How to Critique Written Works

How often do you read an article, a paper or a book and get the content with ease? How much have they changed or interested you? The potential for any written work to capture the readers’ interests, arouse their feelings or put them to action starts from the writer’s knowledge, skills, techniques, experiences, style and reviewers.    

Writing is one task and perfecting it is another. Writing may be so easy; however, crafting it to expected standards involves a number of actions by the writer and other respected parties. Apart from your qualities as a writer, you may need another party to help you learn the effectiveness of your work to potential readers.

When you have written, you may require someone to help you understand the effectiveness of your paper. It may not matter who takes on to critique your work; however, you need to balance by having atleast a lay person, a peer and a specialist reviewer.

Study the following key concepts for which you can base your review for given written works.

• Rationale of the paper: Trace for the major reasons why, and the purposes for which the paper is written. Once you have got them and you are sure they are feasible, check for the certainties that the paper serves its purpose. If it does not, suggest addition of the missing points, abandonment of the erroneous points or call for necessary revision to eliminate ambiguities. 

• Target audience for the paper: Find out and understand the type of audience the paper is addressed to. Understand thoroughly their interest in the subject, knowledge and experience about the subject and what would arouse their feelings towards the paper. Once the writer seems convincing that his/her audience has been catered for, then you can consider his/her paper audience focused.         

• Content coverage and depth:  Since you now know what the audience is, then check whether the content in the paper is suitable or meaningful to them. Check this in terms of coverage, where you have to consider moving across the content or in terms of depth where you have to consider moving vertically. If you have two 12-pages papers, one with 3 topics and the other with 5 topics; then we can comment as follows. The one with 3 topics is characterized as being narrow (by coverage) but deep (by depth). The one with 5 topics is characterized as being shallow (by depth) but wide (by coverage). Ascertain whether the content is enough, little or of a satisfactory extent, then advise accordingly.    

• Substance in content:  Some subject matter may not be meaningful at all, and this very dangerous. Check for validity and accuracy of the content. Make notice of wrong content or comment on the quality of content in the paper.

• Approach:  This is a determining factor of whether your content will be easily comprehended right from the start. Moving readers from a known point towards that which is being learnt is important. Check for established ways of communicating to the audience in terms of language, concepts development or illustration. In your critique, comment on how the writer has managed to capture the readers’ attention and allowing for continued reading. 

• Organization:  Check for the arrangement of ideas in the paper, with emphasis on whether the work is flowing, has breaks or it is mixed up. The writer has to be systematic while laying out ideas, starting with the stronger towards the less strong ones (or vice versa). Put emphasis on the chronology and coherence of the work as you comment on the writing.

• Presentation:  This involves how visually the paper appeals and the language used. The visual aspect covers the page layout, formatting and illustrations, if any. Some times, standard formats are followed, so be careful to establish the type of format adopted. Comment accordingly.

• Finishing:  This is concerned with the grammatical errors, spelling mistakes, punctuations, language usage, vocabularies’ usage, and so on. Not all hard words are vocabularies, but some are key words which may not be left out but only require definition or description. 

• Outstanding features: Check for any possible creative or innovative attributes of the work. Ascertain whether they are positive or negative and assess accordingly.

While critiquing any type of writing, be objective, with a focused rationale. Be balanced with out bias. The writer must also be flexible enough, although sometimes he/she does not need to take all advice as given.