ACTIVITY 9.16
Evaluating Structure, Content, and Quality

Once you have a general idea of the main ideas in the E-text and once you have evaluated the author's ethos, you need to conduct a closer reading of the structure and content of the text.

Step 1: Outlining the Text

Construct a rudimentary outline of the document by considering the following:

If the text offers subheadings, write those down in the order they appear. They can serve as headings in your outline. If the document doesn't offer subheadings, you will have to create your own.

Summarize or quote the sentence or group of sentences you consider to be the thesis statement.

Summarize or quote the topic sentences of paragraphs that develop or offer support for the thesis.

Step 2: Evaluating the Content

Are all the author's assertions or generalizations supported with evidence and examples? How many unexamined opinions, unsupported assertions, or unsubstantiated claims can you uncover?

What kind(s) of evidence does the writer offer? Types of evidence include personal experience, examples from other's experiences, expert testimony or opinion, research, and statistics (either original or reported).

Of these kind(s) of evidence, which kind does the author tend to rely on most heavily to develop the document?

How valid and reliable is the evidence? Personal experience, for example, is very valid-what people experience first hand is, if they are telling the truth, very true to them. But their personal experience may not be true for all people in all circumstances. Citing experts, those who are either commonly known to the general reader or those who hold titles and other signs of expertise, can be effective, but the technique also can be used deceptively. Just because a writer quotes someone else doesn't mean that person has high validity and reliability. And even research statistics can be misleading.

Step 3: Evaluating Writing Quality

The written quality of an E-text can tell you much about the validity and reliability of it. Of course, an established expert in vascular disease need not write like a novelist, nor does a beautifully crafted essay necessarily include valid and reliable information. However, a sloppy, awkward, clearly ill-constructed document does indicate something about the quality of the information the document contains. As you are learning in your own writing experiences, a well-written document indicates to the reader that the writer has taken the topic and the audience seriously enough to present the best document possible.

Evaluate the coherence, cohesion, and unity of the document. Do all the ideas hang together well? Does the evidence clearly and logically support the writer's generalizations? Are the ideas connected to one another logically and smoothly, or do you get lost as the text jumps from one point to another one or veers off on a tangent?

Evaluate the style of the document. Is the text dominated by short, choppy, simple sentences or long, ponderous, sophisticated, complex sentences? Or, is there an appropriate balance among sentence style and lengths that keeps your interest through variety?

Evaluate the "correctness" of the text. Is the text free of grammatical, punctuation, or spelling errors, or is it littered with mistakes in grammar, punctuation, and spelling? If the E-text is a World Wide Web hypermedia document, test the links. Were any "dead"? Was it easy to navigate, or did links take you places without any way of getting back?