Assignment Task

For your critique assignment, you will write a comparative review of two opinion articles about an issue that has been hotly debated in the news within the past two months. Your assignment will use an essay structure to compare and contrast the two articles.

To find suitable articles, do a search online or in the NAIT library database. You may find good options by looking in the “Opinion” or “Analysis” sections of news websites. Make sure that each article is reasonably long and substantial, with some depth and interesting aspects in the content.

You will want to take some notes while reading the articles. You need to have enough information to be able to give a broad overview of the main argument of the articles, as well as to evaluate and compare how effectively the authors present their information and persuade their intended audiences.

Content

• If desired, introduce the issue that the articles discuss with an opener to “hook” your audience. This could be a provocative statement, a question, a short personal anecdote, recent news story, or interesting statistic. Your opener must be specific, not a sweeping generalization.
• Provide a quick summary of the overall issue and discuss the context within which the articles appeared.
• Include a thesis statement with the main point or idea in your comparative critical analysis. Explain why your findings about these articles are relevant or interesting in relation to the issue discussed.
• In a series of paragraphs, evaluate the content of the articles and the way the content is presented from a compare/contrast viewpoint. You could comment on some (but not all) of the following aspects: content/ideas, the way the argument is developed, whether the viewpoint or recommendations are valid and well-presented, organization, audience, writing style, tone, reading level, graphics/pictures/diagrams, layout.
• Note that the best way to organize your paper is to compare or contrast some aspect of the two articles within EACH body section. You will develop a stronger essay using this organizational approach than if you try to analyze one article, then the other one, then compare them, which is a structure that creates a slow-moving, unfocused, and uninteresting essay.
• Conclude your comparison with a strong and specific recap of your main points, restatement of your thesis, and final summary of the relevance of your findings in relation to the issue at hand.

Questions

1. What do you notice while reading the article?

2. What can you find out about the author?

3. What do you know about the original publication?

4. What genre (type of article) is this?

5. What is the main idea of the article?

6. What are the key supporting ideas?

7. Who is the intended audience for the article?

8. How is the article organized (direct/indirect, use of headings and subheadings, size of sections, paragraph length)?

9. What types of evidence and examples are used (personal experience, anecdotes and stories, stats, diagrams, interviews with experts – what types of experts, eyewitness accounts, etc.)?

10. What types of appeals (pathos, logos, ethos)?

11. Word choice? Style/tone, reading level? Use of comparisons (metaphors), repetition?

12. Overall, is the article successful at convincing its audience about the point it is trying to make or not?