Critical Reading and Writing

CSCI102 - Systems

ITCS905 - Systems

MCS9102 - Systems

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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)

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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?

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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?

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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

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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

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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

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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?

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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?

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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)

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Analyse the argument

• Sometimes (not always), the conclusion will be meant to follow deductively

• Other times the argument will not be so tight

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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."

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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?

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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?

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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

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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.

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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.

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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