The choices you make as you structure your essay will affect how your readers understand and interpret your evaluation. Your strategies for organizing, introducing, and concluding your essay should take into account your purposes — for example, whether you are assessing success and failure or making a recommendation, and what you hope readers will do after they’ve read your essay — as well as your readers’ needs and interests. They should also take into account your criteria and the nature and amount of evidence you’ve assembled to support your judgments.

Organization. To decide how to organize your criteria, evidence, and judgments, create an outline or a map. Most evaluative essays are organized either according to the items that are being evaluated or by the criteria used to evaluate them. If you are evaluating a single item, such as a proposed change to class registration procedures or the performance of a musical group on a recently released album, you are likely to present your evaluation as a series of judgments, applying one criterion after another to your subject. If you are evaluating more than one item, you can use your criteria to organize your discussion, or, as Steve Garbarino does in his review of New Orleans sandwich shops, you can discuss each item in turn. Evaluative essays can also employ several of the organizing patterns discussed in Chapter 15, such as comparison and contrast, costs and benefits, or strengths and weaknesses.

Introduction. Most evaluative essays begin with some explanation of the context and a description of the subject. In some cases, your readers will be unfamiliar with particular aspects of the subject — or even with the subject as a whole. For example, if you are evaluating a new technology for distributing movies online, your readers will probably appreciate a brief discussion of how it works. Similarly, if you are reviewing a movie, it can help to provide some details about its plot, characters, and setting — although not, of course, its ending or surprising plot twists. Once you’ve established the parameters of your evaluation and decided how to frame your introduction, you can use a range of strategies to put it into words, including asking questions, leading with a quotation, or telling a story. You can read more about strategies for introducing your essay in Chapter 16.

Conclusion. Your conclusion offers an opportunity to highlight or even to present the overall results of your evaluation. If you’ve already presented your overall results in the form of a thesis statement earlier in the essay, you might use your conclusion to reiterate your main judgment or to make a recommendation for your readers. You can also turn to other strategies to conclude your essay, such as linking to your introduction, asking a question, or speculating about the future. Chapter 16 provides more strategies for using your conclusion to frame the results of your evaluation.