Lesson One: Applying Critical Thinking to Writing

Critical Writing

Applying your critical thinking to academic writing

You will find that your task as a writer at the higher levels of critical thinking is to argue.

You will express your argument in 6 ways:

One. You will define a situation that calls for some response in writing by asking critical questions. For example, is the Confederate flag a symbol of honor and respect for the heritage of white people in the South? Or is the flag a symbol of racial hatred, slavery, and Jim Crow?

Two. You will demonstrate the timeliness of your argument. In other words, why is your argument relevant?

Why is it relevant for example to address the decision of many parents to NOT vaccinate their children?

Three. Establish your personal investment in the topic. Why do you care about the topic you’re writing about?

You may be alarmed to see exponential increases in college costs and this is personal because you have children who will presumably go to college someday.

Four. Appeal to your readers by anticipating their thoughts, beliefs, and values, especially as they pertain to the topic you are writing about. You may be arguing a vegetarian diet to people who are predisposed to believing that vegetarian eating is a hideous exercise in self-denial and amounts to torture.

You may have to allay their doubts by making them delicious vegetarian foods or by convincing them that they can make such meals.

You may be arguing against the NFL to those who defend it on the basis of the relatively high salaries NFL players make. Do you have an answer to that?

Five. Support your argument with solid reasons and compelling evidence. If you're going to make the claim that the NFL is morally repugnant, can you support that? How?

Six. Anticipate your readers’ reasons for disagreeing with your position and try to change their mind so they “see things your way.” We call this “making the readers drink your Kool-Aid.”

Being a Critical Reader Means Being an Active Reader

To be an active reader we must ask the following when we read a text:

One. What is the author’s thesis or purpose?

Two. What arguments is the author responding to?

Three. Is the issue relevant or significant? If not, why?

Four. How do I know that what the author says is true or credible? If not, why?

Five. Is the author’s evidence legitimate? Sufficient? Why or why not?

Six. Do I have legitimate opposition to the author’s argument?

Seven. What are some counterarguments to the author’s position?

Eight. Has the author addressed the most compelling counterarguments?

Nine. Is the author searching for truth or is the author beholden to an agenda, political, business, lobby, or something else?

Ten. Is the author’s position compromised by the use of logical fallacies such as either/or, Straw Man, ad hominem, non sequitur, confusing causality with correlation, etc.?

Eleven. Has the author used effective rhetorical strategies to be persuasive? Rhetorical strategies in the most general sense include ethos (credibility), logos (clear logic), and pathos (appealing to emotion). Another rhetorical strategy is the use of biting satire when one wants to mercilessly attack a target.

Twelve. You should write in the margins of your text (annotate) to address the above questions. Using annotations increases your memory and reading comprehension far beyond passive reading. And research shows annotating while reading is far superior to using a highlighter, which is mostly a useless exercise.

An annotation can be very brief. Here are some I use:

Wrong

Confusing

Thesis

Proof 1

Counterargument

Good point

Genius

Lame

Cliché

Condescending

Full of himself

Contradiction!

Two. How do we generate ideas for an essay?

We begin by not worrying about being critical. We brainstorm a huge list of ideas and then when the list is complete, we undergo the process of evaluation.

Sample Topic for an Essay: Parents Who Don’t Immunize Their Children

Most parents who don’t immunize their children are educated and upper class.
They read on the Internet that immunizations lead to autism or other health problems.
They follow some “natural guru” who warns that vaccines aren’t organic and pose health risks.
They panic over anecdotal evidence that shows vaccines are dangerous.
They confuse correlation with causality.
Why are these parents always rich?
Are they narcissists?
Are they looking for simple answers for complex problems?
Would they not stand in line for the Ebola vaccine, if it existed?
These parents are endangering others by not getting the vaccine.

Thesis that is a claim of cause and effect:

Parents who refuse to vaccinate their children tend to be narcissistic people of privilege who believe their sources of information are superior to “the mainstream media”; who are looking for simple explanations that might protect their children from autism; who are confusing correlation with causality; and who are benefiting from the very vaccinations they refuse to give their children.

Thesis that is a claim of argumentation:

Parents who refuse to vaccinate their children should be prosecuted by the law because they are endangering the public and they are relying on pseudo-intellectual science to base their decisions.

To test a thesis, we must always ask: “What might be objections to my claim?”

Prosecuting parents will only give those parents more reason to be paranoid that the government is conspiring against them.

There are less severe ways to get parents to comply with the need to vaccinate their children.

Generating Ideas for Our Essays

How do we prepare our minds so we have “Eureka” (I found it) moments and apply these moments to our writing?

The word eureka comes from the Greek heuristic, a method or process for discovering ideas. The principle posits that one thought triggers another.

Diverse and conflicting opinions in a classroom are a heuristic tool for generating thoughts.

