Critical Reading and Writing
CSCI102 - Systems
ITCS905 - Systems
MCS9102 - Systems
Definitions
• Analysis
– The investigation of any production of the intellect,
as a poem, tale, argument, philosophical system,
so as to exhibit its component elements in simple
form
• Critical
– Characterized by careful evaluation and judgment
• Critical Analysis
– An appraisal based on careful analytical evaluation
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Critical Analysis
• The ultimate end of analysis is a deeper
understanding and a fuller appreciation of the
literature
• The purpose for writing a critique is to
evaluate somebody's work (a book, an essay,
a movie, a painting...) in order to increase
your understanding of it
• Writing a critical paper requires two steps:
– Critical reading
– Critical writing
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Critical reading:
• To read critically is to make judgements
about how a text is argued
– This is a highly reflective skill requiring you
to "stand back" and gain some distance
from the text you are reading
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Critical reading: A Process
• Identify the author's thesis and purpose
• Analyse the structure of the passage by
identifying all main ideas
• Consult a dictionary or encyclopaedia to
understand material that is unfamiliar to
you
• Make an outline of the work or write a
description of it
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Critical reading: A Process
• Write a summary of the work
• Determine the purpose, which could be:
– To inform with factual material
– To persuade with appeal to reason or
emotions
– To entertain (to affect people's emotions)
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Critical reading: A Process
• Evaluate the means by which the author has
accomplished his purpose
– If the purpose is to inform, has the material been
presented clearly, accurately, with order and
coherence?
– If the purpose is to persuade, look for evidence,
logical reasoning, contrary evidence
– If the purpose was to entertain, determine how
emotions are affected: does it make you laugh, cry,
angry? Why did it affect you?
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Critical reading: A Process
• Consider the following questions:
– How is the material organized?
– Who is the intended audience?
– What are the writer's assumptions about
the audience?
– What kind of language and imagery does
the author use?
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How Do I Read Looking for
Ways of Thinking?
• First determine the central claims or purpose
of the text (its thesis)
– A critical reading attempts to assess how these
central claims are developed or argued
• Critical reading occurs after some preliminary
processes of reading
– Begin by skimming research materials, especially
introductions and conclusions, in order to
strategically choose where to focus your critical
efforts
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How Do I Read Looking for
Ways of Thinking?
• Begin to make some judgements about
context
– What audience is the text written for?
– Who is it in dialogue with? (This will probably be
other scholars or authors with differing viewpoints.)
– In what historical context is it written?
– All these matters of context can contribute to your
assessment of what is going on in a text
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How Do I Read Looking for
Ways of Thinking?
• Distinguish the kinds of reasoning the text employs
– What concepts are defined and used?
– Does the text appeal to a theory or theories?
– Is any specific methodology laid out?
– If there is an appeal to a particular concept, theory, or
method, how is that concept, theory, or method then used to
organize and interpret the data?
– You might also examine how the text is organized:
• how has the author analysed (broken down) the material?
• Be aware that different disciplines (i.e. history, sociology,
philosophy, biology) will have different ways of arguing
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How Do I Read Looking for
Ways of Thinking?
• Examine the evidence the text employs
– Supporting evidence is indispensable to an argument
– You are now in a position to grasp how the evidence is used
to develop the argument and its controlling claims and
concepts
– The prior steps allow you to see evidence in its context
• Consider the kinds of evidence that are used
• What counts as evidence in this argument?
• Is the evidence statistical? literary? historical? etc
• From what sources is the evidence taken?
• Are these sources primary or secondary?
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How Do I Read Looking for
Ways of Thinking?
•
Critical reading may involve evaluation
– Your reading of a text is already critical if it accounts for and makes a series
of judgments about how a text is argued
– However, some essays may also require you to assess the strengths and
weaknesses of an argument
– If the argument is strong, why?
– Could it be better or differently supported?
– Are there gaps, leaps, or inconsistencies in the argument?
– Is the method of analysis problematic?
– Could the evidence be interpreted differently?
– Are the conclusions warranted by the evidence presented?
– What are the unargued assumptions?
– Are they problematic?
– What might an opposing argument be?
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How Do I Read Looking for
Ways of Thinking?
• When highlighting a text or taking notes from
it, teach yourself to highlight argument
• Look for those places in a text where an
author explains
– Analytical moves
– concepts used
– how they are used
– How conclusions are arrived at
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How Do I Read Looking for
Ways of Thinking?
