Write an article review on an article of your choice on political science.
Each review must be 4 typed, double-spaced pages in length. One of the major goals of this assignment is to enhance your ability to summarize political science research concisely (that is, briefly and efficiently), therefore the overall length guidelines for this assignment will be strictly enforced. This means that, in grading the assignment, any text after the 4th page of your critical review will not be considered or evaluated.
Critical reviews, as noted above, must be 4 typed, double-spaced pages in length. Also follow the following formatting rules: the paper must be typed in 12-point font; paragraphs must not be separated by extra lines (double-spacing between lines is enough, so just hit the “enter” key once when you finish a paragraph); all margins must be 1”; and pages should be numbered.
Note that title pages are not required. Indicate your name and student number at the top of the first page of your paper, as well as listing the author(s) and title of the article you have chosen to review. Overall summary (½ page)
Background (1 page)
In this section you will discuss the background or context of the article.
Major claims and evidence (1 page)
In this section you will identify the major supporting claims made in the article, along with the evidence the author supplies in support of those claims.
In order to identify the truly important claims in the article, you might want to focus on those claims that seem controversial or, at least, quite different from the claims and assumptions of other authors. Remember, major claims should tie directly into the article’s thesis.
Conclusions (½ page)
Summarize the major conclusions of the article and restate the article’s thesis. In a sense, this section of the summary should flow logically from the “Major claims and evidence” section.
That is, if you have correctly identified the major claims of the author, the author’s major conclusions should seem to follow quite naturally or obviously.
In this final section of the exercise, Identify one problem with the article, that is, some aspect of the research that you find questionable in some way.
