How to Write a Critical Response Essay With Examples and Tips

A critical response essay is an important type of academic essay, which instructors employ to
gauge the student’s ability to read critically and express their opinions. Firstly, this guide begins
with a detailed definition of a critical essay and an extensive walkthrough of source analysis.
Next, the manual on how to write a critical response essay breaks down the writing process into
the pre-writing, writing, and post-writing stages and discusses each stage in extensive detail.
Finally, the manual provides practical examples of an outline and a critical response essay,
which implement the writing strategies and guidelines of critical response writing. After the
examples, there is a brief overview of documentation styles. Hence, students need to learn how
to write a perfect critical response essay to follow its criteria.

1. Questions That Guide Source Analysis Writers engage in textual analysis through critical
reading. Hence, students undertake critical reading to answer three primary questions:
1. What does the author say or show unequivocally?
2. What does the author not say or show outright but implies intentionally or unintentionally
in the text?
3. What do I think about responses to the previous two questions?
Readers should strive to comprehensively answer these questions with the context and scope
of a critical response essay. Basically, the need for objectivity is necessary to ensure that the
student’s analysis does not contain any biases through unwarranted or incorrect comparisons.
Nonetheless, the author’s pre-existing knowledge concerning the topic of a critical response
essay is crucial in facilitating the process of critical reading. In turn, the generation of answers to
three guiding questions occurs concurrently throughout the close reading of an assigned text.
2. Techniques of Critical Reading Previewing, reading, and summarizing are the main methods
of critical reading. Basically, previewing a text allows readers to develop some familiarity with
the content of a critical response essay, which they gain through exposure to content cues,
publication facts, important statements, and authors’ backgrounds. In this case, readers may
take notes of questions that emerge in their minds and possible biases related to prior
knowledge. Then, reading has two distinct stages: first reading and rereading and annotating.
Also, students read an assigned text at an appropriate speed for the first time with minimal
notetaking. After that, learners reread a text to identify core and supporting ideas, key terms,
and connections or implied links between ideas while making detailed notes. Lastly, writers
summarize their readings into the main points by using their own words to extract the meaning
and deconstruct critical response essays into meaningful parts.

3. Creating a Critical Response Up to this point, source analysis is a blanket term that
represents the entire process of developing a critical response. Mainly, the creation of a critical
response essay involves analysis, interpretation, and synthesis, which occur as distinct
activities. In this case, students analyze their readings by breaking down texts into elements
with distilled meanings and obvious links to a thesis statement. During analysis, writers may
develop minor guiding questions under the first and second guiding questions, which are
discipline-specific. Then, learners focus on interpretations of elements to determine their
significance to an assigned text as a whole, possible meanings, and assumptions under which
they may exist. Finally, authors of critical response essays create connections through the lens
of relevant pre-existing knowledge, which represents a version of the element’s interconnection
that they perceive to be an accurate depiction of a text.

Writing Steps of a Critical Response Essay.