• Don't let yourself foreground and isolate
facts and examples
– No matter how interesting they may be
• First, look for the large patterns that give
purpose, order, and meaning to those
examples
– The opening sentences of paragraphs can
be important to this task
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Critical Summaries
• A summary is essentially a tool to help you in
the task of careful and critical reading
• Once acquired, the habit of critical analysis
will serve you in everything you read
• You should make it a practice to continue
writing such summaries for your own benefit
even when you are not required to turn them
in
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Critical Summaries
• What follows are some tips on how to go
about it
• Your summary should do two things:
– Analyse the argument and exhibit its
structure
– Give a critical assessment of it
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Analyse the argument
• To exhibit the structure of an argument,
you will distinguish:
– Premises (the propositions that the
argument requires you accept at the outset)
– Conclusions (the thesis that the author is
trying to get you to agree with)
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Analyse the argument
• Sometimes (not always), the conclusion
will be meant to follow deductively
• Other times the argument will not be so
tight
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Analyse the argument
• It will often be useful to ferret out unargued
assumptions
– including especially unexpressed ones, which are
needed for the argument to go through
• Note that the premises don't necessarily come
first
– Often a writer, for reasons of convenience or style,
will say not "A, therefore B," but "B, because A."
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Analyse the argument
• Pick out all and only the main points
• Use a Top-Down approach:
– First ask yourself what, in a sentence or two, is the
point of the whole passage or article
– In your summary, you can start with that brief
statement
– Then go on to each principal part of the argument,
and repeat the process until you have got down to
a level of detail adequate for the space available in
your summary
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Analyse the argument
• If the passage is very long, there will
obviously have to be less detail
– Mastery of a text requires the ability to
summarize it to any desired length
– When something remains unclear, don't
gloss it over, but draw attention to it
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Analyse the argument
• Pick out any "crux" or difficulty of
interpretation
– Don't be afraid of admitting that you don't
understand something, but try to say as
clearly as possible what you find had to
understand, and why
– Sharpen any difficulty found by offering
alternative interpretations
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Critical Assessment
• Make very clear when you are no longer stating what
your author says, but have come to your own critical
assessment
• Indicate briefly whether and why you think the
premises and assumptions you have been asked to
accept are
– True or false
– Plausible or implausible
– If the argument is deductive, indicate whether it is valid
– If it is not deductive say whether your find it acceptable, and if
not, why
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Critical Assessment
• One way is to look for more or less
remote consequences of the thesis that
may turn out to be unacceptable
– It is always a useful exercise to try as hard
as you can to find good reasons to disagree
with what a writer says, especially if you
agree
– Conversely, if you disagree with the
conclusion, try hard to make up an
independent defense of it
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Critical Assessment
• If the argument is bad, explain how:
– Are one or more of the premises false?
(This makes the argument unsound)
– Does the conclusion follow? (This makes
the argument invalid)
– Does the argument rely on assumptions
that are unacceptable, or arbitrary, or
debatable?
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Critical Assessment
• Does the argument contain crucial
ambiguities?
– (An ambiguous word or phrase is one that
has more than one possible meaning. This
can foul up an argument!)
– Is rhetoric substituted for argument at some
crucial stage?
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Critical Assessment
• In addition, point out anything about the
logic of the substance of the argument
that seems to especially interesting
– It can be interesting because you strongly
agree or because you strongly disagree
– In either case, you should try briefly to
justify your view
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Your Assignment
• Read, summarise and provide a critical
comment on the provided reading. The
summary and critical comments are to
be provided in sentence and paragraph
format (no dot points) using your own
words.
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Your Assignment
• The article is available electronically at
– http://www.seanational.com.au/downloads/
publications/Hourigan36-37.pdf
• The assignment must be between 250300 words in length
– The assignment is to be submitted
electronically through WebCT
– Due date for submission of assignment is
August 6 2004 5:00pm.
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Your Assignment
• Criteria for assessment of task 1 and suggested %
weighting for each criteria
– Summary of article clearly identifies ( 1.5 % )
• Author’s main argument/ main ideas
• Some of the author’s supporting details, evidence for main ideas
– Critical comment (0.5%)
• Student provides critical comment on the reading
– Grammatical accuracy (1.5%)
• Summary and critical comment are written in paragraph form
• Grammatically accurate sentence structure is used in the task
– Free from plagiarism (1.5%)
• Ideas in the summary are expressed in the student’s own words
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