Critique Of Author's Argument Analysis

Critique Writing
Definition: A critique is a critical or judgmental review of some kind of text. In a critique you may evaluate the author’s opinion, supporting material, and argument.
A Five-Step Approach to Writing a Critique:
1. Introduce the Critique’s Subject. Introduce the work under analysis, identify the author, and provide preliminary information about both. Indicate your thesis (your judgment) and the criteria (how you intend the judge the work).
2. Review the Background Facts or Issues. Review what must be understood before the piece’s idea can be appreciated. Can you identify other data or related issues?
3. Summary of Author’s Argument. Reviews author’s argument and key assumption that one must know before appreciating your
information. Don’t editorialize yet! This is to come.
4. Evaluate Author’s Argument. Review the author’s argument in light of the position you have defined. Make certain that all points relate to your central thesis.
5. State Your Conclusion. Remind the readers of the points you have made and reasons for making them. You are not making arbitrary judgments; rather you are evaluating a work in terms of the criteria you have provided. Finally, do you have any ideas or insights to offer?

SOME KEY WORDS TO USE IN A CRITIQUE:
EVIDENCE

STATISTICS
LOGICAL APPEALS
REASONABLE
FACTS

EXPERT OPINIONS
RELEVANT
LOGICAL
OPINIONS
EMOTIONAL APPEALS
REPRESENTATIVE
FALLACIES
EXAMPLES

ETHICAL APPEALS
ACCURATE
FLAWED

Critiques are usually written in third person. Be sure to read your assignment sheet carefully. There may be some variations from the pattern suggested here. Keep this in mind: Instructors want less summary and more analysis.

Model:
Source “Francis Ford Coppola.”
Along with Martin Scorcese, George Lucas, and Brian DePalma, Coppola belonged to a young generation of university-trained film-students-turned-directors who established careers in the early 1970s.
His earliest films (Dementia 13, 1963; Finian’s Rainbow, 1968) are undistinguished and do not hint at the talent that suddenly burst forth in The Godfather (1972), the most successful example of the epic narrative film-making produced by a major studio since Gone With the Wind. Starring Marlon Brando and Al Pacino, The Godfather offers a richly romanticized and brutal portrait and the rise to power of the Corleone crime family. Feeling he had oversentimentalized the Corleones in the first film, Coppola set out to destroy in the harsher, bleaker sequel The Godfather, Part II (1974), which many critics consider superior to its
predecessor.
Between the two epics, Coppola made The Conversation (1974), an edgy, sophisticated portrait of the psychological disintegration of an electronics wizard and domestic spy (played by Gene Hackman). An extraordinarily stylized and ambiguous work, The conversation avoids the formulaic features of the bigger budgeted Godfather films.
These three films remain Coppola’s greatest achievements as director. His subsequent career is checkered with grandly conceived but incompletely realized ambitions. Seduced by a huge budget and ballooning ambitions, Coppola released Apocalypse Now (1979) a visually spectacular but conceptually muddled account of the Vietnam War. For much of its length it is undeniably hypnotic, but, after the precision and clarity of his previous three films, its diffuseness is disappointing. His next film, One From the Heart (1982), Rumble Fish (1983), The Cotton Club (1984), Peggy Sue Got Married (1986), Gardens of Stone (1987), and Tucker (1988), generally failed to connect with critics or the public and often seemed more conventional than visionary. Part of Coppola’s problem was a faltering economic base. He attempted to establish his own studio by creating Zoetrope Studios in 1980, but Apocalypse Now saddled him with huge depts., and the disastrous box-office performance of One From the Heart compounded his problems. The more conventional films that followed are partly the result of Coppola’s efforts to extricate himself from a mountain of debt by crafting less audacious and more commercial products.
Coppola returned to epic form with The Godfather, Part III (1991), a compelling but uneven conclusion to the saga of Michael Corleone, and Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1992), a controversial but genuinely visionary and audacious adaptation of the Stoker novel. The latter film is one of Coppola’s most ambitious and artistically successful words.
Coppola remains a powerful force in contemporary U.S. films. His up-and-down career is marked by an unresolved tension between grandiose artistic ambitions and the budgetary limitations and need for box-office success inherent in studio-financed production. Unlike Woody Allen, who works successfully and well on limited resources, Coppola often requires huge budgets for his visions and has had difficulty accommodating the inevitable compromises such budgets entail.

Critique of “Francis Ford Coppola”
[Introduction] Steven Prince’s biographical note, “Francis Ford Coppola” provides a thumbnail sketch of the famous director. Its brevity a matter of its context (an insert in the textbook Movies and Meaning) the note is comprehensive and evenhanded in its view of the flamboyant Coppola, thus allowing the reader to comprehend how artistry and business must work together or filmmaking fails.
[Background facts or issues] Francis Ford Coppola is one of the famous – or infamous – directors of the late-twentieth century. A brief note, even when understood in context, is scarcely able to provide a full-length portrait, but Prince intended to create pithy portraits of how directors began to control the filmmaking after the studio system failed, and how this had its own potential for failure. He does this by reviewing Coppola’s filmmaking work from 1968 to 1996, which produced movies ranging from brilliant, to failed, to successful but conventional.
[Summary and Evaluation of author’s argument] In is review of Coppola and his films, prince admires Coppola’s genius, yet is alert to his weak points. Coppola is brilliant, but no businessman, which a director must be for continuing “box office” success. Rather than seeing Coppola as derided by cruel critics and ignored by brainless audiences, Prince sensibly sees his failures as “unrealized ambitions” – that is, great plans deflated by realities of filmmaking that Coppola chose to ignore. Prince’s summation is on-target: the director has had an “up and down” career.
[Conclusion] Prince is sympathetic, fair, but honest about this “legendary director.” His note provides the reader of the text with an insightful look at a late-century director who took advantage of the failed studio system to indulge his genius but may have had a more steadily successful career within a studio system.

