College students are often required to craft critical thinking essays. This type of essay is a preferred requirement because unlike narrative and review essays, critical thinking essays encourage students to think about the meaning or value of specific texts. Students also need to share their thoughts and analyze important issues. With this type of essay, a student’s writing skill and ability to craft a thoughtful and logical argument is tested and developed. For starters, here are the basic steps in writing a critical thinking essay.
Think of a Good Topic
Most of the time, critical thinking essays are responses to opinion pieces, literary works or essays of famous people. If you are writing an essay as a response or reaction to a book or piece you have read, you have to go over it at least twice and outline its main parts. Carefully choose a specific point or idea to expound on your paper. If you will be allowed to choose your topic, go for an issue that you can trim down to a few baseline arguments. Then opt for a single argument that you can exhaustively evaluate in your essay and one-to-one writing help from essay writing service – ThePensters.com.
Develop a Central Argument
Your essay should have a central argument or a thesis, which will be the basis of your entire paper. It should be strong and gives specific information about your chosen topic. It should also cover your primary arguments and go hand in hand with the author’s arguments that you are responding to. You may go against or in agreement to an author’s arguments and this will give a succinct preview of the direction which your paper will take.
Create an outline of your paper by selecting arguments which support your work. Do a little research for you to have evidences to support your paper. If it is merely analytical, you will still need to present logical issues to favor your analysis of the topic which you are reacting or responding to. In case you are comparing different literary works, you may point out the similarities and the differences in your essay. Avoid deviating arguments and emotional plays; rather stick with the most convincing evidences and points that support your essay.
Writing Your Draft
There can be many ways to compose your essay but the most telling is that you summarize your main arguments in the first few paragraphs if you are reacting or responding to a literary piece. If you are developing your own arguments, draft your ideas in the first two paragraphs of your work. The following paragraphs should carry distinct arguments or evidences to support your points.
Anticipate Objections
Your reader might have different thoughts about your work so it will be a good idea to outline possible criticisms that they may raise. You may devote a paragraph of your work explaining why these objections do not apply and continue with your conclusion to summarize your arguments. You can raise new points for further study or research such as unresolved issues and lacking evidences.
Do not forget to cite your sources using the style required by your professor or instructor. You need to provide a list of your sources that you have used in your essay to acknowledge the authors.