Tag Archives: thinking

Write Better Than You Do: Four Writing Tips From 2000 Years Ago

Want to write better than you do? Consider trying these four ancient tricks: Focus on the sublime. The Greek writer, Longinus (first century CE), is among the first persons to address what would become a recurrent theme in the history … Continue reading

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Want to Think Clearly and Creatively?

Get some sleep. This today at the Daily Beast: When a person lies down to sleep at night, the brain undergoes a process that is crucial to learning, memory, and performance in ways that scientists are only now beginning to … Continue reading

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Critical Thinking Quote Watch: Derek Bok on the Primary Goal of a College Education (and Higher Education’s General Failure at Reaching It)

The following quote comes from Derek Bok’s book, Our Underachieving Colleges (Princeton 2006, p. 8): Many [college] seniors graduate without being able to write well enough to satisfy their employers. Many cannot reason clearly or perform competently in analyzing complex, … Continue reading

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Charles Darwin’s Thinking Path

I love this image from Wikipedia Commons. It’s the path that Charles Darwin frequently trod at the grounds of Down House, his home. Darwin called this his “Thinking Path.”

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Critical Thinking Tip #6: Try These Four Fog Breaking Steps for Getting at the Truth of a Matter

Feel like you’re in a fog about what you should believe concerning a claim? Try running it through the following four criteria and see how well it holds up:   The claim is accompanied by evidence. If evidence is not … Continue reading

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Critical Thinking Tip #1: Make Explicit Your Weltanschauung (Worldview)

What’s your Weltanschauung—your worldview? In other words, what do you think you know about the world (your metaphysics)? How do you think you know it (your epistemology)? What should you be doing and valuing as an individual (your ethical and … Continue reading

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Have a Very Reflective (and Not Too Melancholy) Christmas

One’s a Christmas song, the other isn’t. But, somehow, they seem to go together. And:

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Chris Hedges, Noam Chomsky, and Critical Thinking

At TruthDig last week, Chris Hedges reported on his interview with Noam Chomsky. Here’s what Chomsky told Hedges about the importance of critical thinking: “I try to encourage people to think for themselves, to question standard assumptions,” Chomsky said when … Continue reading

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Barack Obama, Afghanistan, and a Book That Mattered

The New York Times today has a long piece on Barack Obama’s agonizing three month deliberative process that brought him, at the end, to order a surge of 30,000 troops to Afghanistan. The piece reveals that there was a book that … Continue reading

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Thinking About Big Words

Over carrots: “The fact that you get upset when there are things that you don’t understand just shows you have curiosity.”

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Two Interesting Links for the Day

How language shapes the way we think. How the Internet is impacting our writing.

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