Steps for Developing Critical Thought and organizing your critique

by Emily Parker Helping students since 2006

Critical thinking abilities is not some the random thing that you can develop without carefully understanding what is it, what are the steps involved, and how it should be organized? This article will give you a clear sense about the steps involved and how to organize a critique. If you think these steps are overwhelming then you should bank on assignment help Melbourne.

Generally for writing a critical piece or an essay, you will have some literature on which you have to base your critical review. The following steps will help you understand how to proceed with the review:

• First of all, you should list down the strengths and weaknesses or limitations pertaining to the broad topic of the review.

• All issues may not have strengths and weakness, then look for advantages and disadvantages, or costs and benefits of the issue.

• Then ideally you should employ an analytical framework that can help you analyze the issue in a comprehensive manner. You can make use SWOT analysis technique or PESTLE (Political, economical, social, Technological, legal, and environmental) analysis of the topic. You should familiarize yourself with an example of SWOT or PESTLE to understand all the nuances these techniques entails before applying it.

• Then you should ask yourself a series of question regarding the way the concerned topic is dealt in the literature:

o Are the arguments based on facts or based on opinions?

o Does the proposed theory come from a singular perspective or it encompasses multiple ones.

• After these questions, you should try to put yourself in the shoe of the author to be able to answer to the following questions:

o What are the political or other motivations of the author to choose this topic?

o Does his evaluations are free from his motivations?

o Is the evidence convincing enough?

• Except these you must ask questions like:

o Does the theory presented logically explain the outcome or the conclusions?

o Is there any recent studies that contradict the finding of the concerned study?

o Can another person repeat the same study and reach to the conclusions reached by the authors in the chosen example?

o Whether the limitations of the study are highlighted sufficiently

Organizing Your Critique: As critical thinking does not ensure that you can organize your critical essay and if you struggle with organizing and writing a critical essay then look for help with assignment in Melbourne. The main thing that you have to decide here how you logically organize various pros and cons points you have jotted down about the literature. One or a mix of the following strategies can be thebest way forward:

• Write a supporting point followed by the point which is directly opposing the same point. The advantage of this structure is that it allows you to highlight your point twice: once at the beginning and then again when you summarize it while writing the point against it.

• The other strategy is just the opposite, where you write the opposing point first and then the supporting point. This strategy actually helps you justify your point through demonstrating how well it is countering the opposing point. Always remember that you can take assistance of an essay writing service to help you decide which strategy to choose.

• The other strategy is based on the importance of various points. You can choose to express the most central point first, then moving towards the least central point. This strategy is usually known as inductive reasoning.

• In contrary, if you start with the least central point to end with most central one then it is called deductive reasoning.