A good evaluation essay is supposed to evaluate strong and weak sides of a topic, based on particular criteria. Thus, you will need to research the subject and provide enough evidence for the reader to believe you and agree with you.
1. Choosing the Topic
Choosing what you’re going to analyze and assess is an initial step towards good essay writing. If you don’t want to put much thought into this stage, you can take such an ordinary topic as an event, a venue, a movie, a book, etc. But if you plan to receive a good grade, you should go further and come up with a creative topic.
Here are a few examples:
- A campus cafe
- A movie remake
- Pop music of the 60s
- A website
- A smartphone/tablet app
- A street musician
- Your professor
You may get surprised to see the last one in this list; but no guts, no glory – chances are high your professor will have much fun reading your evaluation of him.
2. Define the Criteria
Once you have arrived at a decision concerning the subject of your evaluation essay, you should define the criteria you will consider. If you’re writing about a cafe, your categories may include price, location, service. Make sure you don’t take very few categories as this will give you too little information and don’t take too many categories as this will give you too much information and steal the time you could spend for supporting your judgments in each category.
As for supporting, you can’t convince the reader that your evaluation is accurate by merely claiming so. You should give reasons so that the audience would come to the same conclusion themselves, basing on the reasons you provided. So, don’t say that a cafe is nice. Review it considering the prices it offers, the quality of service it provides, and the location it takes.
3. Familiarity With the Subject
An important moment to mention is that you should be familiar with the subject you are assessing personally. That is, writing about a cafe, you need to visit it; writing about the music of a particular period, you need to listen to it; writing about an application for a smartphone or tablet, you should be using it yourself.
By the way, you can write not only about things but also about process.
If you end up with a negative assessment of the topic, it’s not a problem. Your honesty is the key to getting the desired high grade.
4. Outline of Evaluation Essay
Organization of an evaluation essay is simple and much alike with the well-known 5-paragraph structure. Introduction and conclusion don’t differ a lot from what you write for any other essay type. Yet, the body paragraphs are different.
The best way to structure the evaluating process is to devote each body paragraph to a certain criterion followed by examples. Also, you should anticipate the objections to every reason and present a refutation at once to deprive the reader of any chance to disagree with you.
Salman is a prolific environmental writer, and has authored more than 500 articles in reputed journals, magazines and websites. He is proactively engaged in creating mass awareness on renewable energy, waste management, sustainability and conservation all over the world.
Salman can be reached on salman@cleantechloops.com
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