Reason to Write: Applying Critical Thinking to Academic Writing

Reason to Write: Applying Critical Thinking to Academic Writing
by Gina L. Vallis
Paperback: 210 pages
Published: 2011
ISBN-10: 1935987097
ISBN-13: 978-1935987093


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.

Contents:

SECTION I : CRITICAL QUESTION, CONTEXT, DEFINITION
CHAPTER 1: A REASON TO WRITE
CHAPTER 2: CRITICAL THINKING
CHAPTER 3: QUESTIONS IN CONTEXT
CHAPTER 4: SAYING WHAT WE MEAN- MEANING WHAT WE SAY

SECTION II: ANALYSIS, ORGANIZING PRINCIPLE, ARRANGEMENT
CHAPTER 5: PERFORMING ANALYSIS
CHAPTER 6: FINDING COMMON GROUND
CHAPTER 7: ARRANGEMENT

SECTION III: RHETORIC, REVISION, PUBLICATION
CHAPTER 8: COMMUNICATION AND RHETORIC
CHAPTER 9: FEEDBACK AND REVISION
CHAPTER 10: JOINING THE CONVERSATION