Summary
Typically, your critical review should open with a brief summary of the work and the criteria you are using to analyze it; this summary should be no longer than a quarter of the total length of the critical review. A good summary will give both the basic information (author, title, genre, etc.) and an overview of the work (plot, main characters, setting, theme, etc.).
Alternately, your summary can be woven throughout the review to support your analysis, but it still should add up to no more than a quarter of the review.
Critique
The critique portion of the critical review should focus in on a particular aspect or aspects of the work that stood out to you as a writer. What did this book, poem or film, teach you that you can apply to your own work? Here is where you are applying one or more aspects of craft — in this first review you are welcome to use our class discussions along with craft points from In the Palm of Your Hand or Flash Fiction for this criteria.
This doesn’t mean you have to review poetry or flash fiction — you can apply your criteria to any creative form. For instance, you might want to analyze a film and look at how the dialogue in one scene of the film helped create emotional tension, in contrast to another scene where the dialogue undercut or diminished the emotion of the scene (In the Palm of Your Hand certainly has some great points about creating emotion that you can apply here). For an example, see this critical review of the film American History X.
If instead, you choose to begin with a review of an outside book or essay focused on craft (from your semester list of reading), you might discuss in detail the advice that worked for you, and perhaps what didn’t. For an example of this, see this critical review of Stephen King’s On Writing.
Finally, don’t rely on your memory of a work you’ve read or viewed in the past. Read or watch a work more than once so you can really break down and explain the how and why of the work’s successes and/or failures, given your criteria. Then decide how this analysis is helpful to you in your own work.
In this case you will review the dystopian novel called Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury. And the aspects you will talk about is the world building/theme in the story and the characters.