1. Review of concepts 1-3
1—good writing can vary from closed to open forms.
2--Good writers pose questions about their subject matter.
3--Good writers write for a purpose to an audience with a genre.

2. Problematizing a Topic
What could this mean?
Great topics reveal a problem; Great thesis statements reveal a complicated question.

3. Thinking Rhetorically
How a writer thinks about what is unknown, puzzling or controversial about their subject matter.
And how your view of the subject may be different from your audience’s.

4. Closed Form Prose This idea is about academic writing.
The focus is on closed-form prose.
Thesis driven writing should bring something new, interesting, useful or challenging to readers.
Closed form prose is the kind of thesis governed writing that is required in college courses and often required in civic and professional life.

5. So what does a professor want from you?
True or False: Professors want students to comprehend course concepts as taught in textbooks and lectures and to show their understanding on exams.
Yes AND No. Such comprehension is important but is only the starting point.

6. Concept 4--Wallow in Complexity
Most students come to college as “dualists” believing that all questions have right or wrong answers and that it’s the student’s job to learn them.
As a “multiplist” students believe that since the experts disagree on many questions, all answers are equally valid and professors want you to have an opinion and state it strongly.
Not what first year college students aspire to do. Knowing facts, data, definitions is important to begin with, but as students progress to an intermediate stage of development beyond dualism, they become “multiplists”.

7. The final stage of development is where students emerge as a “relativist”
Where a student is able to take a position in the face of complexity and to justify that decision through reasons and evidence while weighing and acknowledging contrary reasons and counterevidence.
Wading into the messiness of complexity and working your way back out.

8. Critical Thinking Skills Needed To Wallow in Complexity
The ability to pose problematic questions.
The ability to analyze a problem in every dimension
The ability to imagine alternative solutions to the problem.
The ability to find, gather and interpret facts and data.
The ability to analyze competing approaches and answers, to construct contrasting arguments, and to choose the best solutions.
The ability to write an effective argument justifying your choice while acknowledging counterarguments.

9. Concept 5—good writers use exploratory strategies to think critically about subject-matter questions.
Experienced writers use writing to generate and discover new ideas.
Not all writing is initially intended as a final product for readers,

10. There are five strategies of exploratory writing and talking:
Freewriting
Focused freewriting
Idea mapping
Dialectic talk in person
In class discussions (or electronic discussion boards)
Playing the believing and doubting game

11. Free writing Asks you to record your thinking directly.
Write rapidly nonstop for minutes at a stretch. The object is to think of as many ideas as possible.
It does not have to be organized. Even if you think you have nothing to say after 3 minutes force yourself to keep your fingers moving

12. Practice Free Writing
What puzzles you about the new digital age?

13. Focused Free Writing Aimed more at developing a line of thought.
You wrestle with a specific problem or question and try to think your way into its complexity and multiple points of view.
It’s still informal. Your purpose is to deepen and extend your thinking on the problem.

14. Practice the focused free write
What is the main problem with today’s education system?

15. Idea mapping A more visual method than freewriting.
Draw a circle in the center of a page and write down your broad topic. Record your ideas on branches and sub-branches. As long as you pursue one train of thought, keep recording your ideas on sub-branches off the main branch. As soon as that chain of ideas runs dry go back and start a new branch.
This method usually records more ideas than a free write but they are not as developed.

16. Dialectic talk Through face to face discussions with others.
Good ones are dialectic—participants with differing views on a topic try to understand each other and resolve their differences by examining contradictions in each person’s position.
The key to good dialectic conversations is careful listening, which is made possible by an openness to each others view.
Not all discussion are productive; some are too superficial and scattered, others too heated. This is not a debate, it’s a true discussion.

17. Practice with idea mapping
What is the biggest challenge young people of your generation face today and in their foreseeable future?

18. Playing the Believing and Doubting Game
This game helps you appreciate the power of alternative arguments and points of view by urging you to formulate and explore alternative positions.
To play the game, you imagine a possible answer to to a problematic question and then systematically try first to believe that answer and then to doubt it.
This game stimulates your critical thinking, helping you wallow in complexity and resist early closure.

19. The believing side of the game
You try to be sympathetic to a point of view.
Listen carefully, opening yourself to the possibility that it is true. Try to appreciate the idea and accept its premise.
Easy to do if you already agree with the premise. Difficult, or maybe even frightening if you try to believe ideas that seem untrue or disturbing.

20. The doubting side of the game
The opposite of the believing game.
It calls on you to be judgmental and critical, to find fault with an idea rather than accept it.
In doubting, you try your best to come up with counter examples that disprove it
To find flaws in its logic.
Easy to do with ideas that you don’t like. Harder to do with ideas that are close to your heart.

21. Practice believing and doubting
“Just as high school basketball teaches you how to be a poor loser, the manly attitude towards sports seems to be little more than a recipe for creating bad marriages, social misfits, moral degenerates, sadists, latent rapists and just plain louts. I regard high school sports as a drug far worse than marijuana.”
Writer Paul Theroux
Pg 37 offers an example of the believing and doubting game.