Here’s an example:

One student says, “Fat people should pay a fat tax because they incur more medical costs than non-fat people.”

Another student says, “Wrong. Fat people die at a far younger age. It’s people who live past seventy, non-fat people, who put a bigger drain on medical costs. In fact, smokers and fat people, by dying young, save us money.”

Another heuristic method is breaking down the subject into classical topics:

Definition: What is it? Jealousy is a form of insanity in which a morally bankrupt person assumes his partner is as morally bankrupt as he is.

Comparison: What is it like or unlike? Compared to the risk of us dying from global warming, death from a terrorist attack is relatively miniscule.

Relationship: What caused it, and what will it cause? The chief cause of our shrinking brain and its concomitant reduced attention span is gadget screen time.

Testimony: What is said about it by experts? Social scientists explain that the United States’ mass incarceration of poor people actually increases the crime rate.

Another heuristic method is finding a controversial topic and writing a list of pros and cons.

Consider the topic, “Should I become a vegan?”

Here are some pros:

I’ll focus on eating healthier foods.
I won’t be eating as many foods potentially contaminated by E.coli and Salmonella.
I won’t be contributing as much to the suffering of sentient creatures.
I won’t be contributing as much to greenhouse gasses.
I’ll be eating less cholesterol and saturated fats.

Cons

It’s debatable that a vegan diet is healthier than a Paleo (heavy meat eating) diet.
Relying on soy is bad for the body.
My body craves animal protein.
Being a vegan will ostracize me from my family and friends.

One. Checklist for Critical Thinking

My attitude toward critical thinking:

Does my thinking show imaginative open-mindedness and intellectual curiosity? Or do I exist in a circular, self-feeding, insular brain loop resulting in solipsism? The latter is also called living in the echo chamber.

Am I willing to honestly examine my assumptions?

Am I willing to entertain new ideas—both those that I encounter while reading and those that come to mind while writing?

Am I willing to approach a debatable topic by using dialectical argument, going back and forth between opposing views?

Am I willing to exert myself—for instance, to do research—to acquire information and to evaluate evidence?

My skills to develop critical thinking

Can I summarize an argument accurately?

Can I evaluate assumptions, evidence, and inferences?

Can I present my ideas effectively—for instance, by organizing and by writing in a manner appropriate to my imagined audience?

Example of an essay that acknowledges opposing views: Harlan Coben’s “The Undercover Parent” (24)

NOT long ago, friends of mine confessed over dinner that they had put spyware on their 15-year-old son’s computer so they could monitor all he did online. At first I was repelled at this invasion of privacy. Now, after doing a fair amount of research, I get it.

Make no mistake: If you put spyware on your computer, you have the ability to log every keystroke your child makes and thus a good portion of his or her private world. That’s what spyware is — at least the parental monitoring kind. You don’t have to be an expert to put it on your computer. You just download the software from a vendor and you will receive reports — weekly, daily, whatever — showing you everything your child is doing on the machine.

Scary. But a good idea. Most parents won’t even consider it.

Maybe it’s the word: spyware. It brings up associations of Dick Cheney sitting in a dark room, rubbing his hands together and reading your most private thoughts. But this isn’t the government we are talking about — this is your family. It’s a mistake to confuse the two. Loving parents are doing the surveillance here, not faceless bureaucrats. And most parents already monitor their children, watching over their home environment, their school.

Today’s overprotective parents fight their kids’ battles on the playground, berate coaches about playing time and fill out college applications — yet when it comes to chatting with pedophiles or watching beheadings or gambling away their entire life savings, then...thentheir children deserve independence?

Some will say that you should simply trust your child, that if he is old enough to go on the Internet he is old enough to know the dangers. Trust is one thing, but surrendering parental responsibility to a machine that allows the entire world access to your home borders on negligence.

Some will say that it’s better just to use parental blocks that deny access to risky sites. I have found that they don’t work. Children know how to get around them. But more than that — and this is where it gets tough — I want to know what’s being said in e-mail and instant messages and in chat rooms.

There are two reasons for this. First, we’ve all read about the young boy unknowingly conversing with a pedophile or the girl who was cyberbullied to the point where she committed suicide. Would a watchful eye have helped? We rely in the real world on teachers and parents to guard against bullies — do we just dismiss bullying on the Internet and all it entails because we are entering difficult ethical ground?

Second, everything your child types can already be seen by the world — teachers, potential employers, friends, neighbors, future dates. Shouldn’t he learn now that the Internet is not a haven of privacy?

One of the most popular arguments against spyware is the claim that you are reading your teenager’s every thought, that in today’s world, a computer is the little key-locked diary of the past. But posting thoughts on the Internet isn’t the same thing as hiding them under your mattress. Maybe you should buy your children one of those little key-locked diaries so that they too can understand the difference.

