CRITICAL THINKING AND ACADEMIC WRITING

If you think of the “academy” not as a single university, but as all the universities and places of learning, across the world, put together, you would start off with a collection of things and people: scholars; students; buildings; classrooms; etc. However, the “academy” is also something else: it’s an ongoing conversation concerning all of the knowledge, in any discipline, that we have accumulated up to this point, in our history. That conversation happens in classrooms, in offices, in conferences, and in publication. However, the place it happens the most is in writing . A physicist writes. An economist writes. A psychologist writes. A biologist writes. An astromer writes. This writing continues, and the conversation continues. With few exceptions, the primary activity, within the academy, is writing.

                 Sometimes this knowledge produces things: cures for diseases, new computer programs, more sophisticated technologies—but before those things are produced, they are written and shared with others in the field. Whether the thing is made, or not, it is the idea that is treated as property. That’s why, at universities, people refer to “intellectual property”—and that property is claimed, and held, through academic publication. Critical thinking serves a lot of purposes, but its main purpose is not directly involved with making arguments. It operates in the background of arguments, encouraging the thinker to pay attention to the social, ideological, epistemological , and historical forces that operate, often invisibly, all around us. These forces shape how we understand such things as other people, objects, issues, the world, institutions, language, and ourselves. In other words, they are the things that help to form the box that tends to structure our thinking.

                 In relationship to this conversation, critical thinking and writing operate in a specific kind of relationship. While it may sound strange, critical thinking functions not to answer a question, but to answer to the way you are asking a question. Critical thinking is about the very act of inquiry. It’s about being curious about everyday things, forming questions to which we do not yet have answers, and staying honest in trying to answer those questions. It is about taking nothing for granted. It’s about regulating our own thought processes, so that we proceed in a way that is sound and ethical. Critical thinking is, in essence, about cultivating a kind of active and careful curiosity.