Practical criticism....لطلبه آداب انجليزي

[مستر/ مينا ماهر]

Practical criticism

Practical criticism is that exercise in which you are given a poem, or a passage of prose, or sometimes an extract from a play, that you have not seen before and are asked to write a critical analysis of it. Usually you are not told who wrote the poem or passage, and usually, too, you are not given any indication of what you might look for or say


To criticize a piece of prose, you should:

1-Read it carefully.

2- Get the idea of the passage (to know if the writer succeeds or not in conveying it).

3-Study the style (to know whether the style suitable to the idea or not).

a) Study the vocabulary, find out the words; the parts of speech; verbs (action-static), nouns, adjectives ….etc.

b) Monosyllabic words (one syllable words), multi syllabic words or foreign sources.

c) The word order of the sentence, in most cases the writer makes a change in the order by which he means something, for emphasis for example.

d) The structure of the sentence: simple, compound, complex.

e) The structure of the passage (parallelism, contrast, comparison, examples).

f) Types of the sentence : statement ( declarative , descriptive ) , interrogative ( normal question , rhetoric question ) , imperative .

4-Get to know the subjectivity (point of view) or objectivity of the writer (universality of his ideas).

5-Get to know the gender of the writing whether masculine (direct , sometimes crude , sometimes pompous , concrete and not emotional ) OR feminine (more emotional and observational , less forceful ) .

6-Get to know the choice of images.

7-The attitude of presentation:

a) Traditional ( like Shakespeare's plays ) .

b)Experimental ( new attractive things )

c) Image of style (good or bad