ANALYSIS OF A PROFESSIONAL ARTICLE

GOALS

This assignment offers the opportunity to fine tune three key skills:
  1. learning to recognize high quality writing and research within one's profession or major
  2. identifying and applying the traits which identify reliable research materials
  3. developing a mental resource library of reliable journals, government publications and trade magazines within the field
PROCEDURE

STEP 1:The key to this assignment is locating a high-quality article from a respected professional trade magazine, research journal or government publication
  1. Check with a professor in your major, a trusted senior colleague at work who reads extensively in the field, or the professional association websites you analyzed previously to locate an appropriate publication.  If you have been assigned a reading in your major from another course, you may use that if it fits the crtieria for this assignment.
  2. search the selected publication for an article that either presents new research or procedures, or summarizes research and development done to date.
  3. Be sure the article  is 5-10 pp. long.  
  4. Do NOT select letters to the editor, editorials, advertising, gossip, personal profiles, job postings, or feature articles.  Look for articles about new research and /or procedures.
STEP 2: Next, carefully read the guidelines for this assignment, which are available through the handout on "Writing a Critical Review" :

http://wwwdocs.fce.unsw.edu.au/fce/EDU/eduwritingcritreview.pdf

Note that the last page of the handout contains the grading criteria that will be used in the scoring rubric, so check your work against them.

STEP 3: Consult help and support files.

  1. If you are not experienced with critical reviewing of professional literature, you might wish to practice with a simplified version of this exercise, "The Annotated Sheet: A Guide to filling out the Record Sheet

      2.  If your article is a report of original research by the author(s), read "ARTICLE ANALYSIS ASSIGNMENT"  before  writing your analysis.

      3.  To understand the use of evaluative verbs , see Message 1 from Jeff Turley.

      4.  If needing summarizing verbs, consult sites like synonyms.com

STEP 4: Collect examples/evidence from the article to support each of your key points.  Long (5 lines or more) examples should be summarized, while shorter ones should be included within the paper using the correct quotation marks that you learned for the quotations quiz.  These are a required elment to support your contentions.

STEP 5: Complete the paper, which should be 3-4 pages long, in typed, double spaced, 12 point type.  Remember to use correct MLA or APA style, as appropriate..

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