HW for 4/6: Read through this post, including the links (especially the review examples)

For your last out of class essay, Essay 4, you need to pretend that you are a critic. You get to pretend you are writing a review for a a newspaper or magazine, which means you have to write to a general audience (think solid description and details for context).

Furthermore, I want your essays to demonstrate a sense of deeper critical thinking with topic sentence claims, so you must choose:

• an ethnic restaurant/one with a particular cultural focus 

• a foreign film/ movie that deals with an obvious cultural theme

• a music album that critiques culture -- the album must have songs that comment on culture in an evident way

This is to be an organized review in which you provide as thesis, your overall "opinion"/critique/review (however you view it!) of the restaurant/movie/or album and a few reasons why you have this outlook.


To review what it means to be descriptive, review what Purdue's OWL says about descriptive essays.   Your essay is to be descriptive, but to also have a clear position on the subject text.

Food Reviews

• The New York Times has a section of reviews in which they may vary from our purpose in overall organization/structure (because we use the 5-paragraph essay) and content, but not in writing style or in descriptive value. Therefore, it will be important to review what it means to be descriptive and to study the types of content that can appear in a restaurant review.

• Below are a few example restaurant reviews:

1. Tertulia 
2. Per Se

• Do what what one smart student did and google "descriptive food language" for a list of great terms to use in your own reviews.  Here is one site that helped that student out: Descriptive words for menus. 

• Here is one that is related to what we are doing: Food Critic Terms.