Critical Reading and Writing

Critical Reading and Writing CSCI102 - Systems ITCS905 - Systems MCS9102 - Systems

Definitions • Analysis • The investigation of any production of the intellect, as a poem, tale, argument, philosophical system, so as to exhibit its component elements in simple form • Critical • Characterized by careful evaluation and judgment • Critical Analysis • An appraisal based on careful analytical evaluation

Critical Analysis • The ultimate end of analysis is a deeper understanding and a fuller appreciation of the literature • The purpose for writing a critique is to evaluate somebody's work (a book, an essay, a movie, a painting...) in order to increase your understanding of it • Writing a critical paper requires two steps: • Critical reading • Critical writing

Critical reading: • To read critically is to make judgements about how a text is argued • This is a highly reflective skill requiring you to "stand back" and gain some distance from the text you are reading

Critical reading: A Process • Identify the author's thesis and purpose • Analyse the structure of the passage by identifying all main ideas • Consult a dictionary or encyclopaedia to understand material that is unfamiliar to you • Make an outline of the work or write a description of it

Critical reading: A Process • Write a summary of the work • Determine the purpose, which could be: • To inform with factual material • To persuade with appeal to reason or emotions • To entertain (to affect people's emotions)

Critical reading: A Process • Evaluate the means by which the author has accomplished his purpose • If the purpose is to inform, has the material been presented clearly, accurately, with order and coherence? • If the purpose is to persuade, look for evidence, logical reasoning, contrary evidence • If the purpose was to entertain, determine how emotions are affected: does it make you laugh, cry, angry? Why did it affect you?

Critical reading: A Process • Consider the following questions: • How is the material organized? • Who is the intended audience? • What are the writer's assumptions about the audience? • What kind of language and imagery does the author use?

How Do I Read Looking for Ways of Thinking? • First determine the central claims or purpose of the text (its thesis) • A critical reading attempts to assess how these central claims are developed or argued • Critical reading occurs after some preliminary processes of reading • Begin by skimming research materials, especially introductions and conclusions, in order to strategically choose where to focus your critical efforts

How Do I Read Looking for Ways of Thinking? • Begin to make some judgements about context • What audience is the text written for? • Who is it in dialogue with? (This will probably be other scholars or authors with differing viewpoints.) • In what historical context is it written? • All these matters of context can contribute to your assessment of what is going on in a text

How Do I Read Looking for Ways of Thinking? • Distinguish the kinds of reasoning the text employs • What concepts are defined and used? • Does the text appeal to a theory or theories? • Is any specific methodology laid out? • If there is an appeal to a particular concept, theory, or method, how is that concept, theory, or method then used to organize and interpret the data? • You might also examine how the text is organized: • how has the author analysed (broken down) the material? • Be aware that different disciplines (i.e. history, sociology, philosophy, biology) will have different ways of arguing

How Do I Read Looking for Ways of Thinking? • Examine the evidence the text employs • Supporting evidence is indispensable to an argument • You are now in a position to grasp how the evidence is used to develop the argument and its controlling claims and concepts • The prior steps allow you to see evidence in its context • Consider the kinds of evidence that are used • What counts as evidence in this argument? • Is the evidence statistical? literary? historical? etc • From what sources is the evidence taken? • Are these sources primary or secondary?

How Do I Read Looking for Ways of Thinking? • Critical reading may involve evaluation • Your reading of a text is already critical if it accounts for and makes a series of judgments about how a text is argued • However, some essays may also require you to assess the strengths and weaknesses of an argument • If the argument is strong, why? • Could it be better or differently supported? • Are there gaps, leaps, or inconsistencies in the argument? • Is the method of analysis problematic? • Could the evidence be interpreted differently? • Are the conclusions warranted by the evidence presented? • What are the unargued assumptions? • Are they problematic? • What might an opposing argument be?

