Finding critical texts, reading them, and judging them
Where critical texts are, and how to search
- Library databases before open web. New Zealand school and public libraries buy access to article databases, and a library card usually opens them from home. University repositories are the other first stop: a thesis chapter explains its method at length.
- Te Ara for context, Papers Past for historical reviews, RNZ for recorded features — the standard allows oral and visual critical texts, so a video essay that argues qualifies.
- Search the approach, not only the title. Search the lens plus the type: postcolonial reading plus travel writing, discourse analysis plus advertising. Adding criticism or analysis filters out study notes. Search the debate, not the conclusion — sources that agree with you leave nothing to critique.
- If nothing is written about your text, that is normal, and the standard does not require criticism of your particular text. Use theory about the type, criticism of a comparable text that you then test on yours, or analysis of the form or institution — and say in one sentence what you did, because that is itself a judgement.
Reading a critical text: four things to extract
- The claim. What is being argued? Write it in one sentence in your own words. If you cannot, you have not finished reading.
- The evidence. What is the claim based on — textual detail, counts, historical record, other critics, or nothing?
- The method. How does the writer move from evidence to claim? Method is the part students skip and the part that transfers to your investigation.
- The gap. Which part of the claim is not supported by the evidence offered? That gap is where your critique starts. Keep one page of notes per source under these four headings, marking each note as quotation, paraphrase or your own.
Reliability and usefulness are two judgements
- The Explanatory Notes name this step: selecting information and evaluating its reliability and usefulness in relation to the investigation.
- Reliability is a property of the source. Can its claims be trusted, and on what basis?
- Usefulness is a property of the relationship between the source and your investigation. The same source can be indispensable to one and irrelevant to the next.
- Judge them separately and say both. Students collapse the two into good source and lose the marks the separate judgement carries. Evaluate the information, not just the source: a text can be reliable about one thing and unsupported about another.
What makes a critical text reliable, and what makes it useful
| Reliable | Useful here |
|---|---|
| The method is visible | It bears on your hypothesis, not your topic |
| The evidence is specific — named passages, counts | It supplies a method you can run |
| Disagreement is acknowledged and answered | It supplies opposition, so you must argue |
| Claims are hedged to fit the evidence | It reaches your kind of text |
| The publication route is traceable | It leaves you room to contribute |
- Age is not unreliability. Older criticism is reliable about its own moment.
How the two come apart
- Useful but unreliable. Reading B, written for this page, is an anonymous essay claiming all modern institutions use language to hide themselves, with no examples. It names your pattern and evidences nothing, so it is a lead, not support — check the pattern yourself and cite what you found.
- Reliable in part. The commonest case: the textual claims are demonstrated, the claim about readers asserted. Use the first as support, treat the second as an open question, and say what the source is for.
- A partisan source is not disqualified. It is reliable evidence of what that position argues.
What the grades look like here
- Achieved — critical texts found and used, their claims accurately represented, and each judged for reliability and usefulness with reasons.
- Merit — discernment shows in partial judgements: reading for the method, using part of a source and withholding trust from the rest.
- Excellence — perceptive work uses the gap, and treats a source's position as data rather than as grounds for dismissal.
Worked Example
Worked Example
Reading A is an extract from a critical essay written for this page. It is not a real publication.
Official prose is often called impersonal, but impersonality is not its purpose. It is a side effect of the more useful property: a report can describe a decision without describing anyone deciding. Nominalisation does most of that work. Once the council decided becomes the decision, the sentence has a thing where it had an act, and things do not have to be defended. The passive finishes the job — a wall was approved, and the approver has left the room. Readers of such prose do not conclude that nobody is responsible. They conclude that responsibility is elsewhere.
Extract claim, evidence, method and gap — then judge reliability and usefulness for a student investigating The Sea Wall.
Answer:
Step 1 — the claim, in one sentence. Official prose is built to describe decisions without decision-makers, and its effect is to move responsibility elsewhere rather than remove it.
Step 2 — the evidence. Two grammatical mechanisms with worked instances: nominalisation (the council decided becoming the decision) and the passive (was approved). Both checkable in any text.
Step 3 — the method. Identify a construction, show what it removes, then infer the effect. The move doing the work is subtracting the agent and asking what the reader does with the space.
Step 4 — the gap. The final claim is about readers, and no evidence about readers is offered. The grammatical claims are demonstrated; the reader claim is asserted.
Step 5 — reliability and usefulness, judged separately. Reliable in part: the method is visible and the grammatical evidence specific, but the reader claim outruns what is shown. Useful chiefly for its method. The gap is where my reading contributes: I cannot survey readers, but I can test whether the story names the elsewhere. In The Sea Wall the refusal is recorded as a variation in minutes no character is shown writing — the elsewhere is a document, not a person.