ENG 112 Online: Varieties of Writing

Essay 1 Lecture 3: Criteria for Evaluating an Academic Article

December 19th, 2007

Hot Tips!

1.) Check out the Instructor Evaluation Rubric under the Portfolio button in our Blackboard site.

2.) Trust your gut. Make evaluations that are sincere.

3.) Learning what are NOT appropriate criteria may help you more quickly understand what’s appropriate. Check out The NOT list:
A.) “It’s hard.”
B.) “It’s too long.”
C.) “It’s stupid.”
D.) “It’s boring.”

If you find yourself thinking in terms of inappropriate criteria, turn on your critical thinking skills and see if you can’t reword them to become appropriate criteria. Check out the YES list:
A.) “The word choices in the article are not appropriate for novices to the subject because they are not clearly defined and explained.”
B.) “The article repeats the same concepts and ideas, therefore making it an unnecessarily long read.”
C.) “The article’s content does not relate to a specific audience.” (Make sure you name that audience.
D.) “The lack of sentence variety and monotonous descriptions may deter some audience members from understanding the meaning of the article.”

4.) Look to our class wiki and discussion board for more ideas.