Reading and Writing for Critical Thinking

I know there is a system of teaching critical thinking named as this post’s title, but it is a topic for a separate discussion. I would like to discuss how critical thinking can be used to improve one’s writing and reading.

Critical thinking for reading isn’t only a text analysis tool. You can use it to understand texts better and faster without a careful analysis. If you know how to identify biases and fallacies, how to check and evaluate arguments, how to look for final conclusions and for initial premises, you can look for specific clues in a text. After finding several clues you can look for some more in specific places and this can clues can be details you are looking for.

This initial review can help you understand a basic structure of a text and also understand do you need read the whole text of a substantial part of it. Or probably you can stop working on a text to find another one, or just postpone reading your current text. In this case critical thinking can help you make a decision what to do.

You can use critical thinking for writing too. First, you can use it for planning your text and for researching sources for it. Next, you can create a logical structure to support your conclusions. After writing your text you can use the same things I mentioned for reading to read and evaluate your own text. You can also use critical thinking to find and choose a good editor to help you improve your text. Of course you have to decide first do you need an editor or you can work without another person.

If before or during writing you need to conduct an extensive research, critical thinking can help you here too. You probably need to read many different texts and to plan experiments. I have discussed reading, so I should briefly mention experimenting. As you could probably imagined, you can use critical thinking there too, to plan, carry on, and analyze results. After that you can return to your writing.