Until it comes to academic writing, that is. Many students fail to realise their full potential when it comes to essay writing, usually because they can't seem to find their way out of the descriptive cul-de-sac they make for themselves. If they could only find it within themselves to write critically, they would earn higher grades. So why do some find critical writing such a problem?
Firstly, knowing your field of study is an important factor in academic writing, and some students simply don't trawl deeply enough. If you know one theory, but are unaware that it has been challenged by another theory, you only have half the story, and you then find yourself on the periphery of the discourse. Knowing the weaknesses of a particular theory will only come from gaining an insight into how that theory came about, and understanding how it can be applied in particular contexts. So to be able to write critically, you need to have read around your subject - you need to have seen the 'big picture'.
Knowledge of your field is not enough though. Critical thinking is crucial to the process. You can think without writing, but you cannot write without thinking. It follows that critical writing comes from critical thinking. If you can't think critically, you won't be able to write critically. Students need to learn to think in a particular mode to be able to do this. One of the top tips I can give to anyone who wishes to write critically, is first to think critically about what they are reading, and learn to ask questions of the text. It is a kind of conversation the reader has with the author. Best questions to ask are questions such as 'how does this writer justify what s/he is saying?' or 'What support does this writer have for their ideas?' You may like to dig deeper and find out how their evidence was obtained. Were the data they used obtained from a particular sample, and were they biased, or contrived in some way? Is the writer being totally objective, or is there some hidden agenda in there?
Academic writing has the capability to generate a great deal of angst. For example, students often get hung up on whether they should be using the personal pronoun in their essays and projects. My view is that there is nothing wrong with it, provided the writer is not expressing their own unsupported opinion. Writing 'I reflected upon this experience and subsequently adjusted my professional practice...' is justifiable, but simply writing 'I believe that ....' is not enough.
In his blog post 5 ways to develop critical thinking in ICT, Terry Freedman offers some great advice on how teachers can probe understanding by repeatedly asking 'why?', or 'how do you know that?' If students can do this during the process of writing up their assignments, many of their descriptive, lack lustre passages could be transformed into dynamic critical, reflective and analytic pieces of writing. One aspect of marking assignments I find particularly unpalatable is when students churn out the same old, bland writing which merely represents what has been covered in the module, and not what they have learnt and critically applied to their practice.
Another pet hate I have is disjointed essay writing. Some students seem to think that they will impress the marker if they pepper their writing with copious direct quotations from the set readin lists. All they end up achieving is a series of unconnected quotations with no particular thread of reasoning running through them. Better by far is the art of paraphrasing key points from published authors and then applying these to support an argument that you are developing. Even better still is the ability to counterpoise these paraphrased elements to form a finely balanced discussion that shows you have thought deeply about all perspectives associated with your argument, and can logically organise them. Whichever way you examine essay writing though, it all tends to comes back to the ability to think critically.
Probably the best form of critical thinking emerges from dialogue within the community of practice. Carr and Kemmis (1997) highlighted the importance of dialectical thinking. Based on Hegel's realist philosophies, Carr and Kemmis propose that the tensions between opposing perspectives, where opponents take the stance of 'thesis' and 'antithesis', usually result in some kind of 'synthesis' of ideas. Although this can often be a compromise between the two opposing perspectives, more often than not, it is also a merging of the strengths of both arguments to form an even stronger, newer thesis. Development of such world views are the basis of all critical learning, and require the student to be open to new ideas, and open to being challenged in their own beliefs, values and thought processes.
Reference
Carr, W. and Kemmis, S. (1997) Being Critical: Education, knowledge and action research. London: Falmer Press.
Image by Enrique Sanabria
Everyone's a critic by Steve Wheeler is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.
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