How to write a critical review, it becomes a concern for students today. Critical review means to evaluate and summarise any information or ideas. In contrast, to write a critical review, the priority is that you understand the information or idea. And the second foremost priority is that you know how to summarize and evaluate that particular idea or information. It is a presentation of the strengths and limitations of a given text.
Purpose of a Critical Review
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The primary purpose behind writing a critical review is to evaluate any book, article, or other types of information. It helps to increase the understanding of readers. It also helps the readers to analyze the writer’s thoughts and ideas. Writing a critical review always requires the reader to read any selected information in detail. It also requires the reader to read other relevant information so that he or she can present an effective and fair evaluation of the information.
Steps
There are three important steps that you have to follow when writing a critical review. These steps are as follow:
1. Reading
- Read the whole article to determine an overall thesis, methodology, and structure. It will help you to understand better the important points discussed in the article.
- Examine the structure, the reasons, or pieces of evidence used in the article for supporting the conclusions.
2. Analyze and examine all the elements.
All the elements presented in the article should be analyzed and examined. These elements include structure, reasons, methods, evidence, conclusions, as well as logical connections in the concepts of the article.
3. Writing
- You should also formulate an effective thesis based on your evaluation of the whole article. This thesis will help you to acknowledge strengths as well as limitations of the article text.
- Make sure that this thesis is effective in answering the assignment.
- Select an effective structure that will allow you to support the thesis within a required page limitation.
Important skills to write a Critical Review
Search for information
For writing a critical review, you have to first scan through the literature reasonably to understand the subject effectively. For this purpose, you should have an effective approach for searching the information.
Reviewing effectively
You should learn effective reviewing skills. You should question the information given in the article or book and present an evaluation, or judge it. Besides, this evaluation refers to analyzing the concept and content given the text, separating it into your main components, and understanding how these components connect, interrelate, and impact each other.
Content of a Critical Review
It would be best if you considered that generally, you could write the critical review in 1-4 pages in length. The structure of a critical review should be as follow:
Introduction
- You should first provide the concept and context for an article that includes background information.
- Give the author’s name and article title.
- Identify why this information is significant and why it is worth writing a critical review.
- Present the article’s purpose
- Demonstrate a brief indication of the overall impression that you have regarding the article.
Summary
- Summarize the main points from the article with examples.
- Present a brief explanation of the purpose presented by the author and organize the text.
- The summary should be no longer than 1/3 of the whole paper.
Main Body
- Discusses and evaluates the article contents.
- Analytical summary of arguments, findings, and conclusions of the article
- Analyze the strengths, usefulness, weaknesses and the important features of article
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Conclusion
- Summarize the discussion presented in summary and main body.
- Give important recommendations and further explanation of your judgment to show the article’s fairness and usefulness.
- Comment on any future issues or implications regarding the article.
References
You should give the references that should be included at the end of the paper, and that helps explain the article.
Wrap up
The critical review should provide effective information, summary, analysis, and evaluation. While writing a critical review, you should be creative and very careful to write it. It would help if you considered that your critical analysis should not hurt someone’s feelings. Besides, you should summarize the main points discussed in the text. It would help if you defined the strengths and limitations in an organized and structured way so that it looks professional.