Step 1: Pre-Writing
A. Analysis of Writing Situation
Purpose. Before a student begins writing a critical response essay, he or she must identify the
main reason for communication with the audience by using a formal essay format. Basically, the
primary purposes of writing a critical response essay are explanation and persuasion. In this
case, it is not uncommon for two purposes to overlap while writing a critical response essay.
However, one of the purposes is usually dominant, which implies that it plays a dominant role in
the wording, evidence selection, and perspective on a topic. In turn, students should establish
their purposes in the early stages of the writing process because the purpose has a significant
effect on the essay writing approach.
Audience. Students should establish a good understanding of the audience’s expectations,
characteristics, attitudes, and knowledge in anticipation of the writing process. Basically,
learning the audience’s expectations enables authors to meet the organizational demands,
‘burden of proof,’ and styling requirements. In college writing, it is the norm for all essays to
attain academic writing standards. Then, the interaction between characteristics and attitudes
forces authors to identify a suitable voice, which is appreciative of the beliefs and values of the
audience. Lastly, writers must consider the level of knowledge of the audience while writing a
critical response essay because it has a direct impact on the context, clarity, and readability of a
paper. Consequently, a critical response essay for classmates is quite different from a paper
that an author presents to a multi-disciplinary audience.
Define a topic. Topic selection is a critical aspect of the prewriting stage. Ideally, assignment
instructions play a crucial role in topic selection, especially in higher education institutions. For
example, when writing a critical response essay, instructors may choose to provide students
with a specific article or general instructions to guide learners in the selection of relevant reading
sources. Also, students may not opportunities for independent topic selection in former
circumstances. However, by considering the latter assignment conditions, learners may need to
identify a narrow topic to use in article selection. Moreover, students should take adequate time
to do preliminary research, which gives them a ‘feel’ of the topic, for example, 19th-century
literature. Next, writers narrow down the scope of the topic based on their knowledge and
interests, for example, short stories by black female writers from the 19th century.
B. Research and Documentation
Find sources. Once a student has a topic, he or she can start the process of identifying an
appropriate article. Basically, choosing a good source for writing a critical response essay
occurs is much easier when aided with search tools on the web or university repository. In this
case, learners select keywords or other unique qualities of an article and develops a search
filter. Moreover, authors review abstracts or forewords of credible sources to determine its
suitability based on its content. Besides content, other factors constrain the article selection
process: the word count for a critical response essay and a turnaround time. In turn, if an
assignment has a fixed length of 500 words and a turnaround time of one week, it is not
practical to select a 200-page source despite content suitability.
Content selection. The process of selecting appropriate content from academic sources relies
heavily on the purpose of a critical response essay. Basically, students must select evidence
that they will include in a paper to support their claims in each paragraph. However, writers tend
to let a source speak through the use of extensive quotations or summaries, which dilutes a
synthesis aspect of a critical response essay. Instead, learners should take a significant portion
of time to identify evidence from reliable sources, which are relevant to the purpose of an essay.
Also, a student who is writing a critical analysis essay to disagree with one or more arguments
will select different pieces of evidence as compared to a person who is writing to analyze the
overall effectiveness of the work.
Annotated bibliography. An annotated bibliography is vital to the development of a critical
response essay because it enables authors to document useful information that they encounter
during research. During the research and documentation stages for a critical response essay,
annotated bibliographies contain the main sources for a critical analysis essay and other
sources that contribute to the knowledge base of an author even though these sources will not
appear in reference lists. Mostly, a critical response essay has only one source. However, an
annotated bibliography contains summaries of other sources, which may inform the author’s
critical response through the development of a deep understanding of a topic. In turn, an
annotated bibliography is quite useful when an individual is writing a critical response to an
article on an unfamiliar topic.
Step 2: Writing a Critical Response Essay
A. Organization.
Thesis. A thesis statement sentence is a crucial component of a critical response essay
because it presents the student’s purpose, argument, and the conclusion that he or she draws
from the textual evidence. Also, the thesis statement is the response to the thesis question,
which an author creates from assignment instructions. After completing the research stage,
students can develop a tentative thesis statement to act as a starting point for the writing stage.
Usually, tentative thesis statements undergo numerous revisions during the writing stage, which
is a consequence of the refinement of the main idea during the drafting.
Weigh the evidence. Based on the tentative thesis, an author evaluates the relative importance
of collected pieces of textual evidence to the central idea. Basically, students should distinguish
between general and specific ideas to ascertain that there exists a logical sequence of
presentation, that the audience can readily grasp. Firstly, for writing a critical response essay,
learners should identify general ideas and establish specific connections that exist between
each general idea and specific details, which support a central claim. Secondly, writers should
consider some implications of ideas as they conduct a sorting process and remove evidence
that does not fit. Moreover, students fill ‘holes’ that are present due to the lack of adequate
supporting evidence to conclude this stage.
Create an outline. An essay outline is the final product of weighing the significance of the
evidence in the context of the working thesis statement. In particular, a formal outline is a
preferred form of essay structure for a critical response essay because it allows for detailed
documentation of ideas while maintaining a clear map of connections. During the formation of
an outline, students use a systematic scheme of indentation and labeling all the parts of an
outline structure. In turn, this arrangement ensures that elements that play the same role are
readily discernible at a glance, for example, primary essay divisions, secondary divisions,
principle supporting points, and specific details.
Drafting. The drafting step involves the conversion of the one-sentence ideas in an outline
format into complete paragraphs and, eventually, a critical response essay. In this case, there is
no fixed approach to writing the first draft. Moreover, students should follow a technique that
they find effective in overcoming the challenge of starting to write a critical response essay.
Nonetheless, it is good practice to start writing paragraphs that authors believe are more
straightforward to include regardless of specific positions that they hold on an outline. In turn,
learners should strive to write freely and be open to new ideas despite the use of an outline.
During drafting, the conveyance of meaning is much more important than the correctness of the
draft.
Step 3: Post-Writing
Individual revision. An individual revision process focuses on the rethinking and rewriting of a
critical response essay to improve the meaning and structure of a paper. Essentially, students
try to review their papers from the perspective of readers to ensure that the level of detail,
relationship and arrangement of paragraphs, and the contribution of the minor ideas to the
thesis statement attain the desired effect. In this case, the use of a checklist improves the
effectiveness of individual revision. Moreover, a checklist contains 12 main evaluation
categories: assignment, purpose, audience and voice, genre, thesis, organization, development,
unity, coherence, title, introduction, and conclusion.
Collaborative revision. Collaborative revision is a revision strategy that covers subconscious
oversight that occurs during individual revision. During an individual revision of a critical
response essay, authors rely on self-criticism, which is rarely 100% effective because writers
hold a bias that their works are of high quality. Therefore, subjecting an individual’s work to peer
review allows students to collect critique from an actual reader who may notice problems that an
author may easily overlook. In turn, learners may provide peer reviewers with a checklist to
simplify the revision process.
Editing. The editing step requires authors to examine the style, clarity, and correctness of a
critical response essay. In particular, students review their papers to ascertain its conformance
with the guidelines of formal essay writing and the English language. Moreover, sentence
fragments, subject-verb agreement, dangling modifiers, incorrect use of punctuation, vague
pronoun references, and parallelism are common grammar issues that learners eliminate during
editing. Then, writers confirm that their critical response essays adhere to referencing style
guidelines for citation and formatting, such as the inclusion of a title page, appropriate in-text
citation, and proper styling of bibliographic information in the reference list. In turn, students
must proofread a critical response essay repeatedly until they find all errors because such
mistakes may divert the audience’s attention from the content of a paper.