How Do I Read Looking for Ways of Thinking? • When highlighting a text or taking notes from it, teach yourself to highlight argument • Look for those places in a text where an author explains • Analytical moves • concepts used • how they are used • How conclusions are arrived at

How Do I Read Looking for Ways of Thinking? • Don't let yourself foreground and isolate facts and examples • No matter how interesting they may be • First, look for the large patterns that give purpose, order, and meaning to those examples • The opening sentences of paragraphs can be important to this task

Critical Summaries • A summary is essentially a tool to help you in the task of careful and critical reading • Once acquired, the habit of critical analysis will serve you in everything you read • You should make it a practice to continue writing such summaries for your own benefit even when you are not required to turn them in

Critical Summaries • What follows are some tips on how to go about it • Your summary should do two things: • Analyse the argument and exhibit its structure • Give a critical assessment of it

Analyse the argument • To exhibit the structure of an argument, you will distinguish: • Premises (the propositions that the argument requires you accept at the outset) • Conclusions (the thesis that the author is trying to get you to agree with)

Analyse the argument • Sometimes (not always), the conclusion will be meant to follow deductively • Other times the argument will not be so tight

Analyse the argument • It will often be useful to ferret out unargued assumptions • including especially unexpressed ones, which are needed for the argument to go through • Note that the premises don't necessarily come first • Often a writer, for reasons of convenience or style, will say not "A, therefore B," but "B, because A."

Analyse the argument • Pick out all and only the main points • Use a Top-Down approach: • First ask yourself what, in a sentence or two, is the point of the whole passage or article • In your summary, you can start with that brief statement • Then go on to each principal part of the argument, and repeat the process until you have got down to a level of detail adequate for the space available in your summary

Analyse the argument • If the passage is very long, there will obviously have to be less detail • Mastery of a text requires the ability to summarize it to any desired length • When something remains unclear, don't gloss it over, but draw attention to it

Analyse the argument • Pick out any "crux" or difficulty of interpretation • Don't be afraid of admitting that you don't understand something, but try to say as clearly as possible what you find had to understand, and why • Sharpen any difficulty found by offering alternative interpretations

Critical Assessment • Make very clear when you are no longer stating what your author says, but have come to your own critical assessment • Indicate briefly whether and why you think the premises and assumptions you have been asked to accept are • True or false • Plausible or implausible • If the argument is deductive, indicate whether it is valid • If it is not deductive say whether your find it acceptable, and if not, why

Critical Assessment • One way is to look for more or less remote consequences of the thesis that may turn out to be unacceptable • It is always a useful exercise to try as hard as you can to find good reasons to disagree with what a writer says, especially if you agree • Conversely, if you disagree with the conclusion, try hard to make up an independent defense of it

Critical Assessment • If the argument is bad, explain how: • Are one or more of the premises false? (This makes the argument unsound) • Does the conclusion follow? (This makes the argument invalid) • Does the argument rely on assumptions that are unacceptable, or arbitrary, or debatable?

Critical Assessment • Does the argument contain crucial ambiguities? • (An ambiguous word or phrase is one that has more than one possible meaning. This can foul up an argument!) • Is rhetoric substituted for argument at some crucial stage?

Critical Assessment • In addition, point out anything about the logic of the substance of the argument that seems to especially interesting • It can be interesting because you strongly agree or because you strongly disagree • In either case, you should try briefly to justify your view

Your Assignment • Read, summarise and provide a critical comment on the provided reading. The summary and critical comments are to be provided in sentence and paragraph format (no dot points) using your own words.

Your Assignment • The article is available electronically at • http://www.seanational.com.au/downloads/publications/Hourigan36-37.pdf • The assignment must be between 250-300 words in length • The assignment is to be submitted electronically through WebCT • Due date for submission of assignment is August 6 2004 5:00pm.

Your Assignment • Criteria for assessment of task 1 and suggested % weighting for each criteria • Summary of article clearly identifies ( 1.5 % ) • Author’s main argument/ main ideas • Some of the author’s supporting details, evidence for main ideas • Critical comment (0.5%) • Student provides critical comment on the reading • Grammatical accuracy (1.5%) • Summary and critical comment are written in paragraph form • Grammatically accurate sentence structure is used in the task • Free from plagiarism (1.5%) • Ideas in the summary are expressed in the student’s own words

Critical Reading and Writing