Guide To WritingArticleReviews
Guide To WritingArticleReviews
Guide To WritingArticleReviews
LEARNING GUIDE
book or a single article or chapter. Some reviews or annotated bibliographies will require you to make extensive comment on how they relate to other material written about the subject. Others will ask you to deal only with the material in the article under review.
Reviews vary in length from about 250 words to 1000 or more words and could be of a whole
This Learning Guide can only give general details to guide you in attempting this type of
If you have difficulty with academic reading or note-taking please refer to the Learning Guides
WRITING CENTRE Level 3 East, Hub Central, North Terrace campus, The University of Adelaide SA 5005 Australia T: +61 8 8313 5771 | E: writingcentre@adelaide.edu.au | W: www.adelaide.edu.au/writingcentre/
Article reviews will generally have a distinctive structure as outlined below: Introduction Body
Conclusion
Critique
Summary
Each section will have particular information in it. Read the assessment task very carefully to see if all of these sections are required and what exactly is expected in your particular review.
You will also need to outline the central themes of the article and what point of You may also wish to give your overall impression of the article, remembering to statements like I believe that view the writer presents.
write in formal academic English i.e. this may mean avoiding personal
(a) Summary
In sentences and paragraphs, summarise the main points of the article in the Omit any descriptive details such as statistics and examples. Stick to the main Avoid using the same word combinations that the author uses. Write the main If writing in your own words, summarising or paraphrasing, you do not need to If you use quotations from the article, use quotation marks to make this clear. identify the author as you normally would when writing an essay. points in your own way. points. same order the writer uses.
(b) Critique
This is where you are expected to provide some critical response to the article. A critical response can include both positive and negative statements. This can be done using some of the following questions:
What is the writers perspective or theoretical position? Do the writers ideas help or hinder their argument? Is the writer biased in any way? Is the writer qualified to write in this area?
Is the text easy to understand or written in a very complicated way, with gaps in
its definitions and/or methodology? How does the writer use other sources? Does the writer simplify complex ideas or make simple concepts difficult to grasp? Would you recommend this article to someone else interested in this subject?
NB: Sometimes the summary and critique section (the body) can be ordered on a point-bypoint basis, for example: Point 1 summary and critique, Point 2 summary and critique, Point 3 summary and critique, etc.
Sometimes the student is asked to do a literature search and choose a specified number of recent articles on a given topic for their annotated bibliography. The process is then very followed. similar to writing an article review for each of them so the guidelines given above can be
It may be useful to compare the relative merits of the different articles in your annotated bibliography.
It is useful to do this once you have done a first draft of all of the bibliographies, so that you
Fox, M & Wilkinson, L 1993, English essentials, Macmillan Education Australia, Melbourne.
This book is a valuable resource for students struggling with the mechanics of their writing. It was written specifically by the authors, both lecturers at Flinders University, to assist students to identify problems with their writing and remedy them. Topics include writing style, grammatical errors, sentence and paragraph construction, proofreading and the writing process. The book is written in a clear, simple, often amusing style that will appeal to students. Common mistakes are outlined and guidelines given on how to avoid them. While this book may not have a detailed enough explanation of language features for English as a second language learners, it is certainly a handy tool for those who need to fine tune their writing.
http://wwwdocs.fce.unsw.edu.au/fce/EDU/eduwritingcritreview.pdf
Annotated Bibliography
http://studentsuccess.asu.edu/files/shared/tempe/tipsheets/Annotated%20Bibliography.doc http://userwww.sfsu.edu/~jnichols/Anobib.doc http://www.csu.edu.au/__data/assets/pdf_file/0005/82742/annotate.pdf Annotate_a_Bibliography.pdf
http://lgdata.s3-website-us-east-1.amazonaws.com/docs/295/167554/How_to_ http://www.unc.edu/depts/wcweb/handouts_pdf/annotated_bibliography.pdf
If you require more assistance with Article Reviews & Annotated Bibliographies, contact the Writing Centre on 8313 5771. Visit the Writing Centre website for additional resources: www.adelaide.edu.au/writingcentre/ Principal Author: Helene Hipp 2005 Revised: Donna Velliaris 2008, Julia Miller 2010