{"id":1354,"date":"2024-10-17T12:58:12","date_gmt":"2024-10-17T11:58:12","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/blogs.bath.ac.uk\/academic-and-employability-skills\/?p=1354"},"modified":"2026-04-28T15:00:08","modified_gmt":"2026-04-28T14:00:08","slug":"critical-writing","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.bath.ac.uk\/academic-and-employability-skills\/2024\/10\/17\/critical-writing\/","title":{"rendered":"Critical Writing"},"content":{"rendered":"

How you can be a better critical writer: going beyond description<\/h2>\n

Have you ever handed in a piece of writing \u2013 an essay or report, for example \u2013 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?<\/p>\n

If you\u2019ve experienced this, you might not be totally clear on what they\u2019re on about. This can be frustrating, especially if you feel you\u2019ve worked hard to research all the important information about the topic or perhaps collected lots of data yourself. What else do they want??<\/p>\n

The issue is probably that you have confined yourself to writing descriptively rather than critically. Let\u2019s examine the difference.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

Descriptive vs. critical writing<\/h2>\n

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.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

In an argument:<\/p>\n