Critical Thinking Skills For Dummies

Chapter 4

Assessing Your Thinking Skills

In This Chapter

Trying out your Critical Thinking skills

Steering clear of thinking errors

Appreciating the value of emotional and creative intelligences

I do not know what I may appear to the world, but to myself I seem to have been only like a boy playing on the sea-shore, and diverting myself in now and then finding a smoother pebble or a prettier shell than ordinary, whilst the great ocean of truth lay all undiscovered before me

— Isaac Newton (as recorded in Memoirs of the Life, Writings, and Discoveries of Sir Isaac Newton, 1855, by David Brewster)

Newton was a pretty clever chap, but a key part of his cleverness was being open-minded and curious, and thinking in unconventional ways. These are the hallmarks and the key skills of the Critical Thinker. And the good news? Everyone can develop them. So, if you can read only one chapter in the book — make it this one! It offers an overview of all the aspects of thinking that people often overlook. For too long courses supposed to help you think have plodded through various kinds of ‘rules’ and exercises that use only a tiny, narrow kind of ‘thinking’.

In this chapter, I explain why these ...