Whether you specialize in literature or just writing an essay at a university, knowing how to write a critical essay will give you an advantage throughout your university and professional career. Writing critical essays allows you to develop critical thinking skills, including attentive reading, technical analysis, academic writing skills, searching for reference books and editing. Mastering these skills will help you conduct a scientific conversation and allow you to communicate and think more productively.

• Find out the subject of your work as early as possible in order to plan a study.
• Find the information you need in a wide variety of sources, including journal articles, books, encyclopaedias, news. Gather more information that you plan to actually refer to when writing a work, but do not collect too much, it can distract from the main thing, and you will eventually include it in your essay simply because you found it. Do not use Wikipedia and do not copy other people’s comments; no matter from which website you take them, plagiarism will be discovered.
• Skim through your sources to separate interesting information from irrelevant material. Interesting research can be found in books, literary guides, in published critical articles on your particular topic. And vice versa, do not investigate things that do not relate to your topic, that is, do not engage in the study of witches, if the theme of your work is monarchy.
• Carefully reread the relevant materials and evaluate them critically.
• Highlight, underline or otherwise mark the necessary information in your personal articles and books. Use colored stickers to draw your attention to important details in library books.
• Make a brief summary of each source after reading it. Pay attention to important details and highlight the main point of view for further use.
• Formulate the theses by reviewing your notes and research. You can write a more general thesis or ask an important question that your work will answer.
• Identify the relationships between sections of your essay and briefly describe them on the margins of your plan.