Improve Your Critical Thinking Skills

Critical thinking helps us analyze each alternative and choose one over the other. Colleges are paid good money for developing our critical thinking skills. Whether, it be for considering a business proposal, or analyzing a poem, these simple steps will help you:

1. Understand your own purpose: Criticism, especially artistic, is subjective. What do you want to achieve by your critique? Do you want to evaluate an artistic work, or an objective business proposal?
2. Understand the purpose of the person whose work you're analyzing: Most criticism goes off its target simply because the critic doesn't take into account what the writer or painter wants to convey. The writer may aim for and hit the branch, while you may think he has actually missed the bird on the branch. Has the writing or painting succeeded in accomplishing its original purpose?
3. Know the alternatives: Research works related to the one you're reviewing. Criticism can only be done by a standard: A thing is higher or lower in relation to something. Find out about contemporary writings and similar endeavors in past ages. If you are evaluating whether to buy a car from someone, find out how much other options like buying second-hand, or renting a car will cost you. If you can find nothing related, let the standard be your own vision of how the project should shape up, or how the originator of the proposal wants it to shape out.
4. Learn logic: Study how an argument is constructed, what premises are, and how the conclusion is reached. Then study the fallacies of logic, and practice pointing them out in your daily life.
5. Learn the critical jargon: Every field has different critical jargon. For example, in poetry terms like alliteration, enjambment, and the trochaic meter, show that you know what you're talking about. These terms will help make your critique more concrete, and give you hotspots on which to focus your critique.
6. Use the GBI technique: The lateral thinking psychologist Edward de Bono states that we should list the Good, the Bad and the Interesting points.
7. Don't just say you don't like it, say why you don't like it, and add suggestions to make it better.
8. Give criticism in a non-offensive way. People get defensive if something they pride themselves on gets attacked. Prefacing criticism with praise usually works well.

Some Tips

1. Don't be absolute, yet don't be timid in your criticism: Try to avoid absolutes like "never", and use them only when you're completely sure. However, at the same time, be assertive in your criticism. Think how much less motivating this saying would be: "Slow and steady, in certain cases, wins the race."
2. Use libraries and the Internet, to find out information on the topic you're critiquing. An uninformed critique is sometimes worse than one merely executed badly.
3. Ask for other people's opinions. They most likely will offer a new perspective which could change your approach. Consider people both from different age groups and different occupations.
4. Practice critiquing, as you'll get better at it. Take notice if others critique your critique.
5. You can something critique much, much better if you can actually do it. Only a writer can properly analyze another's works, for example.
6. Read other people's critiques in newspapers and books, and learn from their mistakes and strengths to improve your own style.
7. Be diplomatic. Your aim is not the person himself, but the proposal he puts forward.