examples of critical essays: critical reading and critical writing 34 reading critically means asking questions about what you are reading questions about the meaning of the text and how that meaning is presented or about the author and his or her purpose for writing, for example. A critical reader does not simply accept what the author says but analyzes why the text is convincing or not convincing. Martin 39 s, 2008 34 when we write a critical essay on a text, we read the text over and over and look at it every which way in the hope of seeing something aslant that we could not see directly. Every further reading has to deal with our previous readings: we write, then, from impressions which are already a palimpset. We assume that the latest reading is best, richest, issuing from a greater experience of the text. Most books are content to be read once, they do not claim to be worth reading twice.

34 denis donoghue, 34 the good soldier, 34 in england, their england: commentaries on english language and literature. University of california press, 1988 continue reading below writing critically about literature: providing evidence 34 when you write about a literary work you will often attempt to convince others that what you see and say about it makes sense. In doing so, you will be arguing for the validity of your way of seeing, not necessarily to the exclusion of all other ways, but to demonstrate that your understanding of the work is reasonable and valuable. Since your readers will respond as much to how you support your arguments as to your ideas themselves, you will need to concentrate on providing evidence for your ideas. Most often this evidence will come in the form of textual support details of action, dialogue.

From the comments of experienced readers whose observations and interpretations may influence and support your own thinking. Mcgraw hill, 2002 34 a critic 39 s work should be used only when it furthers your own understanding. When the critic supplies you with an idea, a fact not of common knowledge , a method of presentation, or an opinion that is not your own but whose truth you both recognize and need for your own essay. It is any scholar 39 s duty to acknowledge the intellectual debt by quoting the critic and/or noting the source of the observation. By quoting a critic, you are saying indirectly, 39 see, i 39 m not alone in this belief.

X believes it too! 39 34 david bergman and daniel mark epstein, the heath guide to literature. Heath, 1984 evolution of the critical essay in english 34 samuel johnson was content to express personal opinions, and indulge strong prejudices, and among the early critical essayists of the 19th century the same habit of thought was dominant. The critical essay was often an extended review of a book, in which the critic did not disguise his own personal rancour, and made little effort to interpret his author. In many instances a book was used merely as an excuse for the publication of the critic 39 s own opinions. Matthew arnold was the first man to lay down the principle that no criticism of an author ought to be attempted without sympathy in the critic that, in fact, criticism was less a polemic than an interpretation. Harper, 1909 john updike on writing criticism 34 writing criticism is to writing fiction and poetry as hugging the shore is to sailing in the open sea. 1983 the lighter side of critical essays 34 english: this involves writing papers about long books you have read little snippets of just before class.

Here is a tip on how to get good grades on your english papers: never say anything about a book that anybody with any common sense would say. Anybody with any common sense would say that moby dick is a big white whale, since the characters in the book refer to it as a big white whale roughly eleven thousand times. Your professor, who is sick to death of reading papers and never liked moby dick anyway, will think you are enormously creative. If you can regularly come up with lunatic interpretations of simple stories, you should major in english. Doubleday, 1985 transcript hello, my name is robin banerjee and i'm a senior lecturer in the department of psychology at the university of sussex. I teach many first year, second year and third year students so if you come into the psychology department i'm sure i'll see lots of you while you're here. Now i'm sure that when you've got essays to write you'll find lots of different instructions to follow for the different assignments that you've got, and of course you'll have to pay attention to them.

But what i'm going to give you today are some helpful guidelines which i hope will be useful to you as you set about the task of writing an essay. Well, my first guideline for writing an essay is to make sure that you have a clear line of argument. If the essay title is in the form of a question this might seem obvious answer the question. Although it seems like an obvious point, i've read many essays where student simply don't answer the question.

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They'll talk about lots of things that relate to the question but they don't actually give you an answer to the question. And even if the essay title isn't in the form of a question, make sure that you have something clear that you want to say. All right, so my second major guideline for writing an essay is to make it clear where you are going. The reader needs to know what you're saying and needs to be aware of the path that you are taking in the essay. So don't wait until the very end of the essay to reveal the main point that you're trying to communicate. As i've said before the most important thing in an essay is to come up with a clear line of argument and it's important to tell the reader about that right at the beginning.

So set out your plan for the essay at the outset and then use the rest of the essay to actually build up your argument. Don't run through a whole range of different examples and pieces of evidence and theories and then at the end say the point that you want to make about it. Once you've done all your reading, once you've done all your research you need to step back from it and decide what you're going to say.

Come up with your main line of argument, but plan your essay before you launch into the actual writing of the essay. So you need a logical sequence of key points that actually build up your argument. It's really important when you've arrived at your key points, it's really important to express them in complete sentences. One of the mistakes that i often see students doing, and one of the things that makes plans a bit problematic for a lot of students, is that when they're coming up with their outline for their essay they just have a list of subject headings: first i'm going to be talking about this, then i'm going to be talking about that, and then last of all i'm going to talk about that. And actually that's not a very good plan, because when you go down to write something you don't know what you're going to say.

You know what you're going to talk about, but you don't know what you're going to say about it. So the most important thing about the plan is to decide what your main points are and to express them in complete sentences not just what are you going to talk about but what are you going to say about it? once you've got that sequence of key points expressed in complete sentences you should have a pretty good summary of your essay. Once you've decided on your sequence of key points, then you can start to flesh out your plan by listing the evidence that you're going to include for each key point. If you look at your plan and you find that you've got nine, ten or even more key points then think again about whether they really need to stand separate from each other as different points.

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In an essay, and even in longer essays like 4,0 word essays, you'll usually only need to have a handful of key points. Remember the main objective is to support the main line of argument that you want to present to the reader. It may be the case that there will be material that you've read that really isn't relevant to the point that you want to make in this essay so decide what the best pieces of evidence are to support the points that you actually want to make in this essay.

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My next guideline for writing an essay is to make sure that you give it to someone else to read. It's really important to get a second opinion on your essay and sometimes when you've been working on an essay for a long time it can be really hard to adopt a fresh objective stance and look at your essay. So find someone, maybe a friend that you can bribe to read your essay, maybe a family member, long suffering flat mates whoever you can. If you've done your job well if you started out with a good plan, with the key points expressed in complete sentences, and you based your essay on that plan then when you give that essay to someone else to read and you ask them, lsquo can you pull out the main points from this essay?', their extracted main points should look very similar to the main points that you had in your plan. So that would be a good sign that you've accomplished what you wanted to accomplish in the essay. You'll probably see in most of the assessment criteria for essays in different subjects across the university that originality is one of the markers of first class essays.

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Can you show originality and flair in the way that you write your essay? well, a lot of students often ask, lsquo what do i do to show originality in an essay? do i just say what my opinion is about the subject matter?' well, partly but it's not just a matter of expressing your personal opinion without justification or rationale. Originality in an academic essay is all about the way that you interrogate the material in front of you and the way that you put the material together. So, regarding the first of those points, if you are dealing with evidence, examples, theories, other people's writing question it, adopt a critical standpoint, evaluate it, don't just accept it at face value. Regarding the second point about how you put ideas together and how you put your points and evidence together in your essay that's a really important opportunity to show your originality. It's not so much about waiting until you get to the end of the essay and then coming up with lsquo well i think. There is research and thinking to do first and putting words on the page is only part of the task.