Overview
Critical Review Assignment Instructions
The purpose of this assignment is to build your critical reading and writing skills by requiring you to isolate key ideas and arguments in scholarly essays and articles. analysis will integrate answers to the following questions: 1) “What is the major argument, or thesis, of each assigned text?”; and 2) “Taken together, what do these texts contribute to a reader’s understanding of the topics and themes they address?” Try not to approach this as a summary, an opinion piece, a personal reflection, or a research essay based on limited sources. A useful way to think about this is that your topic is the readings themselves, not their shared topic. Don’t be fooled by the words “critical review”: task is neither to assess the merits of the assigned readings nor to find something to criticize. Until you have read widely, you aren’t in much of a position to do either, and you pretty much have to go on faith that the assigned items have scholarly integrity and merit.