Critical Essay The Complete Guide. Essay Topics, Examples and Outlines

Critical Essay: The Complete Guide. Essay Topics, Examples and Outlines Whether you specialize in literature or just writing an essay for a class, knowing how to write a critical essay will give you an advantage throughout your studies at a university and in your professional career. Writing critical essays allows you to develop critical thinking skills, including attentive reading, technical analysis, academic writing skills, searching for reference books and editing. Mastering these skills will help you conduct a scientific conversation and allow you to communicate and think more productively. What is a Critical Essay? A critical essay is an analysis of any piece of text. It can be a book, a movie, an article or even a painting. The main point of this type of an essay is to interpret text or position it in a wider context. For instance, if you write a critical analysis of a book, you may analyze the tone of its text and find out how it influences the overall meaning of the book. If you analyze a movie, you might concentrate on a symbol that you see over and over again. Nevertheless, you have to include an argumentative thesis about the text and have a lot of evidence sources, obviously textual, to support your statements. How to write a Critical Essay? Step by Step Guide Find out the topic as early as possible to plan your research. Find the information you need in a wide variety of sources, including journal articles, books, encyclopedias, news. Gather more information than you plan to actually refer to when writing a paper, but do not collect too much, it can distract you from the main thing, and you will eventually include it in your essay simply because you found it. Do not use Wikipedia and do not copy other peoples comments; no matter from which website you take them, plagiarism will be discovered. Look through your sources to separate interesting information from irrelevant material. Interesting research can be found in books, literary guides, in published critical articles on your particular topic. And vice versa, do not investigate things that do not relate to your topic, what I mean is, do not engage in the study of witches, if the topic of your paper is monarchy. Carefully reread the relevant materials and evaluate them critically. Highlight, underline or otherwise mark the necessary information in your personal articles and books. Use colored stickers to draw your attention to important details in library books. Make a brief summary of each source after reading it. Pay attention to important details and highlight the main point of view for further use. Formulate the theses by reviewing your notes and research. You can write a more general thesis or ask an important question that your paper will answer. Write a preliminary introduction, knowing that you can edit or even rewrite it later. Develop an approximate plan based on your notes and studies. Identify two or three main sections of the body of your essay. These sections should consist of your most important arguments. Use your notes and research to fill these sections with details. You can copy and paste the most important details or arguments into your plan. Identify the relationships between sections of your essay and briefly describe them on the margins of your plan. Use this connection to write an approximate conclusion. Set your paper aside for a few days before rereading the draft. Leave enough time to make a thorough review of all material that will clarify any illogical reasonings or arguments. Complete your essay by carefully checking the final version of the printed version. Use your imagination and make the introduction interesting for readers. Write a clear thesis statement and use up-to-date sources, with a lot of useful information.