Being Critical

As an academic writer, you are expected to be critical of the sources that you use. This essentially means questioning what you read and not necessarily agreeing with it just because the information has been published. Being critical can also mean looking for reasons why we should not just accept something as being correct or true. This can require you to identify problems with a writer's arguments or methods, or perhaps to refer to other people's criticisms of these. Constructive criticism goes beyond this by suggesting ways in which a piece of research or writing could be improved.

...... being against is not enough. We also need to develop habits of constructive thinking. Edward de Bono

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Introducing questions, problems and limitations (theory)

One question that needs to be asked, however, is whether ...... A serious weakness with this argument, however, is that ...... One of the limitations with this explanation is that it does not explain why... . One criticism of much of the literature on X is that ...... The key problem with this explanation is that ...... The existing accounts fail to resolve the contradiction between X and Y. However, there is an inconsistency with this argument.

Smith's argument relies too heavily on qualitative analysis of ...... It seems that Jones' understanding of the X framework is questionable. Smith's interpretation overlooks much of the historical research ...... One major criticism of Smith's work is that ..... Many writers have challenged Jones' claim on the grounds that .......

Introducing questions, problems and limitations (method/practice)

Another problem with this approach is that it fails to take X into account. Perhaps the most serious disadvantage of this method is that ..... Difficulties arise, however, when an attempt is made to implement the policy. Nevertheless, the strategy has not escaped criticism from governments, agencies and academics. One major drawback of this approach is that ...... The main limitation of biosynthetic incorporation, however, is ...... However, this method of analysis has a number of limitations. However, approaches of this kind carry with them various well known limitations. All the studies reviewed so far, however, suffer from the fact that .......

 

However, all the previously mentioned methods suffer from some serious

limitations weaknesses disadvantages drawbacks.

Identifying a study's weakness:

(However,)

the main weakness of the study is the failure to address how ....... the study fails to consider the differing categories of damage that ..... the research does not take into account pre-existing ...... such as ...... the author offers no explanation for the distinction between X and Y. Smith makes no attempt to differentiate between various different types of X. Jones fails to fully acknowledge the significance of ...... the paper would appear to be over ambitious in its claims the author overlooks the fact that X contributes to Y. what Smith fails to do is to draw a distinction between ...... another weakness is that we are given no explanantion of how ......