Am I suggesting eavesdropping on every conversation? No. With new technology comes new responsibility. That works both ways. There is a fine line between being responsibly protective and irresponsibly nosy. You shouldn’t monitor to find out if your daughter’s friend has a crush on Kevin next door or that Mrs. Peterson gives too much homework or what schoolmate snubbed your son. You are there to start conversations and to be a safety net. To borrow from the national intelligence lexicon — and yes, that’s uncomfortable — you’re listening for dangerous chatter.

Will your teenagers find other ways of communicating to their friends when they realize you may be watching? Yes. But text messages and cellphones don’t offer the anonymity and danger of the Internet. They are usually one-on-one with someone you know. It is far easier for a predator to troll chat rooms and MySpace and Facebook.

There will be tough calls. If your 16-year-old son, for example, is visiting hardcore pornography sites, what do you do? When I was 16, we looked at Playboy centerfolds and read Penthouse Forum. You may argue that’s not the same thing, that Internet pornography makes that stuff seem about as harmful as “SpongeBob.”

And you’re probably right. But in my day, that’s all you could get. If something more graphic had been out there, we probably would have gone for it. Interest in those, um, topics is natural. So start a dialogue based on that knowledge. You should have that talk anyway, but now you can have it with some kind of context.

Parenting has never been for the faint of heart. One friend of mine, using spyware to monitor his college-bound, straight-A daughter, found out that not only was she using drugs but she was sleeping with her dealer. He wisely took a deep breath before confronting her. Then he decided to come clean, to let her know how he had found out, to speak with her about the dangers inherent in her behavior. He’d had these conversations before, of course, but this time he had context. She listened. There was no anger. Things seem better now.

Our knee-jerk reaction as freedom-loving Americans is to be suspicious of anything that hints at invasion of privacy. That’s a good and noble thing. But it’s not an absolute, particularly in the face of the new and evolving challenges presented by the Internet. And particularly when it comes to our children.

Do you tell your children that the spyware is on the computer? I side with yes, but it might be enough to show them this article, have a discussion about your concerns and let them know the possibility is there.

Harlan Coben is the author of the forthcoming novel “Hold Tight.”

Harlan Coben Acknowledges Opposing Views

In paragraph 1, his gut reaction was to reject his friend’s use of spyware on his children’s computers.

In paragraphs 2 and 3, Coben concedes that it is scary to contemplate the ability to invade your child’s privacy with spyware, but he says it’s worth it.

In paragraph 4, he concedes that this is scary totalitarian tactic that “reeks of Dick Cheney” but he counters by writing we’re not government; we’re parents.

In paragraph 5, he makes a comparison argument: “parents fight their kids’ battles on the playground, berate coaches about playing time and fill out college applications—yet when it comes to chatting with pedophiles or watching beheadings . . . then their children deserve independence?”

In paragraph 6, he addresses the rebuttal that we should “just trust” our children, but he rejects this notion because we’re not talking about trust; we’re talking about neglect: “surrendering parental responsibility to a machine that allows the entire world access to your home borders on negligence.”

In paragraph 7, he counters the claim that parental blocks, not spyware, should be used by saying that he tried parental blocks, and they do not work. For example, they do not work with cyber-bullying or cyber-pedophiles.

In paragraph 9, he makes the rebuttal that the Internet already violates privacy; children should learn that the Internet is “not a haven of privacy.”

In paragraph 10, Coben rejects the comparison of private thoughts kept in a diary with Internet activities.

In paragraph 11, Coben distinguishes the notion of “being responsibly protective and irresponsibly nosy.”

In paragraph 12, Coben shows that texting on a phone is less dangerous than the Internet because the latter is more porous, allowing thousands of predators into the child’s world.

Coben concedes in paragraph 13, that there will be tough choices. At what point does a child’s curiosity for porn cross the line?

Coben concludes by saying freedom and privacy are not absolutes; they are relative terms that have to be addressed in a radically different way in our Internet age.

Letter of Rebuttal

In “The Undercover Parent” (Op-Ed, March 16), the novelist Harlan Coben writes that putting spyware on a child’s computer is a “good idea.”

As a mother and advice columnist for girls, I disagree. For most families, spyware is not only unnecessary, but it also sends the unfortunate message, “I don’t trust you.”

Mr. Coben said a friend of his “using spyware to monitor his college-bound, straight-A daughter, found out that not only was she using drugs but she was sleeping with her dealer.” He confronted her about her behavior. “She listened. There was no anger. Things seem better now.”

Huh?! No anger? No tears or shouting or slammed doors? C’mon. If only raising teenagers were that simple.

Parenting is both a job and a joy. It does not require spyware, but it does require love, respect, time, trust, money and being as available as possible 24/7. Luck helps, too.

Carol Weston
New York, March 16, 2008

Checklist for Evaluation Letters of Response (or any rebuttal for that matter)

What assumptions does the letter-writer make? Do you share those assumptions?

