Remember commentaries offer a new angle to an ongoing public conversation. The goal of commentaries is to convince readers that the opinion of the person writing the commentary is more convincing.
Write a commentary in response to any current event that you’ve seen in the media recently. Remember commentaries offer a new angle to an ongoing public conversation. The goal of commentaries is to convince readers that the opinion of the person writing the commentary is more convincing. When writing a commentary, it is important to make clear points that are understood easily by readers. At the same time, readers of commentaries want to learn something new while figuring out how someone else views an issue or event of interest.
A commentary is a response to another person’s argument. Commentaries are most often found in expressions of opinions on current issues and events [1]. The purpose of commentaries is to offer new and insightful perspectives so that readers can understand their own stance on an issue or event. Importantly, readers can find commentaries as similar to an op-ed (opinion/editorial) piece in a newspaper or a magazine.
What Do Commentaries Do?
Commentaries offer a new angle to an ongoing public conversation [2] . The goal of commentaries is to convince readers that the opinion of the person writing the commentary is more convincing. When writing a commentary, it is important to make clear points that are understood easily by readers. At the same time, readers of commentaries want to learn something new while figuring out how someone else views an issue or event of interest. Most commentaries act on the purpose of making their points memorable [3].
Where Can I Find Commentaries?
Commentaries are not difficult at all to find. Readers can find them in print media (e.g., newspapers, magazines) and visual media (e.g., online news). Many letters to the editor and opinion-editorial (op-ed) pieces have a similar style as commentaries do. In addition, blogs and social networking sites like Blogger or Facebook serve the purpose of creating a space for writing commentaries [4].
What Is In a Commentary?
The content of commentaries (along with letters to the editor and op-ed pieces) have current events or issues as their primary focus[5]. Commentaries often contain an explanation of the current event or issue. Commentaries often offer support for the opinions written in them.
As with any writing genre, commentaries focus on topic, angle, purpose, readers (audience), and context. Writers of commentaries, letters to the editor, and op-ed pieces often view a current issue or event from a unique angle that applies to the issue’s timely relevance. In rhetoric, this is known as kairos. Kairos is the Greek word meaning “right or opportune time.”
Writers and readers of commentaries should not confuse kairos with chronos (chronological time). However, if historical criticism applies to the current event, writers should feel free to put that in their commentaries.
MichaelPickar (discuss • contribs) 18:40, 6 December 2012 (UTC)
One method of organizing a commentary comes from Johnson-Sheehan and Paine [6]. The features included in this method of organizing commentaries are:
As with reviews, commentaries involve using the techniques of preliminary inquiry and background research without necessarily experiencing the subject under review.
However, commentaries are different from reviews in lieu of these features. Writers of commentaries should write about something that is important to them by listening to what others say and reading what others write [7].
Writers of commentaries should also take care to listen to what people are not saying and not writing; this would mean citing a gap in the conversation. Writers of commentaries, in addition, often follow news events found on Web sites, in newspaper, and in magazines [8].
As it is for reviews, writers and readers of commentaries should play the Believing and Doubting Game using the three steps of believing, doubting, and synthesizing. Playing the Believing and Doubting Game can help writers of commentaries see multiple sides of an issue while they tie all of their information together to make it their own.