Critical Thinking

Critical thinking is about analyzing, synthesizing, and applying your knowledge to what you write about. In soccer, this is demonstrated in training where teams are prepared mentally and physically to focus for their next opponents. English essays were filled with opportunities to demonstrate your critical thinking. I think my best work came from interpreting quotes because I always had unique ideas. However, my worst critical thinking came at synthesizing because putting two completely different ideas together can be a struggle.

Critical thinking for me first came through interpreting my quotes. In “Summer Reading Assignment,” I chose to write about this quote: “Our bodies were weak, muscles shrunken from lack of protein, but fear helped us scale the gate as quickly as we ever had.” This quote described the difficult situation that Lev and his friends were in the novel City of Thieves by David Benioff. I interpreted this quote that fear and motivation play a role to how Lev and his friends get out of this situation. Although it was a first essay, it was my first demonstration of how I interpret quotes: by going out on a stretch to make unique ideas.

I demonstrated my ability to interpret also on the midterm essay. The theme I had for the three pieces of work I was analyzing was,“Dreams are deceiving, and they can make us forget about reality.” Ms.Parrish gave me comments on my essay, and she commented “Great Macbeth evidence!” My evidence is that Macbeth was a noble soldier who became obsessed at wanting to be king. However, he later ended up dying because of the prophecy. My interpretation was on point in my essay, and this is important because although some ideas are open-ended, others have specific answers that we need to find.

Although I can interpret quotes better, I am terrible at synthesizing. In “The Emotions of a Truth [F451 Synthesis Essay]”, I constantly struggled on figuring a way to synthesize the pieces of text together. To end my third paragraph, I restated my topic sentence as “This raises emotions to religious people because literature presents a truth, but without emotions rather than raising them through one-sided answers of beliefs or values.” My thesis was, “Books may not have emotions, but they can help tell truths to people.” My final grade on this essay was a B-, and I rewrote this essay four times. I have trouble synthesizing because we are trying to convey two related ideas together, and I can only do this through going on a stretch. However, this does not work as often, so I struggled with synthesizes essay a lot this year.

In conclusion, critical thinking is an important skill that I grew in over the year. I was excellent at interpreting quotes for the benefit of my essay. However, I struggled with synthesizing. I think if I can focus more on this general idea, I would not struggle so often in future essays. My next step is to think of reasonable ideas that no one has thought of before through new interpretations.