Imagine this: it’s the first day of a brand-new semester, and you’re enrolled in a College Composition course. You might anticipate writing essays and reading fiction and non-fiction literature. It’s an English class after all. At the beginning of class, the instructor introduces you to the course and describes what you’ll learn during the semester. That’s when you hear it: your instructor tells you that you’ll develop critical thinking skills over the course of the semester, that you’ll learn how to think critically. This might come as a shock. Critical thinking? Don’t you already know how to think? How can anyone teach you how to think? Not only that, shouldn’t a writing class teach you how to write, not think?

If you had any of those questions, or any variations of those questions, on your first day, you’re not alone: it can certainly be jarring to be told that you will learn how to think in a writing class. Critical thinking, however, is not quite the same as “thinking” in general, and it is a skill that is developed over time. In this chapter, you will learn formal and practical definitions of critical thinking. In addition to these definitions, this chapter will introduce you to other fundamental concepts and skills that you’ll develop and use in your writing classes and beyond, and that are tied to the work of critical thinking, including inquiry, academic reading, academic writing, and how to read writing assignments.

Critical Thinking

What does critical thinking mean? The Oxford English Dictionary defines critical thinking as “the objective, systematic, and rational analysis and evaluation of factual evidence in order to form a judgement on a subject, issue, etc.” (OED). This definition describes a kind of thinking that focuses on breaking something down and looking at it in a structured way, considering this thing in a deliberate and conscious manner. This definition also describes critical thinking as a kind of thinking that avoids subjectivity, bias, strong emotion, and opinion, relying instead on a deep consideration of facts, factual evidence, reason, and logic. Finally, this definition describes critical thinking as practicing all of the above in order to evaluate, or to develop a position on, something. In other words, critical thinking is a deep, rigorous, logical way of thinking about things.

You might be wondering, “What kinds of things do we think critically about?” The sky is the limit here—you can think critically about all sorts of things. You can think critically about any subject, concept, idea, issue, problem, position, and event. You can also think critically about objects and media, such as movies, books, songs, news, and speeches. Other examples of things commonly thought about from a critical level include laws, proposals, political platforms, and politicians. Big decisions, such as buying a car, deciding on a major in college, or moving to a new location are also commonly thought about from a critical level. In truth, anything can be thought about from a critical level.

Let’s look at a practical example. Imagine that you’ve spent the last six months working a job and saving money for a new car. You’ve narrowed your choices down to two different cars: a large SUV or a compact sedan. Each vehicle costs the same. Which one do you choose?

On the one hand, the SUV bears your favorite color. The SUV also has a body design you think is cool, and a DVD player for passengers. On the other hand, while the sedan isn’t in the color you like most and it lacks a cool body shape and DVD player, it would save you a significant amount of money on gasoline, and you would likely need to repair the vehicle infrequently as it is known for its reliability.

In this scenario, if you pick the SUV because its aesthetic features and DVD player excite you or make you happier than the more standard and economical sedan, you made your decision based on emotional response. Your choice is less a product of critical thinking and more a product of emotional thinking. That’s not to say this is wrong thinking; it is merely different. Now, since this choice is a significant one—vehicles are expensive purchases—you might take pause and weigh the factual evidence before you. Perhaps you sit down and write a list of each vehicle’s pros and cons. Here, you’re breaking down each object into its important parts—often a crucial step in critical thinking. Once you’ve listed the pros and cons of each, you’ll likely find it easier to weigh the important attributes of one vehicle against the other. In doing so, you might discover that the DVD player, while exciting, would hardly be used. Perhaps you rarely find yourself transporting many passengers. You might also realize that the vehicle’s color and body shape, while cooler to you than the sedan’s, are ultimately less important than the benefits the sedan would offer, namely the vehicle’s reported reliability and fuel economy. Of course, after listing and considering each vehicle’s pros and cons, you still might decide to choose the SUV. Whether you choose the SUV or the sedan here, your choice is the product of critical thinking, as opposed to the emotional decision described above.

