Literacy and Critical Thinking
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Literacy is the ability to read and write. Broadly, literacy may be viewed as "particular ways of thinking about and doing reading and writing" with the purpose of understanding or expressing thoughts or ideas in written form in some specific context of use. Critical thinking is the analysis of available facts, evidence, observations, and arguments in order to form a judgement by the application of rational, skeptical, and unbiased analyses and evaluation. The application of critical thinking includes self-directed, self-disciplined, self-monitored, and self-corrective habits of the mind, thus a critical thinker is a person who practices the skills of critical thinking or has been trained and educated in its disciplines.
- Writing and Critical Thinking Through Literature (Ringo and Kashyap)
- This course offers instruction in analytical, critical, and argumentative writing, critical thinking, research strategies, information literacy, and proper documentation through the study of literary works from major genres, while developing students’ close reading skills and promoting an appreciation of the aesthetic qualities of literature.
- Writing and Literature: Composition as Inquiry, Learning, Thinking, and Communication (Bennett)
- Writing and Literature builds a new conversation covering various genres of literature and writing. Students learn the various writing styles appropriate for analyzing, addressing, and critiquing these genres including poetry, novels, dramas, and research writing. The text and its pairing of helpful visual aids throughout emphasizes the importance of critical reading and analysis in producing a successful composition.
- Creating Literary Analysis
- Literary scholarship is guided by literary theories and expressed through writing; it doesn’t make sense to learn each in isolation. Literary theories are intellectual models that scholars use to understand stories, novels, poems, plays, and other texts. Different theories prioritize different historical, social, or methodological concerns. The authors believe students of literature should learn about many literary theories.
- Literacy for College Success (Schmidt and Winter)
- This book is a compilation of four primary texts, which we significantly remixed and edited, as well as original compositions of our own. The basis for the organization and the majority of the first two chapters of this book are adapted from Fran Bozarth’s Reading & Writing for Learning.
- A Rhetoric of Literate Action - Literate Action I (Bazerman)
- The first in a two-volume set, A Rhetoric of Literate Action is written for "the experienced writer with a substantial repertoire of skills, [who] now would find it useful to think in more fundamental strategic terms about what they want their texts to accomplish, what form the texts might take, how to develop specific contents, and how to arrange the work of writing."
- A Theory of Literate Action - Literate Action II (Bazerman)
- The second in a two-volume set, A Theory of Literate Action draws on work from the social sciences—and in particular sociocultural psychology, phenomenological sociology, and the pragmatic tradition of social science—to "reconceive rhetoric fundamentally around the problems of written communication rather than around rhetoric's founding concerns of high stakes, agonistic, oral public persuasion".
Thumbnail: Dutch man reading (Unsplash License; Jilbert Ebrahimi via Unsplash)
