9A The How To's of Critical Thinking

           Critical thinking has come up a lot in my Sociology class, and I never really understood what it was or why it was important until then. I have learned that to be a good critical thinker a person needs to be able to put their feelings aside and think logically, not with their heart but rather with their head. There are different types of ways a person can use critical thinking, for instance they can use to try and analyze information or to try and formulate an argument. When using critical thinking to evaluate an argument there are standards that a person has to follow; they need to be precise, accurate, clear, and the argument must be consistent and logical. Critical thinking is something that I think all professors here at Southern want us as students to get in the habit of using because it will help us to understand the information better and intern be able to use it more wisely in the future.

            Critical thinking is not something that is just going to come easy to us, it takes time and practice to fully understand it. To think critically I think we need to instead of just reading something we have to interact with it. Summarizing what we read is not good enough anymore, we need to understand what it was about, but we need to analyze, figure why this was important and what was the point of us reading it, what are we gaining from it. When it comes to classes that I am taking, I find that it is not just important for me to use critical thinking, but almost necessary. For instance, in my Online Communications course, critical thinking plays an important role in it. In this class I have to use critical thinking to better understand the information and be able to evaluate what makes someone do or use the types of that they do. In my opinion, a student who doesn’t use critical thinking that often in the courses, then they are not going to be as successful as those students who do use it.