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Why do we need to be critical while reading academic texts?
Regardless of how objective, technical or scientific the subject matter is,
the author will have made many decisions during the research and writing process.
And each of those decisions is a potential topic for examination and
debate rather than for blind acceptance.
You need to be prepared to step into the academic debate and
make your own evaluation of how much you're willing to accept what you read.
A practical starting point, therefore,
is to consider anything you read not as a fact, but as the argument of the writer.
Taking this starting point, you will be ready to get engaged in critical reading.
Being critical is often associated with being negative, trying to find fault,
but being constructively critical is more positive.
You aim to respect other scholars as potential contributors to your knowledge,
but you need to adopt a skeptical stance about what you have to say.
There are two acute reasons why a skeptical stance is necessary.
First, anyone can make a mistake, overinterpret or
misinterpret the information they are dealing with, or
fail to take into account other relevant published information.
As a critical reader, you decide whether to
accept the author's claims by drawing on your accumulated knowledge and
experience, and by looking for any logical flaws or inconsistencies.
Second, you may well find that different authors make incompatible
claims about the same topic, backed by constructing evidence.
So, in reading, you need to remain open-minded and
ready to accept the author's views, not only if you find them convincing.
You make judgments about how far you agree and why.
You also consider how well the authors communicated their views
through the content of the paper and the language they used.
If you cannot understand what they are trying to convey,
you are likely to remain unconvinced.
It would be unwise to take their claims on trust
when you cannot follow their reasoning.
Weak evidence can be disguised in complicated language.
Successful communication is an essential goal for
all writers who want to convince readers of the validity of their ideas.
When you sit down to write, informed by your reading,
you need to become self-critical.
You apply the lessons learned from your constructively critical reading
of others writing to your own work.
You have judged how well others communicated their views, and
how much they convinced you.
Now, you have to communicate to critical readers of your work and
convince them of the validity of your argument, and
you have to support your argument with facts and solid reasoning.
You do that by emulating the good scholarly
writing practice you have observed.
Equally, you identify and avoid the pitfalls of bad practice.
When learning to become an expert scholarly writer, you have two tasks, to
evaluate other's arguments and to develop your own adequately supported arguments.
In critical reading, you evaluate the conclusions and
support of other's arguments as they try to convince their target audience.
As a self-critical writer, you develop your own arguments,
making them as clear and as well supported as possible.
So as to communicate with and convince your target audience.
Not everything that looks like an argument actually is an argument.
When there are just claims with no support,
then the author has simply offered an opinion.
Even if you agree with this, you should not be satisfied and
accept it without support, and ask, how do you know?
The reason for caution is that sometimes popular beliefs turn out to be untrue.
Once everyone believed that earth was the center of the universe but when sufficient
evidence was examinated, this belief was discovered to be an unsupported claim.
It is fine for authors to have opinions.
But if they want to persuade their readers, they must provide
convincing reasonings for why the claim or opinion should be accepted.
Sometimes there might be evidence but no conclusion.
Then readers may ask, so, what follows from this?
For example,
this study revealed that there are no racial differences in intelligence.
This observation would be evidence used to support a claim, but no claim is made.
A critical reader would ask, so, what do you believe this means?
In other words, if you want to develop as a self-critical writer you need
to acquire critical reading skills.
These are examining the evidence or argument presented.
Understanding the bias from any influences on the evidence or argument.
Analyzing the limitations of the study design or focus.
Examining the interpretations made.
And deciding to what extent you're prepared to accept the author's argument,
opinions, or conclusions.
In the next video, we will discuss how to identify flaws in an argument and
what critical questions you should ask as a constructively critical reader.