How to practice writing critically

To demonstrate your critical thinking in your own writing,

• consider and make arguments and counter-arguments to explain the reasoning you have on a particular topic

• Determine the strengths and weaknesses of the available evidence, including its limitations, and how it may relate to the country setting that is described in the assignment

• You may find particular phrases helpful in expressing your points and arguments 

An example:

This resource is a good checklist  to help you think about your own writing and if you are using a critical approach- read through this after you have prepared a discussion post or written your first assignment draft. Can you recognise any common errors that you make when writing? How can you adapt what you write? And finally, you can assess your own assignment plan or discussion post for critical thinking by asking yourself these questions:

• have I answered the question?
• have I structured the text so there is a logical order?
• have I given examples to illustrate the points I make?
• for each theme you want to cover, is it clear what claims I am making?
• for each claim, do I have at least one or more pieces of evidence?What is the nature of the evidence?  How, when, where, and by whom was it collected? 
• have I discussed the key limitations and strengths of your evidence.  If you are not able to judge the quality of the evidence (perhaps because information is not there), it is important to say that you do not have sufficient information - demonstrating that you know what information is missing also demonstrates critical thinking.

Refer to discussion post questions

Remember - its a useful part of learning to write and then re-write. It does not mean failure. You can often learn more from feedback, and redrafting, than if you had no feedback and had no areas to improve.  There are lots of people that can offer early feedback on your assignment plans, and early drafts.  But the key message here is to seek advice early.  If you are someone who prefers to leave things to the last minute, then try and set yourself smaller deadlines, including a deadline when you will complete a plan, and then your first draft.  

In academic work, you will be required to demonstrate a higher level of critical and clear thinking.  Critical thinking involves suspending your own opinions and beliefs, and thinking about a problem afresh, and being able to judge the quality of information you read and hear.  Too often, one hears or reads the opinion of others repeated as fact.  Such an unquestioning approach is clearly not appropriate in academic work.  Instead, one needs to carefully consider a question or topic from different angles, question one’s information sources, bring external knowledge and information to bear, and be aware of one’s own potential biases.

 A particularly helpful collection of resources on Critical Thinking is on the Leeds University site – do watch the video and tutorial, and have a look at the document “Description vs. critical analysis” (also on Student Corner).

The Open University has a useful resource on Extending and Developing Your Thinking Skills.  Look especially at sections 8 and 9.  The questions in section 9 in particular can guide your reading and note-taking, and will help you construct critical commentaries and arguments in your assignment.

For critically reading research literature in particular, you can apply check questions to different types of research studies, to help you elicit any problems or issues with the study you are reading, and assess its applicability to your own context.  The Critical Appraisal Skills Programme (look under ‘Tools and Checklists’) has a useful set of checklists for different study designs (you may have already found these in the Topic 1 resources).