Critical Essay Summary Text

Jonathan Friesen - Writing Coach

Writing a summary and critique of an article can seem like a daunting task because a good review requires both organized and objective critical thinking as well as the contribution of your personal opinion. The process can be divided into simple steps, including brainstorming to form a list of questions, answering these questions one by one and then finalizing your review in a structured and readable form. Before reading any of the text body, write your subjective opinion on the subject and basic points you would write about if you were the author of the article. These first impressions of the title will help you to form your critique and personal opinion at the conclusion of the review. Create a list of analytical questions about the subject and title that will help you form an objective analysis of the writer's technique. For example, are all the key words in the title addressed? is the author generally objective or very biased? are the claims substantiated by valid arguments that can be confirmed? formulate an outline of your review based on the answers to your analytical questions.

Show how you justify your objective points based on specific ideas and quotes from the article. Write a conclusion summarizing key points of your analysis, as well as some of your personal insights into the subject and how it was handled. It is helpful if you are an expert on the subject and can write with a sense of authority. Review your analysis one last time to look for any errors and add any more touches you believe will create a helpful review. While it is good to pepper your analysis with a touch of creativity, it is important that the overall impression is that of an objective review. In this essay he explores the dubious moral message of susan glaspell's trifles. susan glaspell's trifles concerns a woman who was once young, pretty, and outgoing until she found herself in a loveless marriage with a stern, anti social farmer.

Her isolation, the gloom of her surroundings, and her husband's dispassion slowly drove her to the brink of insanity. She tried to fend off her depression with bits of gaiety brightly colored quilting and a caged songbird but when her husband, in a sudden act of aggression, broke the cage and killed the bird and its singing, she was driven over the edge. In the middle of the night, she slipped a noose around her husband's neck, and strangled him in his sleep. biography faq films globe theatre pictur quiz timeline master shakpeare apos s othello using absolute shakpeare apos s othello say, plot summary, quot s and characters study guid. A quick review of the plot of othello including every iortant action in the play. Samuel taylor coleridge apos s famous say on othello based on his legendary and influential lectur and not on shakpeare. Home othello, the moor of venice study guide study guid hamlet julius caar king henry iv king.

Lear macbeth merchant of venice othello romeo and juliet the tet twelfth night trivia authorsh bard facts bibliography. Review of each character apos s role in the play including defining quot s and character motivations for all major characters. Critical say by influential shakpeare scholar and commentator william hazlitt, ussing all you need to know on the characters of othello. Summary is indispensable in preparing for and writing an argumentative essay.

When you summarize a text or describe visual material , you distill the ideas of another source for use in your own essay. It helps make your analysis of these sources convincing, because it is based on careful observation of fact rather than on hazy or inaccurate recollection. Summarizing critical sources is particularly useful during the research and note taking stages of writing. It gives you a record of what you've read and helps you distinguish your ideas from those of your sources. Summaries you write to prepare for an essay will generally be longer and more detailed than those you include in the essay itself. Only when you've established your thesis will you know the elements most important to retain. It is crucial to remember, though, that the purpose of an analytical essay is only partly to demonstrate that you know and can summarize the work of others. the greater task is to showcase your ideas, your analysis of the source material.

Thus all forms of summary there are several should be tools in your essay rather than its entirety. True summary always concisely recaps the main point and key supporting points of an analytical source, the overall arc and most important turns of a narrative, or the main subject and key features of a visual source. True summary neither quotes nor judges the source, concentrating instead on giving a fair picture of it. True summary may also outline past work done in a field it sums up the history of that work as a narrative.

Essay on Effects of Technology on Human Life

Consider including true summary often just a few sentences, rarely more than a paragraph in your essay when you introduce a new source. Immediately after his introduction to an essay on whittaker chambers, a key player in the start of the cold war, bradley nash included four sentences summarizing the foreword to his main source, chambers's autobiography. Nash characterizes the genre and tone of the foreword in the first two sentences before swiftly describing, in the next two, the movement of its ideas: the foreword to chambers's autobiography is written in the form of a letter to my children. In this introduction, chambers establishes the spiritual tone that dominates the body of his book.

He initially characterizes the cold war in a more or less standard fashion, invoking the language of politics and describing the conflict as one between communism and freedom. But as the foreword progresses, chambers introduces a religious element that serves to cast the struggle between communism and capitalism as a kind of holy war. Every essay also requires snippets of true summary along the way to orient readers to introduce them to characters or critics they haven't yet met, to remind them of items they need to recall to understand your point. The underlined phrase in the paragraph introducing nash's summary is an example of orienting information.