How to Write a Critical Essay?
Welcome to this podcast. In this podcast, we will talk about how to write a critical essay in academic writing. This is for college students as an introduction to write a critical essay in related subject on universities or colleges. Before we go further to discuss about critical essay, what is critical essay actually? It is probably a question which comes across your mind when you heard it for the first time. Critical essay is an analytical examination of a single or multiple work. It can be an artwork, such as: a play, novel, song, or a movie. Critical doesn’t mean you criticize an artwork based on your single opinion which comes from your feeling or intuition that you feel it is right. In critical essay, you analyze an artwork based on facts and some studied materials through research to support your point of view. It’s not necessarily to present a biased and prejudices perspective in your essay.
To develop your first critical essay, there are several steps which you have to do in order to make your essay systematic. These are the following steps to develop a critical essay:
1. Define Your Topic
Before you start to write, the first time you have to do is define your topic. As I told you before that critical essay could be discuss an artwork, you can relate your topic with the social issue happened, such as: gender and feminism, globalization, racism, poverty, conflict, etc. You don’t have to present a wide topic that will be discussed in your essay. You can specify your topic based on your preference that you mastered, for example: You want to analyze a movie let say “GIE”, you can specify it to analyze the dialogue of the movie to relate it with your big topic like conflict.
2. Find References
When you already have a topic that you will be discussed in your essay, you have to find the references to support your idea while analyzing the topic. As I told you before, in essay you don’t have to present a single perspective. You can find reference in a book, online journal, or an eBook. You can choose a specific theory and then generalize it to support your argument. When you feel lazy to read a thick book you can do googling to simplify your work, but don’t forget to put citation for a theory or put a certain argument in a book or journal. Remember this is an academic writing, you have to put acknowledgement in your essay to avoid plagiarism issue.
3. Start To Write
In this step, you can start to write your essay by doing free writing as your draft or you can even try to draw your idea in a mind map to make your essay systematically. Because it is a free writing you can write everything which comes into your mind freely, just put away any kind of writing rules when you do this. After you do free writing you can show it to your friend for getting feedback to make your essay better.
4. Editing
After getting feedback from your friend, you can reflect to yourself what the minus point of my essay is. When you feel it’s not good yet, you can totally edit your essay in this step. Perhaps, you can put any idea which is missing before or you can put acknowledgement of any citation that you used in your essay.
5. Finishing
Last but not least, in this step you have to check for any error in your essay. Perhaps, it could be a grammatical error or wrong typed words. It can be also you point out of some ideas that you haven’t elaborated it properly. Make yourself as a conscientious person who will check you work for every single mistake that could be happen.
Finally, you drew your experience of writing a critical essay. Every single step of writing critical essay is very important in order of gaining quality of your essay. The most important in your essay is you don’t make any judgment or derogatory remark of your point of view. However, it is a process and perhaps you were doubt at the beginning that you will make any mistakes while writing a critical essay. It’s okay, no one best at the beginning. Keep practice to make your writing best.
6 komentar:
I hope this article can help us in writing critical essay, kis...in your opinion, which step is the most difficult in writing critical essay? Why?
am sorry pane,
for lately reply the post,,
heheheh
i just now realize :)
heheheheh
i think the most difficult part of writting an essay is defining the idea of what should i write. what i really find as the hardest point is to construct my idea in systematically order.
however, reading a lot is really help to find idea and drafting is really helpful to help you to construct your idea systematically. according to me, those two things was really help me so far. :)
I agree with you, kis... sometimes it is not easy to define the idea... but beside defining the idea, have you ever felt difficult in finding the right first word that you want to write for your essay (although you already define the idea)? I often feel this... hehe...
same like u pane,,,
i always feel difficult to write the first sentence in my essay in order to get reader's attention because i feel the first sentence is such a magic sentence because it effects also to the content.
do you have any idea to make our first word or sentence effective?
It is a good posting. Hmmm by the way.. the thing that we also have to concern is about the critical thinking of us (for example me :P) Instead of reading the technique of writing the critical essay, i think, i really need too to sharp my critical thinking.
for sharpen your critical thinking we also need to read a lot een as the writer wannabe :)
read for more issues happen like news or other social issues is really helpful for this problem. anyhow, fantasize your idea can help you to train your creative thinking and also reading :)
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