Critical Summary Analysis Essay

by

Humanities

Summary: Your first paragraph should contain both a brief introduction to the article as well as your summary of the article. Your summary should immediately follow your introduction; in other words, your first paragraph, if standing alone, would essentially be an annotation of the article. Your summary should include identifying the publication context as well as the author.

Analysis: The next 2-3 paragraphs of your essay should be a critical analysis of that article. In other words, you will use rigorous, thoughtful, detailed analysis to examine and critique this article. Analysis happens when you break a text, object, or system down into its constituent parts and examine how those parts work together. So your task is to identify the article’s main purpose, carefully explore how the article works to achieve that purpose, and assess how well it does so. What aspects of the article are effective, and how so? What is less effective, or less convincing, and why? Be as specific as possible not only to illuminate various aspects of the article for your reader, but to show them what particularly about the article made your respond the way you did.

Essay should be 400-600 words in length, and should contain at least four well-organized paragraphs. Student name, assignment title, class number, instructor’s name, and the date should appear on the upper left corner of the first page (the first page header). You should also include a “Works Cited” page that provides the bibliographical information about your article.

POINTERS:

  • Perform all the necessary steps.
  • Be both general and specific. When summarizing, one naturally must be general. But when analyzing, one must be as specific as possible. Summarize, paraphrase, and quote specific moments from the article. Always follow your paraphrases and quotations with analysis.
  • Don’t hold yourself accountable for every minute aspect of the article.Your analysis is not expected to account for every single word or sentence of the article. It’s more important to carefully select textual evidence to support your particular critique. Your analysis should both examine and assess the article’s notable features, the author’s key “moves,” and finished product’s successes and failures—those that that YOU deem significant.
  • During your “prewriting” or “invention” stage of drafting, be sure you step back and allow yourself to describe the article to yourself before you attempt to analyze it. Composing a reverse outline will help you to get a mental “snapshot” of the article and digest both its content and its organization before you begin writing your formal essay.
  • You also should attempt to objectively analyze the article before you begin writing your critique. What decisions does the author make? How is the article organized? Does it use examples? Subheadings? To what effect? How does the author use information, rhetoric, and organization to make his or her point?

http://newsroom.cumc.columbia.edu/blog/2013/05/31/… the article you supposed to read