What is the writer’s claim?

In what ways does the writer consider the audience?

What evidence, if any, does the writer offer to support the claim?

Is there anything about the style of the letter—the distinctive use of language, the tone—that makes the letter especially engaging or especially annoying?

A Checklist for Examining Assumptions

What assumptions does the writer's argument presuppose?

Are these assumptions explicit or implicit?

Are these assumptions important to the author's argument or only incidental?

Does the author give any evidence of being aware of the hidden assumptions in her argument?

Would a critic be likely to share these assumptions, or are they exactly what a critic would challenge?

What sort of evidence would be relevant to supporting or rejecting these assumptions?

Am I willing to grant the author's assumptions? Would most readers gran them? If not, why not?

Assumptions in Carol Weston's letter:

One. She assumes that proclaiming herself to be a mother and an advice columnist for girls gives her credibility and superior moral standing. Some might say, her opening phrase sounds cliched and pompous.

Two. She assumes that spyware means "I don't trust you." That assumption could be in error. The parent could be saying, "I don't trust predators."

Three. She assumes that because the parent used spyware to catch his daughter using drugs and sleeping with the drug dealer that the discovery is somehow compromised because it hurt the daughter's feelings. This assumption is erroneous. The girl's welfare, not her feelings about getting caught or invasion of privacy, are the priority.

Four. When she lectures Coben by writing, "Parenting is both a job and a joy," she is implicitly saying that Coben is ignorant of the hard work and joys of parenting. In fact, she has proven neither. Again, she comes across as a pompous, ignorant scold.

Five. When she lectures Coben by saying parening requires "love, respect, time, trust," she again implies that Coben is abnegating his parental responsibilities by using spyware. To the contrary, Coben has made the case that Internet predators make spyware another took parents must use their toolbox to protect their children. Carol Weston's letter is not only wrong; it's insufferable.

Study the Templates of Argumentation

While the author’s arguments for meaning are convincing, she fails to consider . . .

While the authors' supports make convincing arguments, they must also consider . . .

These arguments, rather than being convincing, instead prove . . .

While these authors agree with Writer A on point X, in my opinion . . .

Although it is often true that . . .

While I concede that my opponents make a compelling case for point X, their main argument collapses underneath a barrage of . . .

While I see many good points in my opponent’s essay, I am underwhelmed by his . . .

While my opponent makes some cogent points regarding A, B, and C, his overall argument fails to convince when we consider X, Y, and Z.

My opponent makes many provocative and intriguing points. However, his arguments must be dismissed as fallacious when we take into account W, X, Y, and Z.

While the author’s points first appear glib and fatuous, a closer look at his polemic reveals a convincing argument that . . .

In-Class Exercise

Write an argumentative thesis that addresses Coben's essay and be sure your thesis has 3 mapping components.

Ways to Improve Your Critical Reading

Do a background check of the author to see if he or she has a hidden agenda or any other kind of background information that speaks to the author’s credibility.
Check the place of publication to see what kind of agenda, if any, the publishing house has. Know how esteemed the publishing house is among peers of the subject you’re reading about.
Learn how to find the thesis. In other words, know what the author’s purpose, explicit or implicit, is.
Annotate more than underline. Your memory will be better served, according to research, by annotating than underlining. You can scribble your own code in the margins as long as you can understand your writing when you come back to it later. Annotating is a way of starting a dialogue about the reading and writing process. It is a form of pre-writing. Forms of annotation that I use are “yes,” (great point) “no,” (wrong, illogical, BS) and “?” (confusing). When I find the thesis, I’ll also write that in the margins. Or I’ll write down an essay or book title that the passage reminds me of. Or maybe even an idea for a story or a novel.
When faced with a difficult text, you will have to slow down and use the principles of summarizing and paraphrasing. With summary, you concisely identify the main points in one or two sentences. With paraphrase, you re-word the text in your own words.
When reading an argument, see if the writer addresses possible objections to his or her argument. Ask yourself, of all the objections, did the writer choose the most compelling ones? The more compelling the objections addressed, the more rigorous and credible the author’s writing.

Topic for an Argumentative Essay:

"Is College Worth It?"

"College Is Still Worth It, Despite the Cost"

"Can Language Influence Our Perception of Reality?"

To read critically, we have to do the following:

One. Comprehend the author's purpose and meaning, which is expressed in the claim or thesis

Two. Examine the evidence, if any, that is used

Three. Find emotional appeals, if any, that are used

Four. Identify analogies and comparisons and analyze their legitimacy

Five. Look at the topic sentences to see how the author is building his or her claim

Six. Look for the appeals the author uses be they logic (logos), emotions (pathos), or authority (ethos).

Seven. Is the author's argument diminished by logical fallacies?