Critical Thinking Skills For Dummies

Chapter 10

Cultivating Your Critical Writing Skills

In This Chapter

Structuring your writing for clarity

Knowing and addressing your audience

Walking your readers through the issues

Explanations exist; they have existed for all time; there is always a well-known solution to every human problem — neat, plausible, and wrong.

—HL Mencken (‘The Divine Afflatus’, New York Evening Mail, 1917)

This chapter is all about applying Critical Thinking skills where they belong best — in writing. You get an overview of how to write effectively and also an ‘inside view’, as I explain the sorts of things that help to make writing, especially academic writing, clear, concise and successful. In the process, you really get into the nuts and bolts of Critical Thinking.

In this chapter, you can find out how to structure your writing to make its points clearer as well as about the ‘who, what and where’ factors that are vital to guiding your arguments. I dish up some tasty tips on preparation and research, and describe how to home in quickly on the textual clues in writing — by being aware of the key terms and words.

Finally (and that's a straightforward textual clue to flag the end of these introductory ...