Importance of critical thinking in literature
Critical thinking is required for critical writing. Your writing will include critical reading and reflection on written texts.
Your ability to use a text to develop your own arguments is based on your critical reading and thinking about it. You create judgments and interpretations of other people’s ideas, arguments, and claims provided in the texts you read as a critical thinker and writer. The idea is to read for pleasure rather than for information. Instead, read to find new ways of thinking about the topic.
Importance of critical thinking in literature
How to read literature critically
- Determine the text’s key claims or purpose (its thesis). A critical reading strives to identify and evaluate the development and defense of these essential claims.
- Begin to make some contextual judgments.
- Is the text intended for a specific audience?
- Who is it conversing with?
- What historical period is it written in?
- Recognize the different types of reasoning used in the text.
- What terms are defined and how are they used?
- Is the text based on one or more theories?
- Is there a methodology in place?
- If a certain concept, theory, or method is invoked, how is the data organized and interpreted using that concept, theory, or approach?
- What methods has the author used to break down the material?
- Examine the evidence used in the text, such as supporting facts, examples, and so on. Because supporting evidence is so important to an argument, consider the following types of evidence:
- Statistical?
- Literary?
- Historical?
- What sources does the evidence come from?
- Are these primary or secondary sources?
- Evaluating critical reading is a possibility. If your account for and make a series of judgments about how a text is argued, your reading of it is already critical. Some tasks may also demand you to evaluate an argument’s strengths and shortcomings.
Read: Contribution of Socrates and evaluation on his death
By Ador
