Get skills of Critical Thinking from Communicating

by Eri

     Reading and Writing would help me learn critical thinking skills. However, I think communicating would be more helpful than reading and writing in creating intellectual engagement. I have several reasons, and one of them is that I can know new ideas which I have never considered from other people by communicating.

     According to the article, "Study: Many college students not learning to think critically", the author, Sara Rimer, reports that students who took classes heavy on both reading and writing showed the higher rates of learning critical thinking. Reading more than 40 pages and writing more than20 pages per week help you think critically. This is true because reading can build your vocabulary, and writing can teach you to explain your own ideas. Nevertheless, reading a lot can be factors of making biased thinking. For example, my friend likes horror and mystery books and has been reading a lot of these books. By reading a lot, she can think critically. However, when she wrote essays, it became like a horror essay, and she couldn't write a positive one. It means that reading specific types of books, she acquired a biased thinking skill. As same as reading, although writing many pages might be good to increase the skill of analytical thinking, if someone doesn't have enough information, writing can be meaningless. Therefore,  the author's recommendation, reading and writing a lot, is one approach to improve your thinking skill, however, it is not the best way.

     Compared with this advice, communicating may be a better way to change your thinking skill to the more critical one. Before I came to the U.S., my mother suggested me to talk to as many people as I can. This is because the more I communicate with people who have different aspects, the more I can consider deeply and widely. Indeed, I learned a lot of ideas from Small Talk. My classmate told me many opinions which I had never thought. For example, I learned a lot of stereotypes of Japan which I couldn't notice when I lived in Japan. To know how my country has been thought by other countries' people is important to know what my country is, and I could think of Japan again, but more deeply. In addition, you can practice talking about your opinion by communicating as well as writing. Therefore, communicating is the best way to learn critical thinking for my lifestyle.

     In conclusion, although the author's recommendation, reading many books and writing many pages, is a good method to acquire critical thinking skills, as for me, communicating with many people is the best way to gain the skills effectively.