Critical Thinking in Academic Writing
Here are a few ways to help your figure out a strategic approach and techniques for your own academic work. You can execute and develop these strategies. The activities covered in this blog will serve as a writing prompt that gets a student think and write critically. As you are done with the writing activity, the questions in the argument can be used for classroom discussions. It further forces a student to articulate the ideas in the best possible manner.
Drawing Information from different Sources
Think of a common condition or a practice such as college student voting. Do some research and see what others have to say about this. You should look for some true thoughts of scholars and average people from various cultural disciplines.
Apply the trend in your essay by drawing information from a vital source. Develop a thesis that takes various view points and opinions. Go back to your sources and form an argument about each new idea you have. Apply insights to your sources and apply in the form of paraphrase, quotation or a summary.
Apply Your Concepts
Take one of the concepts that you believe in or live by in your everyday life. It is like living in a society adopting various concepts of responsibility, freedom, terrorism, adulthood, nature and much more. Think critically on any of the above mentioned concepts and discuss how it affects your life directly and indirectly.
Understand your Argument
Inspect all the details in your concept and look for a pattern that suggests an argument. You will see that the details will add up to form arguments on concepts that we believe in our everyday lie. Think of a context and see how the concept relates to the context. Find out the relationship between the subject and the surroundings. See if the concept and context oppose each other or complement each other. Try to express all these arguments in your essay.
Compare and Analyze your Idea
Examine how the key components of your argument to see if they fit together and how the points relate to each other. Also, find the similarities and differences between the ideas that you are reading
Synthesize
Make logical connections by bringing together different sources of information. They will help to shape up your ideas.
Justify Everything
Use the critical thinking approach to develop the best arguments and draw conclusions from those arguments.