14 What is Critical Thinking?
You’ve learned that actively reading in college helps you to:
- Improve engagement
- Strengthen comprehension
- Retain important information
- Interpret the meaning of a text
You’ve also learned that writing with clarity in college helps you to:
- Organize thoughts
- Use revision strategies
- Proofread your work
- Communicate clearly with your reader
Some may see these two activities as separate, but reading and writing go hand in hand. They integrate as you think critically. Critical thinking is the ability to analyze, and evaluate a topic in order to make a decision or solve a problem. For instance:
- You read a text message, you think about how to respond, you sort out your thoughts, then you respond by writing a text message
- You read a book, write down your notes to analyze the key points, determine your own point of view, and then organize and draft your essay
- You read and annotate your textbook, read a set of questions and think about the connections in the text, synthesize your ideas and those of the author, and answer the questions in writing a thoughtful response
- You read an article, analyze the author’s point of view versus your point of view, and compose a written response
In this section of the book, you’ll learn about how to integrate reading and writing:
- Paraphrase
- Summarize
- Synthesize
- Analyze
You’ll also learn the elements of the rhetorical situation. Critical thinkers consider the rhetorical situation as they actively read and write. Here are the key elements:
- Context
- Writer
- Purpose
- Audience
- Text
“Thinking, reading, and writing are all forms of relationship–when you read, you enter into dialogue with an author about the subject at hand; when you write, you address an imaginary reader, testing ideas…Critical thinking is always a matter of dialogue and debate…” (Colombo, Gary, at el. Rereading America, Bedford/St. Martin’s, 2013)