Critical Thinking

Critical thinking is "the examination and testing of suggested solutions to see whether they will work."

Critical thinking is "the art of thinking about your thinking while you are thinking in order to make your thinking better: more clear, more accurate, or more defensible."

"It also includes the ability to generate questions, construct, and recognize the structure of arguments, and adequately support arguments; define, analyze, and devise solutions for problems and issues; sort, organize, classify, correlate, and analyze materials and data; integrate information and see relationships; evaluate information, materials, and data by drawing inferences, arriving at reasonable and informed conclusions, applying understanding and knowledge to new and different problems, developing rational and reasonable interpretations, suspending beliefs and remaining open to new information, methods, cultural systems, values and beliefs and by assimilating information."

These three quotes describe best how I write my hypertexts for several reasons. When writing my hypertexts I start with a general introduction about the message I am trying to get across. By writing this general statement, I then see where I can go further, where I can create new connections. The second quote is the best description. As I am writing, I am constantly thinking of new ideas or areas that I want to incorporate into the work. The more I write, the more ideas come out and in the end I am able to create a cohesive work that takes the best arguments or points that I came up with while freely writing. After coming up with all the possibilities, I use the best ones to create the most logical and effective piece. By using this approach, I find that I am able to come up with the best and most logical conclusions than when I take the time to write out everything I want to say in an outline, then using that as the template for the writing. It doesn't allow for new ideas to come in or the creation of new pathways in the thinking. These new ideas tend to be the best ones and the most logical for my argument. By using this technique in my writing, I have found that I produce better work than the outline technique I used in the past.