Assignment #1
Practice: read the text below and write your critique about it.
Follow the guidelines given previously so that you can succeed on your piece of writing. We’ll be discussing your critique in class.

Under the influence of Technology: The history of mass communications
Communication technology has had an enormous impact on society by changing the distribution of information and assimilation of knowledge.
Communication technology has facilitated the evolution of “entertainment” that has reinforced or challenged societal norms since bards entertained audiences by reciting epic poems and oral histories (Zillmann 10). From the time of ancient Greece, linear print technology (alphabets) has altered oral practices and dramatically expanded the capabilities of language by preserving written records of thoughts and ideas (Ong 8).
Many centuries after writing was invented, the technology of the printing press enabled the first mass distribution of books, pamphlets, and newspapers that allowed single authors to inform and entertain large audiences. In what was to become the United States of America, public discourse, facilitated by print technology, argued for democratic freedoms from government tyranny and fueled the fight for American independence (Lucas). In the newly established democracy, “freedom of the press” protections guaranteed that print media sources would continue providing information and
influence.
These protections were invoked, later in American history, when debates raged over the power and influence of new mass communications technologies. By the turn of the 20th century, electronic technology was at the center of American political and social power struggles over entertainment’s ability to propagandize masses of people in society.
From the time movie technology first appeared in 1984, censorship proponents sought to limit criminal and sexual content while other groups proposed using the new medium to teach social ideology (Spring 13). As early as the 1020’s, movies were blamed for increasing youth sexuality.
Movies were seen as reality-makers that clashed with values taught in school and contradicted societal norms. Studies during that time revealed that high school and college students were learning (and practicing) sexual technics they had seen in the movies. Although censorship in the 1930s curbed sexual content in film, off-screen Hollywood sexual culture continued to influence American youth culture (Spring 67-69).
The mass medium of movies was seen as a vehicle to propagandize audiences with entertainment messages. In 1943, Elmer Davis, who was then America’s Director of the office of War information, stated: “The easiest way to inject a propaganda idea into most people’s minds is to let it go in through the medium of an entertainment picture when they do not realize that they are being propagandized” (Spring 137). The mass audience reach of movies made them a battleground for numerous entities who wanted to promote a host of political and social agendas.
Commercial interests soon became a major participant in the battle to wield mass media power in both entertainment and news. Despite economic and political influences, radio broadcasters, attempted to create a perception of neutral and non-biased news reporting, and Americans began to rely on commercial radio as their primary source of news and information (Spring 139). After commercial interests won control over radio in the 1920s, broadcasting began to create a national culture for shared consumerism (Spring 98-109). Although 1930s and ‘40s mass media images emphasized political rights and freedoms of speech, by the 1950s television stations did not want air any content that would create controversy and affect advertising dollars (Spring 183). In 1951, in order to avoid government censorship, the television industry’s National Association of Broadcasters (NAB) adopted a code of self-censorship that created a proper moral image for television. However, advertisers soon became the greatest source of television censorship as advertising agencies for companies such as Procter & Gamble sought programming content that presented positive business images (Spring 164-65).
By the 1960s, communications scholar Marshall McLuhan envisioned a shift away from the linear organization of print media to the orality of television that he believed would revive oral communication as the basis for knowledge and knowing (113).Television’s high visual and audio impact, according to McLuhan, established new ways of meaning-making that reconnected viewers to the roots of oral communication (8). McLuhan anticipated electronic technology’s potential to influence every facet of personal and public experience with fast-action, multi-sensory images that communicate more than many words (26, 157). In the battle over media influence, movies and television have been, and continue to be, perceived as more powerful than print media. In the early days of film, movie theaters were not permitted to show news reels of certain volatile stories – such as violent labor disputes between union members and industry owners – that newspapers were free to cover (Spring 16). Although a Supreme Court ruling in the 1950s included movies under the free press protections of the First and Fourteenth Amendments, even today, cigarette and liquor advertisements are banned from television but not from newspapers and magazines (Spring 162). The television medium became central in the power struggle to influence mass media content. Although commercial interests dominated television broadcasting, special-interest groups such as the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) began challenging stations that did not give balanced treatment to certain issues. In 1966, the U.S. court of appeals ordered the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) to include more public input in licensing hearings, thus giving women and minority organizations the ability to advocate their agendas (Spring 216-217).
The struggle over media influence has included “government, private enterprise, advocacy groups, and, in more recent years, philanthropic foundations” (Spring 251). In 1967, the Carnegie Commission proposed establishes the Corporation for public Broadcasting. Foundations, and activists working in government and education, created the Public Broadcasting System (PBS) in an effort to shape a more intellectual culture (Spring 233, 250). The issue of commercialized media continues to be at the forefront of debates over mass media influence on culture. The evolution of communication technology has enabled fewer and fewer people to have greater and greater control over the distribution of information and entertainment. Both conservative and liberal scholars, educators, and activists are concerned with the mass media’s ability to limit democratic discourse and propagandize through entertainment messages. Their perspectives inform potential solutions for mitigating the influence of mass media on American teen sexual culture.