Name: WANG XIANG PG2

4/8/2013

Discuss the essay writing progress and evaluate the importance of each stage to what extent is critical thinking an integral part of the progress

Introduction

Essay is a piece of writing written from an author's personal point of view. However, nowadays, essay has become an important assessment to assess the achievement of students, especially the achievement of undergraduates and postgraduates. So it is crucially significant for these students to know how to write good essays without plagiarism.

Critical thinking is an essential skill while students writing their essays. ‘Critical thinking is the art of analyzing and evaluating thinking with a view to improving it’ ( Richard and Linda; 2007). To generate critical thinking, we can think from eight parts, say, identifying a topic, answering “what” questions, asking some questions and etc. In brief, there are three main stages of critical thinking while we writing our essays. They are description, analysis, evaluation. Significantly, critical thinking can be helpful for writing a good essay. However, it plays different roles in different stages of writing.

Therefore, in the following paragraphs, this essay will help you build a clearer conception of what extend is critical thinking an integral part of the essay writing progress and discuss it from research, planning and writing.

Research

Research is a process of steps used to collect and analyze information to increase our understanding of the topic of essay. It is the first stage of essay writing process and the most important stage in the process of writing an essay. It includes five progresses such as analyzing the title, brain storm initial ideas, searching for relevant information, reading the information critically, making note and noting the references.

Critical thinking plays an extremely important role in these five aspects especially in reading and noting. It is the key for us to establish our main point after brainstorming the initial idea of the title. In this aspect, ‘we must know how to apply everything we already know and feel, to evaluate our own thinking’ (Norris, 2003). Similarly, critical thinking not only helps us to make notes but also helps us to select information. For example, research includes reading for journals and books, but it does not necessarily to take so many irrelevant notes from the essays without critical thinking. Therefore, the critical approach can be very helpful at making notes. In addition, critical thinking is also a crucially important ability for us to search for relevant information. If we don’t look for information by critical thinking we would never know what we should look for. ‘Critical choices involve selection and selection is made easier if we are good at categorizing information’ (Cottrell, 2005).

In short, research can’t be separated from critical thinking.

Planning Planning is in the second stage of essay writing progress which means the process of making plans for writing (Oxford dictionaries). To analyze if critical thinking is an indivisible part of planning, planning should be divided in six parts. These are considering about the essay’s structure, choosing related information, preparing details of the outline, checking the correlation of all information, writing clear topic sentences and optimize the organization of the essay.

Name: WANG XIANG PG2

4/8/2013

Critical thinking is not essential in some of these parts such as planning the structure because logically writing should be based on relative mode but not just planning in casual. Nevertheless, it indeed has some effects in choosing related information, preparing details of the outline and checking the correlation of all information because the information and details are components of the whole context. What’s more, critical thinking is significantly important in context because our thought and performances are easily affected by the context. ‘There is reason to think that context will also affect critical thinking performance’ (Norris, 1984). Evidently, planning can influence critical thinking in some progresses and vice versa.

In brief, even though critical thinking doesn’t influence every progresses of planning, there is still an interaction relationship between planning and critical thinking to some extent.

Writing

The last stage of writing essay is writing. Writing is a form of written essay. It depends on good research and careful planning. Writing is composed of writing first draft, proofreading, editing, writing final draft, correcting mistakes and checking presentation.

Writing has a weak link with critical thinking. One way to know if critical thinking is an integral part of writing is to analyze the relationships among them. Establishment of the order of each progress is necessary. Firstly, critical thinking is not so important in writing first draft and proofreading. This is primarily due to the fact that writing is just base on the planning stage, what we need to do is just logically reorganize some parts of the context. Similarly, in theory, proofreading may need evaluation, but when we do a good research and planning well at previous two stages we can get around critical thinking of proofread. At the following stages, critical thinking is also useless in editing, writing final draft and checking presentation. Because, there is a framework of format when we editing our essay. At the same time, there are just some correcting works in writing final draft. What’s more we can use our common sense to check the presentation in essay without any critical thinking.

In summary, we can do writing stage even without critical thinking when we have a good research and planning because writing is depending on the previous two stages.

Conclusion

In conclusion, there is a strong link between research and critical thinking, while it slightly weakens between planning and critical thinking. What’s more, there is rarely link between writing and critical thinking at essay writing progress.

References:

1: Dr. Richard Paul and Dr. Linda Elder (2007) The Miniature Guide to Critical Thinking concepts AND TOOLS: Near University of California at Berkeley.

2: Norris, S.P. (2003) Synthesis of Research on critical Thinking. Available at /ct/synthCT.pdf (Assessed: 4 August 2013).

3: (Cottrell, Stella, 2005), Critical Thinking Skills, Palgrave Macmillan Ltd

4: Oxford dictionaries (2013). Available at:

(Accessed: 9 August 2013)

5: Norris, S. P. (1984) ‘Defining Observational Competence.’ Science Education, 68: pp129-142(online)(Accessed: 9 August 2013)

 

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