This activity is not limited to noting what’s wrong or bad about an article or accomplished by trying to justify your opinion of the article. Critiquing a piece of writing involves considering what the author has either told you or implies she or he is going to do (prove, explain, interpret) in the article and evaluating how well or not the author has done so. A critique can also serve to explain to its readers in what ways the article advances knowledge in the field (or not). In this context, it means an evaluative, thoughtful overview of literature (articles and books) in a particular field.

A Guide to Reading and Analyzing Academic Articles, by Amanda Graham, 1997-2012, is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License.