The Assignment: Writing an Evaluation
Pick a subject to evaluate — one you have personal experience with and feel competent to evaluate. This subject might be a movie, a TV program, a piece of music, an artwork, a new product, a government agency, a campus facility or policy, an essay or reading, or anything else you can think of. Then in a thoughtful essay, analyze your subject and evaluate it. You will need to determine specific criteria for evaluation and make them clear to your readers. In writing your evaluation, you will have a twofold purpose: (1) to set forth your assessment of the quality of your subject and (2) to convince your readers that your judgment is reasonable.
These three students wrote lively evaluations:
A music major evaluated works by American composer Aaron Copland, finding him trivial and imitative, “without a tenth of the talent or inventiveness that George Gershwin or Duke Ellington had in his little finger.”
A student planning a career in business management evaluated a computer firm in which he had worked one summer. His criteria were efficiency, productivity, appeal to new customers, and employee satisfaction.
A student from Brazil, who had seen firsthand the effects of industrial development in the Amazon rain forest, evaluated the efforts of the U.S. government to protect forests and wetlands, comparing them with the efforts in her own country.
Facing the Challenge Evaluating and Reviewing
The major challenge writers face when writing evaluations is to make clear to their readers the criteria they have used to arrive at an opinion. While you may not be an expert in any field, you should never underestimate your powers of discrimination. When reviewing a movie, for example, you may begin by simply summarizing its story and saying whether you like it or not. However, for readers who wonder whether to see the movie, you need to go further. For example, you might find its special effects, exotic sets, and unpredictable plot effective but wish that the characters had seemed more believable. Based on these criteria, your thesis might maintain that the movie is not realistic but is entertaining and well worth seeing.
Once you’ve chosen a topic, clarify your standards for evaluating it:
- What features or aspects will you use as criteria for evaluating?
- How could you briefly explain each of the criteria for a reader?
- What judgment or evaluation about your topic do the criteria support?
After identifying your criteria, you can examine each in turn. Explaining your criteria will ensure that you move beyond a summary to an opinion or judgment that you can justify to your readers.