There are six steps to writing a comprehensive critical essay. You have to examine yours sources, organize your thoughts, construct a thesis, create an outline, write your first draft, and improve your essay. That’s a lot of work for one person, but you need to score top grades for the paper, which means you have to give the assignment the attention it deserves.
So in this guide, you’ll learn how to write a critical essay the right way.
You’ll learn:
- What makes an essay critical
- Look at the structure of the assignment
- Then write the essay step-by-step.
We’ll also give you some handy that you can use to make your critical essay the best assignment that it can be.
What is a Critical Essay?
In academic writing, a critical essay is an assignment that requires a student to read and evaluate a text, claim the text’s ideas, and then use reasonable and objective evidence to support that particular claim. In other words, you spend your time reading and evaluating someone else’s work and then doing your best to demonstrate that your evaluation is correct.
To be clear, a critical essay isn’t the same as a report or review. It doesn’t have an overlying connection with a critical précis either. It’s purely an assignment that requires thorough evaluation of already existing work, such as a movie, a book, and an article.
A critical essay is also different from a persuasive essay and an expository essay. The role of such essays is to persuade readers to do something or consider certain ideas, which is not what a critical essay does. As the term suggest, this type of an essay is critical in its very nature and therefore provides a thorough critic of the existing work of an author.
To be clear, being critical doesn’t mean judging the work of an author. Therefore, your paper should reflect an analysis and interpretation of the work in question.
Therefore, your critical analysis should demonstrate clear arguments with accurate and consistent references to support your assignment. By showing your instructor that you’ve read a source and understood the central theme of the work, you put them in a position of assurance where they’re certain that you’ve evaluated the evidence linked to the primary theme of an author’s work.
What Are The Characteristics of a Critical Essay?
When it comes to writing a critical essay, you have to give a claim along with evidence to support and prove that claim. You have to dive deeper into looking at the central theme of the text and then analyze how the writer has conveyed that particular theme.
Keep in mind that your essay can be critical only if:
- Your paper includes a thesis statement that shows the central theme of the work under analysis
- The paper clearly explains what a writer intended to write about the themes stated in the thesis section
- The work clearly explains the writing techniques the writer used to communicate the central message to a specific audience
How to Write a Critical Essay Step-by-Step
Now that you know what a critical essay is as well as its purpose and characteristics, it’s time to learn exactly how to write a critical essay that will earn you top marks.
The two most important terms to concentrate on as you write a critical essay is:
- Analysis: The art of breaking down a piece of text and studying it in parts
- Evaluation: You closely look at the strength and weaknesses of a piece of work to identify areas that need improvements.
By expressing a claim in a thesis statement and then using evidence to support the central theme in the body paragraphs of the essay, you end up with a more comprehensive critical analysis that your teacher will be interested in reading.
1. Read and Understand the Source
The first step to writing a critical analysis essay is to read and understand a piece of text. Start by reading the text carefully and thoroughly to understand the mind (or intentions) of the author. It helps to take note of the most instrumental concepts in an author’s piece of work.
A few questions you might want to consider include:
- What literary devices has the author used?
- In what way is the author’s words and grammar construction?
- What primary message does the author want to communicate?
Many questions will arise as you continue to read the text, but only make sure you’re writing down only the most significant points.
Reading the work of an author might take a lot of time, but this is the first best step to get you to present their point of view and techniques in a way that your instructor is likely to appreciate.
2. Identify the Central Theme of the Author’s Work
Now that you’ve already read the piece of text thoroughly and carefully, it’s time to determine the primary topic and the issue the author is trying to address with their work. Identify the central claim or theme and look at the evidence that the author uses to support the theme.
Some brainstorming can be useful in this step. At least it helps you to think further about what you already know about the topic in question. Don’t hesitate to go the extra mile to explore related ideas that may arise as you analyze the piece of text.
You might even have to do additional research to find secondary source such as online reviews and scholarly articles by other experts to understand the current author’s work even better. This can help you have sufficient references just in case you need to have them later in your critical analysis.
3. Come Up With a Thesis Statement
Write a one or two sentence thesis statement for your critical analysis essay based on the information you’ve gathered from the piece of text you’ve read. The thesis will give direction to your essay and should therefore have a claim and details to sustain it.
4. Create an Outline and Write the Essay
The most important part in writing a critical analysis essay is to first read and understand an author’s piece of work. If anything, steps 1 to 3 are the most critical in this guide, as they help you come up with ideas that you can use to write them essay.
Now create an outline and use it to organize the ideas that you identified in steps 1 to 3 of this guide. Given that you already have the arguments and evidence that you would like to present, it should be easy to organize those thoughts in paragraphs.