Manage the keys of the writing quality is a complicated and difficult process to learn. However, there are certain guidelines that allow us to successfully develop certain texts. One of them is the critical essay, a modality widely used in the university environment. Therefore, below from OneHowTo.com we explain how to write a critical essay. In this way you will learn its basic components and writing it will not pose any problem.
The parts of the critical essay
All critical text presents a classical structure, divided into three parts. It was exposed centuries ago by Aristotle in his work Poeethics and it has hardly presented any changes. These text divisions are:
- Introduction
- Development
- conclusion
Introduction
In this part it is important that grab the reader’s attention without neglecting the objective of the text: to present hypotheses about the subject on which you are going to develop the critical content. To do this, you can start by using an anecdote, a striking quote or a relevant fact.
In the same way, it is very important that in this part of the text concretize your ideas, as it is a very limited space. In fact, the ideal is that it occupies around 20% of the total text.
Also, in the introduction you should clearly state the hypothesis of your work, transmitting to the reader what is your point of view and the aspects that you are going to develop next. Or what is the same: the main ideas that you are going to present in the development.
Development
This is the longest part of the critical essay. It can easily occupy 60% of the total text, so you must organize it internally with a dose of coherence.
To do this, it is best to go paragraph by paragraph, explaining in each of them the main ideas that you had stated in the introduction. This task is complicated, as it requires a significant capacity for synthesis. Thus, try to illustrate the ideas with examples, expert quotes that validate your critical argumentation and anticipate the possible responses generated by the reader.
conclusion
This part of the critical essay is the recapitulation of the aspects that you have reached through the development of the ideas that you have raised. In short: it is about encompassing those aspects that you want to convey to the reader, so it plays a key role in the critical test.
In the same way, the conclusions they must be short, ideally not occupying a space greater than 20% of the total text, so you have to spin very fine and use the most appropriate words for each approach you synthesize.
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