Critical essays

For some assignments, you will be asked to write a short critical essay in which you look at a document or group of documents—or perhaps a historical argument written by a scholar. For example, if you were studying the US decision to send troops to Vietnam, you might be asked to analyze one or more of John F. Kennedy’s speeches and put forth a theory about why Kennedy chose to authorize the initial troop deployments. In the same course, you might be asked to read a journal article by a scholar analyzing Kennedy’s decision and assess the way that scholar used evidence to support his or her conclusion.

Related topics:

Analyzing a written text

Analyzing an image or a multimodal text

Book reviews

Research papers

Historiographic essays