Evaluation Essays

Narrative & Evaluation Essays Narrative Essays: Consider your writing voice—what matters to you? Detail, detail, detail—the building block of any good essay Evaluation Essays: Establishing criteria—how do you make useful comparisons and judgements? Offering proof—what constitutes appropriate evidence?

Evaluation Essays An essay that offers judgements about a subject based on a set of criteria These judgements relate to the quality (or lack thereof) of the subject and are supported by “hard” or textual evidence i.e. movie reviews, book reports, product reviews, social satires, etc.

Evaluation Essays Purpose & Audience: For whom are you writing? How much do they know about the subject? What information does your audience want? How does this differ from a narrative essay?

Criteria (plural of criterion) a standard of judgment or criticism

Criteria (plural of criterion) When assessing something, we need to have clearly defined reasons for our claims otherwise people will not be convinced. i.e. The Walking Dead is a great show.

Criteria (plural of criterion) But your rationale has to be tailored to suit our audience. If your reader is not overly invested in the technical or esoteric aspects relevant to your subject, you need to use more general criteria. i.e. The Walking Dead sucked because in issue #17 of the original The Walking Dead comic book, Rick loses his hand, but in the TV show he never does.

Criteria (plural of criterion) You need to establish a rationale that makes sense to you and your reader. i.e. The Walking Dead is a good show in terms of set design and action sequences but sometimes fails to feature good acting.

Criteria (plural of criterion) But how do you know that your reader agrees with you about the criteria you have suggested? Who determines what constitutes “good” acting, set design, or writing? “Hard” criteria (criteria that are measurable using numeric data) can be useful, but how do we judge what can’t be objectively measured?

Criteria (plural of criterion) Your criteria needs to be established in terms of the larger class of items being evaluated. To what genre does The Walking Dead belong? What are the standards for this genre or thing? Which TV shows in this genre can you compare The Walking Dead with? On what grounds?

Evidence Moving from criteria to judgement Clear and specific evidence (detail!) is needed to support your claims—otherwise you are just offering unsupported opinion. i.e. One of the weak points of The Walking Dead is the acting, which is laughably bad at times.

Evidence Clear and specific evidence (detail!) can take the form of “hard evidence” (again, numerically-based evidence), but more often, we use textual evidence. i.e. One of the weak points of The Walking Dead is the acting, which is laughably bad at times; one notable example is the actor who plays Lori Grimes. In many scenes in season two, she reacts to impending disaster in inappropriate ways. In one particularly painful display of poor acting in the fourth episode of season two…

Judgements Once you have established a set of criteria appropriate for your reader, grounded in the standards of the class of things to which it belongs, and gathered evidence you can begin to pass judgement. Judgements are arguments that focus on how well a thing meets a standard.

Judgements What is the purpose of your judgement? Again, your audience and purpose should inform the tone of your judgements and your conclusions.

Evaluate this: Choose a recent movie or show you watched. Would you recommend it to a friend? Why or why not? Come up with at least three criteria. Think of three examples from the “text” that supports this.

Evaluate this: Choose a recent movie or show you watched. Would you recommend it to a friend? Why or why not? Come up with at least three criteria. Think of three examples from the “text” that supports this.

Evaluate this: Now, imagine that you were asked to review and evaluate this same movie or show for the website Common Sense Media, a group that evaluates and rates new shows, movies, and music for kids, families, and schools. What criteria would you use instead? What evidence would you offer?