Being Critical

The basis of any essay is the reading you have done.  There is no shortcut; the more knowledge you have, the better.  A critical approach starts with active rather than passive reading.  A statement in a book or article is not necessarily a "fact", just the argument of that writer.  Make your reading an active process: question everything, compare and contrast with other authors/views, link to your own experience.  Try to capture this process in your notetaking, whatever your style, identifying your thoughts and questions as you go along;  these will inform your essay.

Critical questions

There are numerous suggestions for critical questions you can use to analyse the literature, but they depend on the type of information you are reading. This Critical reading grid is a generic set of questions to encourage critical engagement with your reading.  The Critical notetaking form accompanies it to record your answers.

For alternatives try Stella Cottrell who gives 3 templates for: argument, books and articles (p. 155-157).  The CASP Critical Appraisal checklists is used to evaluate specific types of research.

Critical Reading Tutorials 

These tutorials provide a worked example of critical analysis of a journal article and will help you understand how to use the Critical reading grid to evaluate a piece of research.

	Critical Reading Foundations
	Critical Reading Next Steps

How do you get all of your critical reading and thinking onto paper in a coherent way?  Hopefully the process of actively engaging with the literature has clarified "what you want to say", which will help you to write a focused essay.  Use this focus to plan your key points and identify the evidence you will bring in to support your argument. Structure and paragraphing are your friends, use them to build a logical progression or case.  The Writing at University page has more information on planning, structure and argument.

Try to keep descriptive writing to a minimum, don't just say WHAT an author said or WHAT happened, this is descriptive. Discuss WHY it is significant, HOW it compares to other views and HOW it applies to your point.  

Develop your voice by using different verbs to indicate your assessment of the literature.  For example, shows is seen as positive as it reports an observation or finding as a proven fact. The use of concludes or states is seen as neutral. However, claims or presumes disassociates the writer from the position of the author cited. The writer's choice of verb shows their distance from the author's perspective and that the writer is questioning the author's approach.  This allows the writer to establish a critical perspective and follow with an evaluation of the author's point that may well include counter argument.

Useful verbs for reporting other writers' findings

There are many more examples of this type at Academic Phrasebank to help you develop your writing.

Take a look at this example of critical writing CriticalWritingExamples which illustrates some of these techniques such as paragraphing, developing an argument and the authors voice.