CRITICAL THINKING and CREATIVE WRITING
Critical thinking engages students’ reasoning capabilities-and their creativity. Being able to reason requires imagination and vision. Good writers interest us not just for their descriptive techniques, for instance, but for their perspectives, their ways of looking at what they observe or experience, and the ways that they relate their perspectives to human experience in general. Many students will respond ‘no’ when asked whether or not they find writing essays or research papers a creative activity. Fiction writing, they believe, engages the creative process and produces ‘interesting’ material, whereas non-fiction writing, such as essays, they seem to think, are ‘serious,’ and thus, ‘boring.’ Perhaps their beliefs arise from their own writing experiences: writing about dragons may have seemed fun, while writing about summer vacation may have seemed a chore. The summer vacation essay, however, might prove more entertaining to the reader than the dragon tale, especially if a student were taught how to describe a vista or relate the vacation experience to other life experiences. No two people can describe the Grand Canyon in the exact same terms. To tell an audience what you saw when you looked at the canyon walls requires that you re-create the scene from memory, and that is a creative act.
Students will probably not be assigned the ‘what-I-did-on-my-summer vacation’ essay in their college composition classes, but they will be assigned essays that call for narrative or descriptive techniques in some parts of their papers. They will also be asked to write arguments in which they will be making ‘claims.’ One of the best ways to support a claim in an argument is the ‘example,’ including the ‘invented situation.’ Inventing situations requires imagination and vision-in short, creativity. Writing an argument against decriminalization of marijuana, a student might want to show that legalization of the drug could legitimize it to the extent that Americans would adopt the same attitude toward the drug that they do toward alcohol-they would expect to be able to buy packs of it at Shop-A-Lot and toss it into their grocery sacks with their potato chips and yogurt. People have yet to experience or observe these behaviors, of course, but they can certainly envision them. What problem a writer foresees with purchasing marijuana at Shop-A-Lot, he or she must explain to the reader, to be sure; and thanks to the ability to reason, a student should be able to offer logical explanations that will persuade an audience that decriminalization might or might not be a good idea.
When we ask students to think critically about a topic or issue, we are usually asking them to look at it from other perspectives, to analyze with care a topic or issues before making judgments or drawing conclusions. We also expect that the judgments that they make or the conclusions that they draw are rooted in logic, not bias, prejudice, narrow-mindedness, or fallacious reasoning. A hastily drawn conclusion based upon too little evidence, such as a single experience of the writer, is a logical fallacy, and shows a lack of the ability to think critically and to think well. Making the claim that having a full-time job while being a full-time college student is beneficial to the student based solely upon the writer’s experience of working full-time and going to school full-time cannot wholly support the claim that working full-time and going to school full-time is good for everyone. A sample of one, the writer, is too little evidence upon which to base that conclusion. As instructors of writing arguments, you show students how to avoid fallacies in logic and reasoning, and how to build solid, valid arguments.
Students entering English 101 rarely bring critical thinking and argumentative skills to their writing; in fact, much of the semester is spent teaching components of composition, such as how to write a thesis or develop a paragraph, since many students lack the preparation needed to write expository essays that meet college-level expectations. At some point during the semester, students will need to be introduced to argument, however. What they learn in your class they can take with them to English 102, the course in which argument skills are central to most assignments, and to other courses in which written work is assigned. Because you will also be grading students on their ability to think well, logically, and imaginatively, teaching students critical thinking skills will produce the kind of writing in papers that you and other faculty expect from college-level writers.
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URL: http://www.siue.edu/ENGLISH/Comp_Manual/critical_thinking.html
Published by: Department of English Language and Literature
Last Update: July 13, 2003 by English Web Manager
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