a list of positives and negatives about the essay. While some items from the list may relate to logos, pathos, and ethos, they don’t all need to. The trick here is to work quickly. You want to establish as long a list as you can, so write down every judgmental thing that comes to your mind. Of course, you won’t be able to incorporate all these things into your essay, but your list will give you a good starting point of what you might cover as you begin drafting.

You must now look at your prewriting list of positives and negatives and decide which of those are important enough to include in your critical review essay. Consider ones that could be developed into paragraphs of ten to fifteen sentences. Integrating a few well-developed evaluative points is better than tossing in several opinionated but underdeveloped points. When you look at your list, think about including opinionated statements that can best be developed with clear explanations and plenty of examples from the text you’re reviewing.

Planning Step 2: Divide your paper up into three sections -- pathos, logos, and ethos. For each section, list (with examples) how the writer uses each appeal. Evaluate how well the writer makes use of each appeal as well.

Planning Step 3: Look at Planning Steps 1 and 2 and complete an outline for the essay you will write in class. Remember, you are not reviewing the writer’s own opinions but the manner in which he or she presents those opinions.

• You may want to think of a paragraph that evaluates the style of the essay. Here you might consider how well the writer makes use of pathos to keep a reader’s attention. You might think of the writer’s tone or voice as well. Is the tone appropriate for the topic of the essay? Would it be appropriate for a writer to use humor or sarcasm in an essay about doctor-assisted suicide, for example?
• A paragraph or two of your essay should also consider the writer’s support for the arguments. These paragraphs might consider the logos and ethos in the essay. Does the writer support the arguments with real-life situations? hypothetical examples? statistics? opinions of experts?
• Another option for the organization of the body of your essay may be to spend the first part of your essay addressing the positives or the article and the second part of your essay addressing the negatives of the essay. This method of organization is pretty straightforward, but you still need to remember to sufficiently develop your critical opinions. Do not write a long paragraph that simply lists a several unrelated and undeveloped positive comments -- that would be a list, not a paragraph.
• One final item to consider when developing the body of your essay will be how much space to devote to summarizing points from the article you’re reviewing. As you write, you want to think of an audience who is already familiar with the essay; therefore, a complete summary like the one you completed for the first assignment is probably unnecessary. Instead summarize only the information that is relevant to the evaluative points you will be arguing. You may choose to write a short summary paragraph after the introduction that briefly highlights the main points of the article. On the other hand, you might include a few sentences of summary with each of the evaluative points that you make; thus, you would be summarizing here and there throughout the body of your critical review.

One of the most important parts of your critical review is the thesis or controlling idea. Your thesis needs to state an opinion and let the reader know your essay’s purpose. Sometimes students write a thesis that is misdirected and as a result they write an essay that is not a critical review of an essay. There are two common mistakes that might occur when writing the thesis for this essay.

• The first mistake would be to write a thesis that does not express an opinion about the essay you’re reviewing but instead states the subject of the essay. Writing a thesis like this makes it sound like you will be writing a summary, not a critical review.
• The second mistake is to write a thesis that states your opinion about the writer’s point of view. While this thesis does state an opinion, its opinion is misdirected because it leads the reader to expect an argumentative essay that reviews an issue or controversial topic rather than an essay that evaluates how a writer presents an argument. Remember, you are writing a critical review of an essay, not a critical review of an argument or issue.

You must be careful then to write a thesis that states an opinion about the quality of the essay you are reviewing. In short, your thesis should let the reader know whether you liked the essay or not, and what you specifically liked or disliked about the essay.

Of course, the thesis statement cannot be the only sentence in your introduction. What other information do you need to include in your introduction? It may be helpful to think of your introduction as a place to provide some background on the article you’re reviewing. For example, you might give background upon the issue or topic of the article. You could provide some information about the author. You might briefly highlight the main points of the article. Whatever you choose to focus upon in your introduction, be sure to incorporate the writer’s name and title of the article somewhere in the opening paragraph.

Finally, you must be sure to write a conclusion that does not merely summarize the major points you argued in your critical review. Instead, it might be helpful to think of the conclusion as a place to explain why it is important to read with critical eyes. Or, if you did not like the article you reviewed, the conclusion might be the place to highlight what the writer could have done to improve the article. Finally, if you are critiquing an essay you might use in your next synthesis assignment and/or research project, you might use the conclusion to explain how helpful the essay will be in your paper.

Final Review Questions: Ask yourself these questions after you have finished your essay. You could also use the questions to help you plan your essay.

Introduction

• Does your essay begin in an interesting manner?
• Do you introduce the essay being reviewed and its writer?
• Does your introduction state the purpose (or central argument) of the essay you are reviewing?
• Does the introduction conclude with your thesis?

Summary - Remember, this should be brief. If you don’t have a separate paragraph devoted to a summary of the essay, you might include some summary information in the introduction, or as you make your evaluative points in the body of your essay.

• Do you briefly state the main points of the article you are reviewing?
• What can you add or remove from this section?

Analysis of the essay you are reviewing

• Does your analysis section express your opinion?
• Does your essay explain:

1. How the writer informs readers of the issue?
2. How the writer keeps readers interested?
3. How the writer supports his claims and arguments?

• Does this section provide specific examples by discussing the writer’s terminology, fair use of information, and logic?
• Does this section critique the effectiveness of 1, 2, and 3 from above? Does the essay you are reviewing succeed in what it attempts to do?
• To what extent do you agree with the article you reviewed? Do you find the article to be satisfying overall? What could or should the writer have done differently?
• How well do you explain how or why you feel the way you do?

Conclusion

• Is the conclusion more than a summary?
• Some options for conclusions:

1. Does the conclusion emphasize the significance of the your critique? (Perhaps it discusses why an evaluative reader is better than a passive reader.)
2. Or, does the conclusion concentrate upon the issue of the article? (Perhaps it discusses why this issue is important in our world today.)
3. Does the conclusion explain how you might use the essay in your synthesis assignment or research project?