How do you engage with critics in an essay?

This is a key skill which confuses a lot of people and really marks out A* candidates. It needn’t be all that difficult and with eight techniques you can have it in the bag. Firstly, try to consider critics as people in a conversation, it just so happens that that conversation is an academic one. To engage with a critic, you must begin by listening to what they have said and evaluating it; what does it make you think or feel? Do you agree? Then, you use this to work out what to say in response. Here, confusion typically sets in but this can be made far easier by breaking down forms of response into eight failsafe categories: 1) Picking a fight: knock down a critic’s argument and ideally replace it with your own. 2) Riding on the critic’s coattails: agree with a scholar to gain authority in your work and support your argument. Potentially also defend the critic from others and resolve a larger controversy. 3) Standing on a giant’s shoulders: agree with the critic but then extend their argument, usually by applying one of their ideas differently in your own research to argue something new. 4) Leap-frogging: initially agree with a critic’s view but then solve an issue with it, such as an oversight. 5) Playing peace-maker: identify a dispute between critics and then resolve it by showing how they both fit into a larger perspective and are therefore arguing for the same thing. 6) Taking on the establishment: an ambitious yet impressive stance, take on a whole critical school, such as deconstruction, you can do this as applied to a specific text and argue that everyone before you has got it wrong. 7) Finding room on the margins: explore an idea or interpretation that hasn’t been given the light of day before and show why it matters. 8) Cross-breeding with something new: bringing in information from a different discipline, for instance, exploring the the nurture-nature side of gene selection in relation to language acquisition and therefore the development of languages. These are from Mark Gaipa’s ‘Breaking into the Conversation: How Students Can Acquire Authority in Their Writing’ in Pedagogy, if you want more information. There you have it, eight failsafe techniques to turn to every time you write essays or read around your set texts.