How to Write an Article Review
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Article reviews are common assignments that are aimed to introduce you to some important works in your field. You will need to summarize and evaluate works written by professionals so you have to understand main points and be able to analyze arguments accurately. To evaluate some work, you need to get a grasp on the general theme, understand the influence of this work on further research of the subject, and analyze supporting arguments. Here are some useful tips for you.
Prepare for Your Review
First of all, you need to understand what your review will be about. Article reviews imply writing for a specific audience that is familiar with your subject. The main purpose of your paper is to summarize key ideas, findings, and arguments so that you can estimate what contribution this article made to a research of this subject.
- Article reviews are not just about your opinion. Given that you have to analyze a serious source, you need to support your opinions with facts, theories, and your own findings. Make your critique meaningful, building it on a solid ground of evidence.
- Your article review is just a response to somebody else’s work, not a new research.
- You need to both analyze and summarize your sources.
Organize the Article
We suggest setting up your article review even before you start reading a source article. This will allow you to understand what exactly to focus on when reading. Usually, article reviews have a logical structure that looks as follows:
- A summary that highlights the most important points and information.
- A discussion of strong sides of the article: ideas, interesting observations, etc.
- The next section identifies gaps and contradictions. You need to decide whether a topic was fully considered or there is a need for further research. If there are any unanswered questions in the article, you have to point them out.
Read Your Article
Read the article a few times. Take a glance at your list of the most important moments that you wrote when preparing for work, and highlight all the necessary information. It’s important not to highlight every paragraph and sentence. You need to focus on the most important points only. Make sure that you select the information that is really useful for your review and meets its purpose. Think how new information is connected to your existing knowledge of the field. Do you agree with the author’s point? Why? Identify what this article has in common with other sources devoted to this topic, and what are differences between them. You need to fully understand the article because it’s the only way for you to write a good review. After this, write a quick summary which will serve as a basis for your further work.
Write an Outline of Your Review
Take a look at your summary and decide whether the author was clear and accurate. Jot down author’s contributions to the field, important points and impressive methods of writing that he or she used. You need to highlight the strong sides of the article, and your main argument for it must briefly explain how this article solves a particular issue. In turn, when you describe drawbacks of the article, we suggest focusing on details that are not clear or not useful enough. Don’t forget that you must support your thoughts with evidence, especially when it comes to estimating the overall quality of the article.
Write a Review
First, write a title. Your title must be related to the purpose of the whole review. You may choose a descriptive title, a declarative title, or interrogative title. After this, write a citation from the article. The rest of the review must follow this citation. Make sure that you use a proper citation format. If you’re not sure what format to choose, we suggest asking your instructor.
Begin with an introduction. It must briefly describe crucial points of the article and the most important arguments used by the author. After this, you need to write a thesis. This type of assignments is different from others because you have to write the author’s thesis statement. It may include several points, but if it’s not clear enough, you have to define it yourself, based on your analysis.
The central part of your review must provide a brief summary of the article. Express the author’s main ideas, findings, and arguments in your own words. Support your thoughts with quotes. Don’t focus on specific details, just summarize the most important points to provide a broad perspective.
After this, you have to write your critique, in fact, it’s the section where you evaluate the article, its contributions, arguments, ideas, biases, and drawbacks. Support your opinion with quotes.
In a conclusion section, we suggest commenting on how this article influenced further research in the field.