Best Answer
What an excellent question! In fact, one of the things we encourage students to do is make sure that they understand what an assignment is asking them to do before tackling the assignment. A critical review is an analysis of material that you are exploring, which involves you examining its strengths and weaknesses and putting those together in a cohesive argument about the merits and deficits of the material as a whole.
Critical reviews can be used in almost any area of academic study, though the approach for a critical review will vary according to the subject and reflect many of the author’s opinions about the efficacy of the writer’s work, while critical reviews of scientific studies or the social sciences will be more objective. It is important to understand these distinctions, because using only the techniques that would be acceptable in writing a critical review for a work of fiction will lead to an unsubstantiated critical review for a scientific work.
To write a good critical review, you want to make sure that you understand the structure of what you are reviewing. If you are examining research, pay careful attention to whether the research presented is valid, can be replicated, and is reliable. If you are examining a fictional work, make sure you look at literary tools such as symbolism, motif, themes, etc. A careful reading of the initial work should leave you with impressions about the work and those impressions are going to serve as the heart of the critical review. However, do not stop with writing about your feelings on a work; you want to make sure and provide the textual evidence to support why you came to those feelings. Generally, a critical review only involves examination of the source material, but if you need to use additional resources to understand the material, make sure you cite them and explain why you are including them in your analysis.
