Student Name: Yik Lung Ng Email:
[email protected] Class: Pol Sci 001 Section: 1134
CRITIQUE #1: On the Importance of Critical Thinking and Critical Writing in the Social Sciences 1. What is critical thinking and how is it distinguished from noncritical thinking? Instead of having a negative meaning, the word “critical” in critical thinking is a neutral word which means examining ideas thoroughly and deeply, think twice before accepting ideas rather than blindly accepting them at the first glance. As for critical thinking, it means making effort to control the conscious thinking process rather than just passively receiving information from the environment and let our brain process those information innately by our human nature of thinking. Our awareness of how we think is a critical factor which makes a difference between critical and non-critical thinking. According to Sylvan Barnet and Hugo Bedau in their book entitled “Critical Thinking, Reading, and Writing”, we come fully aware of an idea or an action, reflect on it, and ultimately during critical thinking process. When we are aware of how we think, we generally go through 4 steps while thinking. They are summarize, analyze, synthesize and evaluate. Summarize means getting the main idea(s) from the source of information without adding our own thoughts or opinions. Analyze means breaking the materials into tiny components and discover how they relate to each other. Synthesize means creating a new material by connecting your own
Student Name: Yik Lung Ng Email:
[email protected] Class: Pol Sci 001 Section: 1134
experience and knowledge to what you have summarized and analyzed. Finally, evaluate means the judgement about the quality and credibility of the material. It should be noted that critical thinking is not a linear process and we may go back and forth between the steps when we are engaging in critical thinking. To conclude, critical thinking occurs when we are aware of how we think and when we don’t accept information easily without evaluating the credibility of it by going through the 4 stages of critical thinking process. As for the difference between critical and non-critical thinking. Rather than thinking them as black or white, they are more like the opposite sides in a color spectrum. The more awareness and deepness we put when we are thinking, the more critical we are. 2. What is the importance of critical thinking and critical writing in the conduct of academic work? Critical thinking is important in the conduct of academic work as the ability to think critically contains a wide range of skill set which are critical to implement any academic work. As Peter A. Facione said in his article “Critical Thinking: What It Is and Why It Counts”, critical thinking skills include interpretation, analysis, inference, evaluation, explanation and selfreguation. When conducting academic work, it is important for the scholar to expose himself/herself to a lot of information about a subject matter before they form their hypotheses or conduct their researches. Hence it is important
Student Name: Yik Lung Ng Email:
[email protected] Class: Pol Sci 001 Section: 1134
for them to be able to extract important information which are useful for their own thesis, and to find relationship between different information in order to get insight so as to come up with novel and original ideas. Moreover, the ability to inference helps to develop causal relationship between different factors or events which is important to the credibility of an academic work. As for critical writing, it usually consist of 3 parts. The first part is to summarize the main idea of a specific subject matter that you are going to respond. The second part is a transitional passage to connect your summary to your response and finally comes to your response to a subject matter based on your personal experience and knowledge. Academic paper with good reliability and validity should involve critical writing to provide background information of any arguments and provides evidences for your own point of view.
