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Critical Digest In a critical digest your audience will not have read the title in question. Your responsibility is to become the explainer and evaluator of the text, and to make a persuasive case for your reading. A critical digest may contain the following: a concise summary of the text's contents and argument; an evaluation of its methodology, style, organization, etc; a suggestion of its potential usefulness or value to other scholars; and an overall estimate of the quality of the project. The purpose of these critical digests is threefold:
Your review should offer your reader a clear and specific sense of the text's ideas. Be sure that you explain them fully and provide demonstrations from the text. One way you might proceed is by offering your reader a chapter by chapter analysis that includes an explanation of the thesis idea in each. Or you may choose to highlight only the most important chapters, the ones that you feel are most valuable. You should also note any particularly problematic chapters or sections. The idea is to give your reader a full sense of the book's purpose, its scope, the material it covers, and its success or failure in achieving what it sets out to do.* Though you should come to your own summary and evaluation independently, you may wish to consult other reviews of the text. Use them to sharpen your critical insight rather than to define it. Your review will be 3-5 pages, use a Works Cited page with proper MLA documentation, and should be error free. *From Dr. Moira Baker's Critical Review in English 600 [680 home]
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