How to Apply Critical Thinking Skills
Critical thinking skills set you apart from the crowd. At work, for example, when you apply critical thinking skills to the task at hand, you can assess the situation and come up with new ideas or find solutions to challenges. To think critically about written materials, you must examine how you think about subjects and open your mind to suspicion as well as different perspectives.
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Instructions
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Approach the material with reason rather than emotion. Critical thinkers interpret texts on the basis of evidence, following a trail of logic and trying to discern the author's motives. Recognizing bias, prejudices, assumptions, emotion, opinion and point of view are important critical thinking skills.
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Ask questions about the texts. If you find a statement in the material, ask, why would the author make this statement? What are his motivations? Examine and evaluate the facts and evidence behind statements the author makes.
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Challenge the text beyond your first reaction. Critical thinkers examine their own reactions and try to understand why they had those initial thoughts. For example, a non-critical thinker may look at Charlotte Bronte's "Jane Eyre" and suggest that Jane is boring. A critical thinker takes that response and thinks about why, in a 20th century society, a reader might call the character boring when in the Victorian era she would have been considered independent and progressive.
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Place yourself within the perspective of the material, author or subject, then try to imagine alternative responses to the text from the subject's point of view. Be open-minded as you think from this new point of view and reason with the opposition.
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Resources
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