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When you evaluate, you make a value judgment about something or someone—
Evaluation is part of your daily life: after all, before you make any decision, you need to evaluate your options. For example, you evaluate clothing and electronic equipment before you make a purchase, and you evaluate films, concerts, and TV shows before you decide how to spend your evening. Before you decide to go to a party, you evaluate its positive and negative qualities—
When constructing an evaluation argument, you have several options: you can make a positive or negative judgment, you can assert that someone else’s positive or negative judgment is not accurate or justified, or you can write a comparative evaluation, in which you demonstrate that one thing is (or is not) superior to another.
As a college student, you might read (or write) evaluation arguments based on topics such as the following:
Is the college bookstore doing its best to serve students?
Is a vegan diet really a practical option?
Is Moby-
Is the SAT a valid testing instrument?
Are portable e-
Are Crocs a marvel of comfort and design or just ugly shoes?
Are hybrid cars worth the money?
Is Taylor Swift the most important musical artist of her generation?
List ten additional topics that would be suitable for evaluation arguments.
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When you write an evaluation, you use terms such as the following to express judgments and indicate the relative merits of two items.
Superior/inferior | Important/trivial |
Useful/useless | Original/trite |
Efficient/inefficient | Innovative/predictable |
Effective/ineffective | Interesting/dull |
Successful/unsuccessful | Inspiring/depressing |
Deserving/undeserving | Practical/impractical |
Choose one word in each of the word pairs listed above, and use each word in a sentence that evaluates a service, program, or employee at your school.
Everyone has biases, and these are likely to show up in evaluations, where strong opinions may overcome objectivity. As you read and write evaluation arguments, be on the lookout for evidence of bias:
When you read evaluation arguments, carefully consider what the writer reveals (or actually states) about his or her values, beliefs, and opinions. Also be alert for evidence of bias in a writer’s language and tone as well as in his or her choice of examples. (See “Detecting Bias in Your Sources” for more on this issue.)
When you write evaluation arguments, focus on trying to make a fair assessment of your subject. Be particularly careful not to distort or slant evidence, quote out of context, or use unfair appeals or logical fallacies. (See “Being Fair” for more on how to avoid bias in your writing.)
Criteria for Evaluation
When you evaluate something, you cannot simply state that it is good or bad, useful or useless, valuable or worthless, or superior or inferior to something else: you need to explain why this is so. Before you can begin to develop a thesis and gather supporting evidence for your argument, you need to decide what criteria for evaluation you will use: to support a positive judgment, you need to show that something has value because it satisfies certain criteria; to support a negative judgment, you need to show that something lacks value because it does not satisfy those criteria.
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To make any judgment, then, you need to select the specific criteria you will use to assess your subject. For example, in an evaluation of a college bookstore, will you base your assessment on the friendliness of its service? Its prices? The number of books it stocks? Its return policy? The efficiency or knowledge of the staff? Your answers to these questions will help you begin to plan your evaluation.
The criteria that you establish will help you decide how to evaluate a given subject. If, for example, your criteria for evaluating musical artists focus on these artists’ impact on the music industry, the number of downloads of their music, the number of corporate sponsors they attract, and their concert revenue, you may be able to support the thesis that Taylor Swift is the most important musical artist of her generation. If, however, your main criterion for evaluation is the artist’s influence on other contemporary performers, your case may be less compelling. Similarly, if you are judging health-
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Consider another example. Suppose you want to evaluate the government’s Head Start program, which was established in 1964 to provide preschool education to children from low-
Choose one of the topics you listed in Exercise 14.1, and list five possible criteria for an evaluation argument on that topic.
By what criteria do you evaluate the textbooks for your college courses? Design? Content? Clarity? Comprehensiveness? Cost? Work with another student to decide on the most important criteria, and then write a paragraph in which you evaluate this textbook.