The section “Generating Ideas: Writing as a Way of Thinking” on pages 15 through 22 of From Critical Thinking to Argument is required reading for this assignment. The rest of the chapter, pages 22 through 39, is optional and is very informative as it provides examples for you to study.
WRITE: After reading the assigned pages and lessons, write a short response (200-250 words) in which you continue thinking about the issue you discussed in last week’s assignment. I want you to think critically about the issue you’re tackling and demonstrate several ways of generating ideas about the issue you wrote about last week. They are:
- Point out a “eureka” idea from your previous assignment. It can be an idea you had written that you knew you had discovered and wrote out, an idea you had written but didn’t notice until later that it was something you discovered, an idea that occurred to you after you handed in your assignment and wish you had included, or an idea that you had to really think about to come up with.
- Confront an unfamiliar angle or perspective on your issue. Maybe you’ll ask a challenging question about the issue, maybe it makes sense to you to identify a problem or circumstance that you’re not seeing in the discussion that is ongoing on your issue, or maybe you want to point out how the ongoing discussion seems to be ignoring other important points of view.
- Write out sentence or two that shows how you are approaching the issue you’ve selected.
- Challenge yourself to explore the “classical topics” to come up with, invent, an original way to think and write about the issue you have selected.
I realize this seems challenging but you probably do this all the time without realizing it. I want you to make yourself more aware, more self-conscious of using sources to support and explore what you say about important issues and how you can contribute to and expand upon important issues.
