Critical Paper

Critical Paper Guide

Critical Papers (CP’s) are an essential component of success in this course. A CP is a short
paper critically responding to the readings for a complete unit. This paper is your
opportunity to demonstrate mastery of the concepts and materials and to critically analyze
those materials considering your own academic experiences and perspectives. These
guidelines will outline what we’re looking for in a CP and how to succeed on these writing
assignments.
These papers are academic in nature. This means your paper needs to have a thesis which
informs the reader about the specific topic of discussion, argues for a position, and guides
the reader through the structure of the paper. Properly informing the reader means
thoroughly defining your terms and explaining your concepts with examples. Arguing for a
position means making a clear, refutable claim. Properly guiding the reader means giving
your reader a roadmap for the paper which lets them in on how you’ll be structuring the
ideas and arguments in your paper.
Inform
To keep your reader informed throughout your paper, you’ll want to define all terms which
don’t have standard, scientific definitions as concretely as possible. Words like natural
selection, evolution, or belief probably won’t need to be defined in your paper; you can rely
on your audience’s existing knowledge. Words like religion, spirituality, reified object, or
sociobiology would all need to be defined, however. These are terms which the reader is
likely unfamiliar with, or terms which the reader may define them differently from how
you define them for your paper.
Defining a term doesn’t mean using Webster’s Dictionary definition—it means offering
your own definition for the term as it fits in the context of your paper. Occasionally we use
terms which would be too tedious or difficult to concretely define. In those cases, we often
provide examples of the term rather than a definition which fits in all cases. For instance,
the term social insect could be pretty hard to concretely nail down without being
redundant (‘insects which behave socially’ doesn’t clarify a whole lot). So, instead of
defining it, we might offer a loose definition accompanied with examples: “social insects
like bees, wasps, and ants, collect in large groups and behave altruistically, sacrificing
individual interest for the wellbeing of the group.” The definition is pretty broad, but with
the examples, we’ve narrowed our reader’s attention, and they have a good idea of what we
mean. Notice also, we provided a definition for altruistically, because we don’t want to
assume our reader would have the same definition for it we do.