This addresses the problems writers face in writing critical essays. Its purpose is to teach by precept and example the tricks critics employ in describing, analyzing, and evaluating serious literature. Although you may find them elementary, know from experience that only by applying them well can anyone succeed, even partially, in performing the task at all. So study them carefully.

    We can first define the term "criticism." Popularly, the term is synonymous with "fault-finding," suggesting that a critic’s duty is to point out failings in books. But were his sole duty, he would soon have little important to say, since his actual duty is to explain what he "sees" in books, virtues as well as faults. Properly, a critic’s job is "to advance a reasonable exposition of ideas," reading books not to complain, but to explain, to other readers, what they might also see in them by taking his point of view. In effect, the critic’s problem is one of perspective.

    Central to his success is isolating those parts of books contributing to his taking such a perspective. These generally fall under such categories as plot, character, setting, scene, and imagery. More generally, they come under the larger categories giving them critical significance: technique, theme, or theory. A critic usually decides whether his concerns are technical, thematic, or theoretical — or some combination — and then determines from a rereading of the book what parts might support his contentions about it. A critic, in short, is an ideal re-reader.

    Criticism naturally serves not just the needs of the critic but those of his readers as well. But here is the central problem in criticism. As readers of the same book, readers must be addressed in a way that neither bores nor confuses them; a critic in sharing his perspective must address their "proper level of admissible ignorance." He must, that is, tell more than they know about the work (his point) but not more than they know of it (their memory of it). That’s his job in a nutshell.

    We can understand it through the common experience of telling friends about movies. If we have seen a recent film, we can of course urge our friends to see it by simply summarizing what happens in it. Such summary is fine because our friends presumably have not seen the film. But if they have seen it, we can only then interest them in what we say about it, not in what they know of it. Any summary must bear only on advancing our ideas — we recall parts only to illuminate a whole. We don’t retell the whole.

    In sum, we decide what’s reader knowledge and what’s not, trusting memory in the first case and aiding it in the second. We have, so to speak, a duty to delight and instruct readers. We graciously presume their knowledge while humoring their ignorance. Primarily, it is a matter of judgment.