How you can be a better critical writer: going beyond description
Have you ever handed in a piece of writing – an essay or report, for example – and got comments back from your tutor saying that it needs to be more critical, that you are just storytelling, or that it lacks an argument?
If you’ve experienced this, you might not be totally clear on what they’re on about. This can be frustrating, especially if you feel you’ve worked hard to research all the important information about the topic or perhaps collected lots of data yourself. What else do they want??
The issue is probably that you have confined yourself to writing descriptively rather than critically. Let’s examine the difference.
Descriptive vs. critical writing
Descriptive writing simply tells the reader facts about the world: for example, how much rainfall there is in a country in a year or how much global sea levels have risen in the last 100 years.
In contrast, critical writing goes further than just description. It uses facts (like the ones above) to show that certain claims about the world are true or that they are false. For example, I might use the fact that global sea levels have risen about 12 cm in the last 100 years to show the claim that climate change is real is actually true. This creates an argument: a key part of critical writing.
In an argument:
- The claim is what the writer wants the reader to believe
- The evidence is a set of facts that say why the reader should believe the claim
To get a clearer idea of the difference between descriptive and critical writing, let’s have a look at a couple of examples. First, descriptive writing:
In the sphere of climate finance, the term 'adaptation finance' refers to the funds that governments in developed countries pledge to support the reduction of the effects of climate change in developing countries. However, not all of this money is actually paid. According to the UN Adaptation Gap Report (2023), between 2018 and 2023 only 66% of the funds promised were actually delivered.
You can see that what makes this paragraph descriptive is the way it just informs the reader of several facts (in bold).
Now, imagine that the student who wrote this got feedback similar to that mentioned at the top of this post: that it needs to be more critical or lacks an argument. The student reflected on this and came up with the following revised version which now uses those facts to support a claim:
The global community is currently woefully off target to adapt to the current and likely future ill effects of climate change. One issue lies in the sphere of climate finance, more specifically 'adaptation finance' which refers to the funds that governments in developed countries pledge to support the reduction of the effects of climate change in developing countries. According to the UN Adaptation Gap Report, between 2018 and 2023 only 66% of the funds promised were actually delivered. This is a significant shortfall and can only result in greater and greater challenges to adaption.
By adding a topic sentence at the beginning that states a claim - that we are off target to adapt to climate change – whose believability is supported by the facts from the previous descriptive version, we now have a paragraph that is critical rather than just descriptive. By using the right facts to show that a claim is true, this student has turned their descriptive paragraph into a critical one.
Where in my writing should I be critical?
It can be appropriate to be critical almost anywhere in a piece of academic writing. However, there are places in essays and reports where it is more needed.
In an essay or dissertation, critical writing occurs more in the body paragraphs (after the introduction and before the conclusion) because it is here that you are arguing for your thesis (your answer to the main question of the essay given in or implied by the essay title).
In a report, (where you have collected primary data) critical writing will occur mostly in the Discussion section where you produce arguments about what your data shows. In the Discussion, you might also argue that your findings are supported by those of other similar studies.
References
UN Environment Programme, 2023. Adaption gap report 2023. Nairobi: UNEP.
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