Inquiry

Critical thinking has wide-reaching uses and benefits. Critical thinking helps us, for example, re-assess our own positions on topics, sometimes allowing us to uncover preconceived biases or guiding us to empathize with experiences that are otherwise unfamiliar to us. Here is another example: Let’s say that you eat a meat-based diet and you have a friend who recently switched to a vegetarian, or plant-based, diet. At first, you question your friend’s choice. Perhaps your position on this subject is that a vegetarian diet lacks proper nutrition for the body, or perhaps you believe that a meat-based diet is perfectly ethical. One day, you ask your friend why they changed their diet. They simply say that “Eating a meat-based diet is unethical and eating a plant-based diet offers adequate nutrition.” You don’t want to just take your friend’s word for it, so you begin to look up some of your friend’s claims. This is a form of inquiry, an important part of critical thinking, academic reading, and academic writing.

Inquiry involves asking questions about topics in order to learn more information about them. We ask all kinds of questions when we inquire: we might ask why something is the way that it is, how it came to be this way, who supports or opposes this topic (and why), where this thing came from, what this thing’s history is, and so on. If it’s helpful to remember, you can think of inquiry as involving who, what, where, when, why, and how types of questions. We ask questions about topics in order to learn more information, and this information can help us make a more objective, reasoned judgment about that topic. When we think critically, we can move beyond surface-level thoughts about things because critical thinking looks deeper than the outer layers of a subject. We try to resist thinking about a topic as “just the way it is,” or explaining the world as operating a certain way based on surface-level ideas. Critical thinking avoids saying something like “That thing is the way that it is, because it’s always been that way.” Inquiry, then, helps us uncover the inner workings and components of the subjects we consider, and allows us to think about these subjects closely and critically.

In the vegetarian and meat-based diet example above, you don’t just accept your friend’s word. Instead, you begin an inquiry into the topic. Perhaps you do some research online, looking up reasons why vegetarian diets might or might not be better than meat-based diets. Perhaps you look into why someone might say that meat-based diets are unethical. In your inquiry, you learn about factory farms and discover that some such farms treat animals poorly. Perhaps you also discover that there is research supporting your friend’s claim that vegetarian diets offer adequate nutrition for the body. After collecting this information, then, you begin to think about your own eating habits. Here, you might decide to change what you eat. Maybe you decide to switch over to a vegetarian diet because you disagree with the way animals are treated in factory farms, and you have evidence to support that such a diet will not lack in nutrition. Alternatively, perhaps you decide you’ll continue eating animal meat, but that you’ll think critically about the companies you purchase food from, instead opting to purchase meat from companies that don’t treat their animals poorly (something you learn, again, through inquiry and critical thinking). On the other hand, perhaps your inquiry didn’t reveal the above information. Rather, you found that there was no evidence of poor animal treatment on factory farms, and that there is evidence suggesting vegetarian diets lack proper nutrition. Here, you might decide not to change your eating habits at all. Or perhaps you did discover that animals are treated poorly on farms and you found evidence supporting your friend’s claim about vegetarian nutrition, yet you ultimately decide that you would not like to adopt a vegetarian diet. In all cases, you’ve arrived at your decision through critical thinking, which requires your inquiry into the debate between vegetarian diets and meat-based diets.

In your writing classes, you’ll likely be asked to think critically about contemporary social, cultural, and political issues. You might even be asked to think critically about your own life experiences. That said, you might still wonder why people bother thinking critically about the world. What’s wrong with thinking subjectively? There’s nothing inherently wrong with such thinking—and this textbook is not arguing that subjective thinking is wrong. Instead, we can envision critical thinking as a kind of thinking in a toolbox of other forms, used when considering things that benefit from a more objective approach.

The social, cultural, and political issues that you’ll explore in your writing class will likely be real and pressing issues that you and others all across the world live with or face. Sometimes, these issues are issues that we might want to change or improve. Approaching these issues from an objective and critical position can increase our chances at effecting change or improving them. This is because the objective, rational approach that is a product of critical thinking is founded more on facts, reason, and evidence—more tangible supporting points—than opinions or emotions.

Continue Reading: 2.2 Introduction to Academic Reading