By: Gina L. Vallis
This handbook is a practical guide designed to offer students the means to apply critical thinking to academic writing.
Critical thinking is a challenging term. Sometimes it is presented in relationship to formal logic, which is too rigid to use as a strategy for writing instruction.
Sometimes critical thinking is made synonymous with analysis, although they can be clearly differentiated as separate cognitive activities. Sometimes critical thinking is reduced to writing prompts on selected readings, or exemplar asides.
REASON TO WRITE introduces the critical question, a pre-writing strategy that both stipulates a working definition for critical thinking, and, in doing so, reorients the approach to academic writing as fundamentally inquiry-based. Critical thinking provides specific strategies designed to help student writers to work through the relationship between thinking and writing. When given the opportunity to develop a line of inquiry based upon a question, students not only acquire critical thinking skills, but also the means to be self-corrective in their writing, and to transfer those skills into new contexts.
In three major sections, students are guided through steps that build upon foundational critical thinking skills, and that reinforce academic writing as a practice designed to answer a question, solve a problem, or resolve an issue.
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