Critical Essay: Do’s and Don’ts
Saturday, July 24th, 2010
Tips on how to write critical essays
Did your teacher ask you to write a critical essay? Don’t panic! Most students tend to make the same mistakes oven and over again with this essay type. But here we’ll provide you some great tips on how to write good critical essays (and how not to write them!). Pay attention and keep reading.
Do’s
- Show your ideas in an objective way: When writing a critical essay, you should always evaluate ideas based on solid arguments, and prove your point, no matter if you are trying to agree or to reject the concepts. The same applies to argumentative essays.
- Give readers good reasons on why you are right and the other positions are wrong: That means, you can use resources such as reductio ad absurdum in order to reject an argument opposite to your own. There are many persuasive essay writing techniques you can apply in this kind of essay.
- Provide the opposite argument as well: When you are criticizing an author in your essay, you should always begin your work with a summary of the author’s point of view, considering the main ideas that they express and some facts that influenced them.
- Research: Try to read as much as you can before you start to write the essay. You may find contradictory ideas in different works of the same author, that can change your mind on the way to organize your critics.
- Complete the essay with quotes: Reference the essay in order to show that many qualified people think the same as you. Refer to them as the “experts”, putting yourself in a modest position by this rhetorical resource.
- Make a sketch: As in any assignment writing, a proper organization of your ideas is the key to a successful paper.
Don’ts
- It is not necessary to reject the author or the book you are criticizing: Critical essays can be perfectly built in total agreement with the reading. In such case, what you must demonstrate is why precisely the author or book are right.
- Be careful with anachronisms: There always has to be an evaluation of the author’s work judged by its time as well as present time. You can’t criticize a book of the 1600’ judging it by today’s values, at least not without considering its worth at the time it was written.
- Don’t forget that critical essays are supposed to be informative: They should emphasize the literary work being studied instead of the feelings and opinions of the student writing the work.
- Don’t let yourself carried away by your feelings: Imagine you are trying to persuade the reader to change his or her mind into your opinion. You can’t force them to accept the arguments. On the contrary, you need to use a professional and objective tone. So even if you want the reader to actually hate a certain author or book, you should always focus on facts rather than the unpleasant feeling you experimented while reading it.
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Tags: critical essay, essay tips, Essay Writing
