Evaluative Writing

Specific Example - this is not evaluative:

Many people visited Mt. Fuji and littered there, so the amount of garbage on the ground there increased.

General, evaluative statement about this type of thing:

Increased pollution caused by tourism can degrade the atmosphere of towns or natural sites. 

The evaluative word here is “degrade”. The writer argues that it “can degrade the atmosphere”.

“Evaluate” means to judge something’s quality. “Value” is in the word “Evaluate”.

If a statement is evaluative, it says there is a positive or negative, or an increase or decrease in the, value, quality or function of something or the impact that something has on the value, quality or function of something else.

Writing in a general way has a purpose: it makes you think through the issue more thoroughly and logically. Evaluating a factor in an issue creates an argument about that issue.

TASK:

Write general, evaluative sentences based on the examples in [1], [2] and [3].

Try writing one yourself first. Then, share sentences among your group. Combine some good ideas from each member to create a group sentence to write here in this document.

Some words you can use in your answers to evaluate tourism:

[1]

This sentence isn’t really evaluative, it just states a fact:

20 million tourists in the UK visit the Lake District every year, causing major traffic jams in villages there.

Based on this, can you write a sentence that is evaluative of this type of thing in general? (Shift the focus to discuss the potential impact of tourism in any location, not just the UK, Lake District, and traffic jams. Do not completely change the topic, though. You are writing about the type of impact in the example above, not about other factors such as economy, safety, and so on.)

[2]

At the Tambopata Natural Reserve in Peru, there are over 600 species of birds, 200 species of mammals, and 100 species of reptiles and amphibians. The money generated by tourism in this area has been used towards jobs and resources to maintain and preserve this natural environment.

Of course, we know this is very positive from just seeing this example, but there is no evaluative vocabulary in this information. Can you write a general evaluative statement about this?

[3]

For the 2004 Athens Olympics, Greece invested heavily in building infrastructure. After the Olympics, tourism dropped dramatically and the government could not pay back the large costs for the infrastructure that was not being used anymore.

Try generalizing this example from Greece in an evaluative way:

Follow-up Task - Writing Structure & Organization

Next, think of whether your generalized, evaluative sentence(s) would be useful before or after the information it is based on (the information that was already in this document before you did this activity). Copy and paste your group’s sentence(s) to position them either above or below the informational text which is there for each topic.