Evaluation essays set out to create criteria and then judge or evaluate the subject based on these criteria. Writing an evaluation essay requires the writer to fully analyze both sides and determine an arguable judgment. Writers must fully explore the subject and then provide views and evidence to support that judgment. For example, you might make a list of movies, films, books or policies to evaluate.

Analytical Phd Thesis

Decide on a topic and then further your brainstorming with an expanded list of details about the topic. The thesis details the overall purpose of the evaluation essay and sets up the angle for your judgment. In evaluation essays, the thesis should argue the value or lack of value of your particular topic based on the criteria you will later establish. Provide background information about your topic or subject before you begin evaluating.

For example, when evaluating a book, provide a brief summary of the plot and its characters to set up the context of the evaluation for the reader. In order to evaluate a topic or attempt to pass judgment, writers need to detail criteria in which the topic will be evaluated. For example, if you are evaluating a movie, the criteria might be cinematography, plot, action, realistic characters or visual effects. When drafting evaluation essays, the body of your essay should address the effectiveness or ineffective qualities of each set of criteria. Provide examples to support your judgment of each criteria and argue in accordance with your thesis.

evaluative

probably one of the first essays you ever had to write after you wrote about what you did on your summer vacation was a book review of some kind.

You probably gave a brief run down of the book's major characters, a summary of the plot if there was one or told what the book was about, and then said how wonderful the book was being careful not to reveal too much about the ending. The evaluative essay remains a valuable tool in your arsenal of composition patterns. Hopefully, your ability to say what you like about the object at hand 151 whether it's a book or a painting or a jazz album or a rock concert or a dinner at a fancy restaurant or the design of a new car 151 has become more subtle and convincing over the years since your first book review. Writing about literature demands special skills, and we recommend an online document called suggestions about writing papers for introduction to literature.

In writing about poetry or a short story or play or novel, it is very important to keep in touch with the language of the art, showing your reader over and over again where exactly in the poem or story you get your ideas, and to do that you have to use quotations 151 sometimes a lot of quotations. Pay special attention to the hints in that document about using quotations. one device you might want to use in writing your evaluative essay is the device of comparison and contrast. You can beef up your essay and add to your readers' understanding at the same time by comparing, for instance, this rock album to an earlier album by the same group, showing how the group has matured or deteriorated or by comparing this album to another group's album, which does the same thing, but better. Whether you are writing about literature or a rock concert, though, there are several points about the evaluative essay you want to keep in mind. How can an essay about literature or the other arts ever be wrong ? isn't it all opinion, all subjective analysis, anyway? how can an instructor say that my feelings about a poem or a painting are wrong? discerning right from wrong in the garden of literature is our attempt to deal with these questions.

Your readers are apt to become defensive: we'll be the judge of that, they'll say. Your job as the writer of this essay is to show how the work under consideration is beautiful or exciting. If you do that well, your readers will be convinced of the work's beauty without your saying that it's beautiful. An occasional, off handed beautiful or exciting is all right just don't expect your readers to be convinced unless you make them feel that beauty or excitement. They're going to wonder why they aren't reading toni morrison's novel instead of your essay after all, the nobel prize winner probably did a better job telling her story than you could ever do. Then, in reading your essay, readers will say, wow! that's great! i better go read that novel.

There will be occasions when you are forced to use the specialized vocabulary that people who really like this kind of art are used to using. Reading the cd booklets of jazz albums is sometimes like reading a foreign language if you're not hip. You can't be expected to review a rock concert with the same language that you'd use to review the performance of a string quartet. The environment and special effects of a rock performance are a big part of your enjoyment of it on the other hand, you would remark on the environment of a string quartet performance only if it were particularly inappropriate for careful listening.

Critics who write about art sometimes have their own vocabulary for doing so, and you need to be at least somewhat familiar with that vocabulary before writing seriously about art.

sample papers

click here to see a full length student essay on samuel taylor coleridge's poem, kubla khan. Click here to see a full length student essay on william carlos williams's poem, the red wheelbarrow.

other examples

we also have online a fine essay on charlotte perkins gilman's short story the yellow wallpaper. The essay is called 'the yellow wall paper': a twist on conventional symbols. it was written by liselle sant, a student in smith college's connections program 1995 and is used in conjunction with the connections web site with ms. For other examples of evaluative essays, we provide a hyperlink here to capital community college's archive of sample students' essays.

Columbia University Department of Economics Discussion Paper Series

Click on english in the left hand frame and enjoy! there are also some good book reviews listed under history. The beginning actually, three full paragraphs of another evaluative essay on a painting by bruegel is available in the guide, in the section called writing with a sense of purpose. In english, is professor emeritus of rhetoric and english at armstrong atlantic state university and the author of two grammar and composition textbooks for college freshmen, writing exercises macmillan and passages: a writer 39 s guide st. definition: a composition that offers value judgments about a subject according to a set of criteria. examples of evaluation essays 34 without good reasons for liking or disliking certain things, students can never get beyond being passive receivers of marketing, fickle consumers without a basis for their opinions.

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