Introduction:

Students often get confused while writing a critique. It is because they usually confuse a critique paper with literature. It is important to know that critique demands a completely different approach than a literature review. In your student life, you will be often asked to write a critique on something. But, you can only write it confidently if you know the best technique.

Well, we have written this article to solve this problem for you. Below we have provided the best approaches you can use while writing a critique.

What Is a Critique Paper?

A critique paper is a type of academic writing that demands careful reading and summarising the analysis of the study. Simply put, it is a paper that focuses on critically analysing a research paper or an article. When you write a critique paper, you try to understand the concepts used in the study and evaluate them. You can give negative and positive views, depending on the quality of the work. You have also an option to get PhD dissertation help service if you can’t do it yourself.

Best ways to write a critique:

The following ways will guide you in writing a critique in the best way possible:

Table of Contents

1. Doing critical reading:

Your critical analysis can highly improve through critical reading of relevant literature work. Try to do a careful reading of good literature work and make notes. Write down important points while reading, and then use these points in your critical analysis. This approach can greatly help you in writing a critique. Following are the important points to do critical thinking:

Analyse why the author has written this piece. You must try your best to get involved in the author’s world.
While reading, point out the literary tools and devices used by the author to prove their arguments. For this, you also should do some research on literary theories.
Point out what you like or dislike about the literature. Find out gaps and inconsistencies in writing.

2. Understand the thesis of the author:

The next approach you can use in writing a critique is to focus on the main argument. Usually, you can find this in the first paragraph of the work. You can write your critique by observing whether the thesis statement of the work is explicit or not. It is also important to observe if the author has successfully proved his thesis statement. In this way, you can write a healthy critique using the principal argument of the work. For instance, if you are writing a painting critique, try to find out what the author is attempting to project.

3. Writing Summary:

Another way to write a critique is to summarise the text. Before writing a critique on something, summarise its whole text in the simplest possible way. With the help of your summary, you can get the whole concept of the work easily. This can help you to write a critique in a better way. For your summary, you will focus on the important points you found interesting about the topic. Make sure that you have summarised all the main ideas of the author. Explain how the author has constructed these ideas in the summary of your critique.

Ask the following questions:

What is the importance of this topic?
What are other prominent works on this topic?
What are the arguments of the author? How does he prove them? Did he collect data on basing her arguments?

4. Critical analysis of the text:

Writing a critique demands good critical analysis skills. Using this skill is a good approach to writing a healthy critique paper. To do a critical analysis of the text, ask yourself the following questions:

How was your emotional response to the author’s work?
What ideas, images or techniques triggered emotions in you?
Study the background of the author critically to analyse his work. Find out the experiences and events in his past that made him write such ideas. Also, try to analyse his other works to get a general understanding of the author.
Has the author used his concepts in his work correctly?

5. Try to do both explicit and implicit evaluation:

You cannot do a good critique without learning to do the evaluation. Evaluating the text is the most vital part of your critique. There are two types of evaluation techniques which are implicit and explicit evaluation. In detailed evaluation, you directly evaluate the text. However, implicit evaluation is usually less direct. Using both ways to critique an article will include the benefits of both evaluation styles. This is the most difficult task that students face while writing a critique. For this, try to practice your evaluation skills as much as you can without any bias. Try to write both negative and positive points.

6. Make a draft of your paper:

Before writing a critique, it is important to first make a rough draft and get a review done by the instructor. To make a draft, first, you need to write an overview. Then make a thesis statement in one sentence about the paper you are critiquing. The next step is to write an introduction. Your introduction must describe the main idea of your paper. Explain all the important points in it. After this, write the main body of the paper. It is important to cover all positive and negative points you have found while critically analysing the text. The last step is to write a conclusion and reference list. Get the draft reviewed so that you can see, based on your instructors’ feedback, that you are on the right track.

Conclusion:

Using the abovementioned approach, you can write the best critique to help you stand out in your class. We have given details of the best points you could use to write a critique. With the help of these approaches, you can now critique anything with confidence. Thus, there is no need to stress and waste time. Start writing your critique to flourish in your academic career.