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When you study at an academic institution, you’re often tasked with analyzing theories, publications, methods, approaches, and concepts. This exercise should hone your critical analysis skills vital for research evaluation and your personal standpoint development. The critical analysis allows you to evaluate the authors’ arguments, to determine whether they are valid or flawed, to see whether the researchers use substantial evidence to prove their opinions, etc.
Writing such works is always an exciting discovery of research quality and your attitudes to specific scholarly approaches. Still, completion of critical analysis essays in compliance with the highest academic standards requires the knowledge of numerous literary conventions and rules of writing this essay type. To learn that skill and hone your critical thinking and writing mastery, read on to learn the tips from our professionals.
As its name suggests, a critical essay is an academic assignment type dedicated to the critical analysis of some work, such as a peer-reviewed article, a theory, or a book. Therefore, the key purpose of such a paper’s composition is to show how well you understood the author’s argument and what your reaction to that argument is. Critical essays typically include a summary and a commentary, with the first being your summarization of the author’s central message and the second being your analytical commentary on it.
Critical essay’s main difference from other academic assignments is the focus on another person’s work or ideas. When writing narrative or expository essays, you can choose any subject and present personal views and thoughts on it. You’re not free to choose the subject in critical writing as your focus lies within what another author said. Instead, you identify the main ideas in the piece assigned for critique and structure your arguments based on what that work says.
Structuring your critical analysis essay won’t be hard if you know the general rules of academic work structuring. As with other papers, you need to have the text’s introduction, body, and conclusion parts.
However, a specific trait of critical analysis essays is to divide its body into two distinct parts: summary and commentary. In this way, you have an introduction naming the critiqued work, giving the general context and thesis statement, and providing an argument’s preview. Then a summary of the work follows. After this part, you can present your critique, making conclusions from the overall content in the final section.
Altogether, a critical essay’s structure will look as follows:
Newbies in critical analysis writing may find it hard to develop a workable approach to the assigned material. After reading the article or book several times, you may still doubt the author’s central message and the best way to approach it critically.
Here are some tips for developing the proper critical essay format.
You may opt for studying the theoretical questions the author raises. Is their conceptualization correct? Did the author find a valid explanation for some phenomenon, or is there a better theory to understand it?
You can focus on the way the author handles key definitions in their writing. Are all of them clear? Are the definitions consistent with the commonly used definitions in academia? Are definitions complete and comprehensive, or can you add anything?
The most fruitful approach is to focus on the author’s argumentation. What type of evidence do they use? Do they give credit to competing/contrasting viewpoints? Do they cite facts, statistics, or other researchers’ works? Is their evidence convincing? Comprehensive? Exhaustive?
You can also approach the critique from the viewpoint of implications, relevance, and significance of the researcher’s work. Did they offer valuable contributions to their academic area? How did they advance the body of knowledge on a specific subject? What are the future research directions to explore?
Depending on your approach, the format of an essay will take shape. Be clear about the subject you’re approaching, as mixing several approaches may turn your essay into a mess. An alternative variant is to approach these points paragraph by paragraph, dedicating one part to definitions, one to theories, one to evidence, and so forth.
Now let’s look into such work’s structure in more detail. Here is a sample outline you can adapt to any subject you’re assigned.
Introduction:
Summary:
Argument/commentary (this is the main body of your paper, so make sure to single out several sub-arguments and dedicate separate paragraphs to them):
Conclusion:
Critical analysis is a labor-intensive, time-consuming exercise that not all students can afford to complete. You need to set all other pending assignments aside and research broadly to offer informed, substantiated critique of the subject.
Keep in mind that you will hardly bring any valuable insights to the topic by simply referencing yourself. So, your task is to conduct additional research, compare and contrast several approaches to the issue, and choose your standing.
Such academic work may be too much for a hectic, busy student, and we have good news. We are ready to help with critical analysis essays, with dozens of competent writers available 24/7 for assistance. We can improve your draft, write a work from scratch, or collect the evidence you need to produce valuable arguments.
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