Reflecting on What You Have Learned; Reflecting on the Genre

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THINKING CRITICALLY

To think critically means to use all of the knowledge you have acquired from the information in this chapter, your own writing, the writing of other students, and class discussions to reflect deeply on your work for this assignment and the genre (or type) of writing you have produced. The benefit of thinking critically is proven and important: Thinking critically about what you have learned will help you remember it longer, ensuring that you will be able to put it to good use well beyond this writing course.

Reflecting on What You Have Learned

In this chapter, you have learned a great deal about this genre from reading several essays that justify an evaluation and from writing an evaluation of your own. To consolidate your learning, reflect not only on what you learned but also on how you learned it.

ANALYZE & WRITE

Write a blog post, a letter to your instructor, or an e-mail message to a student who will take this course next term, using the writing prompt that seems most productive for you:

  • Explain how your purpose and audience influenced one of your decisions as a writer, such as how you presented the subject, the strategies you used in justifying your evaluation, or the ways in which you attempted to counter possible objections.

  • Discuss what you learned about yourself as a writer in the process of writing this particular essay. For example, what part of the process did you find most challenging? Did you try anything new, like getting a critical reading of your draft or outlining your draft in order to revise it?

  • If you were to give advice to a friend who was about to write an essay justifying an evaluation, what would you say?

  • Which of the readings in this chapter influenced your essay? Explain the influence, citing specific examples from your essay and from the reading.

  • If you got good advice from a critical reader, explain exactly how the person helped you — perhaps by questioning the way you addressed your audience or the kinds of support you offered in support of your position.

Reflecting on the Genre

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Good evaluative writing provides readers with reasons and support for the writer’s judgment. However, the writer’s personal experiences, cultural background, and political ideology are also reflected in evaluations. Even the most fair-minded evaluators write from the perspective of their ethnicity, religion, gender, age, social class, sexual orientation, academic discipline, and so on. Writers seldom make their assumptions explicit, however. Consequently, while the reasons presented within an evaluation may make it seem fair and objective, the writer’s judgment may result from hidden assumptions that even the writer has not examined critically.

ANALYZE & WRITE

Write a page or two explaining how the genre disguises the writer’s assumptions. In your discussion, you might do one or more of the following:

  1. Identify one of the hidden assumptions of a writer in this chapter. Think of a personal or cultural factor that may have influenced the writer’s judgment of the subject. For example, how do you imagine that Akana’s gender may have influenced his judgment of the film Scott Pilgrim vs. the World?

  2. Reflect on your own experience of writing an evaluation essay. How do you think factors such as gender, age, social class, ethnicity, religion, geographical region, or political perspective may have influenced your own evaluation? Recall the subjects that you listed as possibilities for your essay and how you chose one to evaluate. Also recall how you arrived at your overall judgment and how you decided which reasons to use and which not to use in your essay.

  3. Write a page or two explaining your ideas about how hidden assumptions play a role in evaluation essays. Connect your ideas to the readings in this chapter and to your own essay.