What is the Essence of a Critical Essay?

September 17, 2021

Let’s start by defining the very concept of criticism. This concept means the assessment of any type of human activity, from the assessment of creativity to the assessment of behavior or actions. The task of criticism is to evaluate mistakes, identify contradictions, study events, creativity, and so on. But we must understand the difference that being critical does not mean playing on the “dark side”. Being critical is not the same as being bad.

StudyEssay, as an experienced company, knows for sure that often people are convinced that the essence of criticism is to give bad feedback about another person’s activities or work. It is important to understand that good critical analysis can also help improve the subject matter and serve for good.

You can always learn more about the types of essays but first, let’s figure out what is a critical essay itself and what it serves for.

A critical essay is a creative work written for the purpose of analyzing a work or activity. This type of essay is usually given to a student in order to develop their own critical skills, to learn how to express themselves without fear of receiving criticism in return.

Key Things that are Hallmarks of a Critical Essay

A critical essay has an author’s opinion, supported by evidence. Having formed a statement, you must provide arguments and examples for it. For example, after watching a movie, you discuss with a friend what you saw, in the format: “If the main character did not make this decision, he could have achieved much more”. To which your friend might say: “Yes, but then he would lose friends and be miserable”. Such reasoning may seem like criticism, but it is far from it because it describes the essence of what we saw and does not analyze the essence of the plot or how the director showed us the situation.

An example of criticism in this situation would be the phrase: “We saw a struggle between two opposing opinions of the main character when he made a fateful decision. This situation is the director’s manipulation of the audience’s emotions since when we got to know the protagonist closer, we were imbued with sympathy for his life story and unconsciously experienced with him his every step”.

In this example, we show what we noticed in the director’s work: what methods he used to get our attention and how they influenced us as viewers. And this exactly makes our opinion critical.

6 Steps for Creating a Good Critical Paper

Students often confuse a critical essay with a review and simply express their opinion in their work and come to StudyEssay to get professional help. As we remember, the key point in our essay should be the obligatory presence of arguments and evaluation of the work. The creation of this type of essay requires the following preparation steps for writing:

1. Check out the original work, the criticism for which you will compose. For example, if this is a literary work, read it mindfully, without prejudice, form your own and proceed to the next stage.
2. Explain your thoughts to yourself and form an opinion. After reading, understand what exactly you noticed in the author’s work, what impact it had on you, what you agree with and what you disagree with.
3. Write down your thesis. Make sure you add both statements and details that describe your thesis.
4. Write an outline for your future essay. Seeing in front of you the points that you will describe, the process of creating a critical essay will be simplified, and thoughts will be more orderly in the end.
5. Start writing your essay. But be prepared for the fact that this is just a draft. Editing the finished text is one of the key keys to get a successful essay.
6. Edit your essay. As we said above, editing is an important stage that needs to be given special attention. Check your work for grammatical and punctuation mistakes and make sure the text’s structure is easy and understandable to the reader.

These steps are easy to follow for anyone with experience writing essays like this.

The Importance of Giving Attention to the First Source

One of the reasons for the successful writing of essays by StudyEssay is the fact that we pay great attention to the initial work with the original literature (movie, event, etc.) about which we will write. Let’s see the essence and sequence actions on the example of working with literature:

• Find or create your own copy of the original work. If this is not a large work, you can always make a photocopy. Alternatively, you can always try to find the work on the Internet and print it out. It is also a good idea to buy a book for further reading and writing notes on its pages.
• There are two ways you can take notes, depending on the size of the piece of literature. The first one is relevant when you have a small text so that you can easily read it once, formulate your opinion and make short notes. The second method is relevant when you are presented with the task of working with a large amount of text. in this case, you need to read it with openers and be sure to write down your opinion and arguments;
• Read the literature again. This time, you need to pay attention to details, such as the characters of the protagonist, the development of the plot lines, the literary techniques that the author used, the way of presenting his thoughts, and so on. All this will help to form a critical point of view for the subsequent writing of an essay.

In fact, a very good way is to take a pencil and underline all the details that matter. In the future, when writing an essay, this will help a lot.

Organizing Thoughts Before Starting an Essay

It is necessary to delightfully understand the main idea, idea, and problem of the article. Find the main statement and the arguments to support this statement. Is there something that makes it different from the rest of the work? Take time to think about how you feel, know, and feel about this topic. Think about the existing ideas and associations that arise when you analyze the work. After you finish putting your thoughts down on paper, start putting them in order: put ideas together and define a path for further research.

There is a very likely chance that you will have to find secondary sources for further research. Scientific articles and reviews by other authors can often help shape arguments and strong text as a consequence. Also, finding the search for the necessary links on the Internet and collecting them in one document will be convenient and useful in the future.

StudyEssay’s writers know for sure that order of thoughts is just as important as the order of the notes. For an inexperienced writer, this may not be obvious and will lead to subsequent confusion in the composition of the essay.

Formulation of the Main Thesis of The Essay

A thesis is a main thought or idea formulated in one sentence. Subsequently, understanding the central thought of writing work, we have a central point from which we will start when writing a critical essay. The thesis must be a statement. But this statement must necessarily have details to support it.

Writing a Critical Outline that Will Form the Basis of The Essay

When writing a critical essay, always recommends making an outline for future work. With a lot of experience, we already know what role a clear plan plays when writing texts.

Its importance can often be downplayed. Consider that you had one invaluable thought that could add meaning to your essay while reading the literature. But due to a lot of information or lack of experience, you just forgot about it in the process of writing. A written plan in advance will help you avoid this situation.

Creating the First Draft of a Future Essay

After all the preparation processes are completed, thoughts are put in order, opinions and thesis are formed; only now is the best time for us to start writing our critical work. When writing an essay, it is important to remember to adhere to your writing style. Namely: the way of presenting thoughts should remain formal, objective and make the reader think that he is in the process of getting acquainted with a really strong critical work, which has its own clear opinion.

We tell you that it is extremely important to winning the reader’s attention by means of gaining his respect for the author. At the end of your work, be sure to draw final conclusions and attach the arguments with them.

Reading the Finished Critical Essay and Editing It

How important do you think this final stage is? In the Study Essay, we know that sometimes mistakes of various kinds can destroy even very strong text. By refusing to reread the final version of the essay, you are at risk of losing all weight of the text and form the wrong opinion about the author.

Also, sometimes during the last reading of the finished work, you may notice the same thoughts and words repeating many times, which can be removed, and the text can be given a better look. An author who does not neglect these rules will definitely create high-quality text. But we know that the process of creating a critical essay sometimes is still not easy. In this case, you can always contact us to buy an essay, and we will gladly make things easier.

It will also be helpful to read a few tips for writing a critical essay, which we ourselves use and recommend to students.

Useful Tips for Developing Your Own Critical Essay Writing Skills

Essay writing is always about showing your mental abilities in the form of a creative text. Regardless of what type of essay you create, always read examples written by other writers before starting work. This is very useful, especially when you don’t have any experience of writing this kind of work yet.

Start writing your essay ahead of time, don’t try to write it in one day. Due to a large amount of information, as experience shows, important thoughts can simply slip away from the author, which would be undesirable.

Also, when you read any literary work, it can become a very interesting habit to deliberately subject him to quick criticism. By developing critical thinking in the future, critical writing essays will be much easier and more enjoyable for you. And remember that no matter what needs and tasks you face, StudyEssay.org is always next to you to become your best assistant!