Academic Writing 7 – Criticism and evaluation
Welcome back to Academic Writing – the course with the tips and knowledge for top-class writing on your distance learning course. This time we’re looking at how to be critical in your writing. ‘Criticism’ in an academic context means ‘careful analysis of what other people have said or written and stating whether or not we agree with them – and why’. Are you ready to get critical?
Reporting verbs
So, we can use verbs like ‘demonstrate’ and ‘show’ to indicate that we agree with a source. These are sometimes called ‘endorsing verbs’. Alternatively, we can use a ‘distancing verb’ like ‘argue’, ‘claim’, ‘assert’ and ‘maintain’ to indicate that we’re reporting what our source says, without saying whether or not we agree with it.