The writing process starts in your head. It may seem a little pedantic to elevate thinking into a separate stage of the process, but how can you start writing until you know what you want to write? Besides, the great advantage of writing as a means of communication is that you have time to consider carefully what you are going to communicate. When you communicate in conversation, generally speaking, you have to make things up as you go along. There are several disadvantages to writing something as opposed to saying it, and we shall consider these later, but one distinct advantage is you do not have to put down on paper the first thing that comes to mind. Use that advantage. Remember also that the first virtue in writing of any kind is clarity. Clear writing comes first and foremost from clear thinking.ThinkingThere are three questions that you have to think about. You must answer these for yourself before you go any further.- What kind of document am I writing?
- What am I writing about?
- Whom am I writing to or for?
The nature of the piece of work you have in hand—school assignment, letter, report—will affect the way you style what you write. The status of the reader you have in mind—instructor, friend, child, boss—will also partly determine the style you choose. The nature of the text and the identity of the reader also have a bearing on the type of information that you put into your writing and may have to be assembled beforehand. Statistics may be useful for some purposes, for example. Detailed descriptions of objects, scenes, or processes may be required. You may be expected to quote from literary or scientific works, and if you use quotations, then you will also be expected to provide some kind of referencing system. The clearer you are about the kind of task you are engaged in, the easier it will be to prepare for it and accomplish it.In many instances somebody else will have set you a particular writing task. If so, this person will probably have defined the task for you. In many cases, however, you will be writing on your own initiative, so you must define the task for yourself. Consider carefully the three questions listed above. When you have found answers to them, you should be in a position to produce a concise statement of what you intend to do, what we might call, adopting business terminology, a "mission statement."The Task Defined: The Mission StatementYour "mission statement" should be no more than a brief note that sums up your purpose in writing. Whether you write it down or keep it in your head will depend on your personal preferences and your power of memory, but it is generally safer to jot down thoughts and ideas and have them as a visual aid. For example,Talk to be given to members of Ultraville Rotary Club on chairman and treasurer's visit to Rotary Club of Infraham, VA, and arrangements for return visit of Infraham R.C. officers or,Short story for Ladyfriend magazine based on incident at bowling alley last Saturday night: main character, Lucia, 40s, 3 kids, meets younger man or,Brief explanatory statement for department colleagues about reasons for opposing proposed relocation from downtown premises to new greenfield site Your mission statement is for your eyes only. So long as it is clear to you what kind of piece you intend to produce, what it is about, and what kind of readership you are targeting, it does not matter at this stage if an outsider would understand it or not. For example, you know what happened at the bowling alley and what kind of person Lucia is; the rest of the world will find out in due course.The purpose of the mission statement, whether mental or written down, is twofold. First, it provides you with your initial impetus: You have defined your task, so now you can set about doing it. Second, as you proceed, or when you reach the end, it enables you to check that you are doing, or have done, what you set out to do. Once you have established the basic nature of your undertaking, it is time to begin assembling your material.More ThinkingEverything you write—whatever it is, whatever it is about, whomever it is intended for—should contain something that comes uniquely and individually from you. If you are intending to write something fairly brief, there is a good chance that your own knowledge, experiences, and ideas will provide you all the material that you need. You simply have to set your memory to work and use your reason and your imagination to put the material into a proper order. The document will, as a consequence, bear your personal stamp.Even if your task is to write something more extensive, and even if you realize from the outset that your existing personal resources will not be sufficient to provide everything you require, your personal input in the form of your individual approach to the topic is still going to be the freshest and most valuable element in the piece. If you are starting from scratch and have undertaken to write on a subject you know little or nothing about, you will need to establish a connection with that subject or else your work will be very heavy going, both for you and for your reader. Whatever the situation, therefore, in order to supply the vital personal touch you will need to do some creative thinking before you begin any research.The process of creative thinking is not easy to describe and cannot really be done to order. At this point you will have to use up some of your allotted 10 percent of inspiration. A certain amount of free association is called for. What does the topic mean to you? What sort of ideas or images does it call up for you? What do you immediately and naturally connect with it? If someone said X to you, what would your first thought or your first reaction be?Remember, too, that ideas do not have to come in the form of statements. If they come in the form of questions, they can be equally, if not more, useful. List the basic question words—who, why, how, what, when, where, and which—and apply them to your topic. If you know little or nothing about a subject, ask yourself what you would like to know. If you are already familiar with it, ask yourself what it is that particularly interests you. Consider why something happened, or if the time and place at which it happened were significant. Think whether you know precisely how something happened or how something is done, and whether it is worth finding out. Do not be afraid to ask yourself apparently obvious or stupid questions. The answers may be less obvious, self-evident, or irrelevant than you think. In posing these questions you may come across an entirely new angle on the subject that nobody else has thought of because the answer was assumed to be a foregone conclusion. Why did the dog not bark in the night? wondered Sherlock Holmes, and the answer provided the key to the mystery. Why are there subtle differences between the finches on the various islands in the Galapagos? asked Charles Darwin; working out the answer was a milestone in the development of his theory of evolution. How many children had Lady Macbeth? queried the literary critic F. R. Leavis, not intending to throw new light on the play so much as to deride a previous school of critics whose method was to treat Shakespeare's characters as if they were real people. Any student of Macbeth might nevertheless find it interesting to consider Leavis's "stupid" question, for Lady Macbeth says, "I have given suck and know / How tender 'tis to love the babe that milks me," yet in the play there is no sign that children feature in the home life of the Macbeths. Does this tell us something about the characters and situation of the Macbeth couple, or is it an inconsistency on Shakespeare's part that tells us more about his priorities when devising a play? Wrestling with—or simply letting your mind play with—questions such as these can often arouse your interest and set your creativity to work.In order to illustrate this stage of proceedings, let us now turn to a concrete example. Let us assume that you have been asked, or have decided, to write something about the British writer Charles Dickens and America. It might be a school or college assignment; it might be a talk you are giving to a local society or an article you are writing for a newspaper or magazine.If you are unfamiliar with the subject, then, as has been said, your first jottings are likely to be in question form. For example,Did Charles Dickens visit America? If so, when and why?
Did he write about America? If so, what?
What did he think of America?
What did Americans think of him?
Were his novels popular in America? You may already be familiar with the basic facts. Dickens did visit America; in fact, he came twice, in 1842 and in 1867–68. He wrote a book describing his first trip called American Notes, and a central episode of his novel Martin Chuzzlewit, written shortly after that first visit, is set in the United States. He had great expectations of American society, believing it would be a great improvement on the class-ridden, inegalitarian societies of Europe. His first trip began promisingly, but when he left New England for the then less developed states of the interior, his views changed radically. The picture he painted of 1840s America in American Notes and Martin Chuzzlewit was a largely unfavorable one. Americans were, understandably, less than pleased by the way in which Dickens depicted them. His early novels had been immensely popular in the United States; his later novels were still avidly read, but his personal reputation was less high. However, by the time of his second visit, which took place shortly before his death, there had been a good deal of forgiving and forgetting on both sides. On that occasion, Dickens came mainly to give readings from his own works. People flocked to hear him, and the tour was an unqualified success.It is a substantial topic. If you were set to write about it, you might well wish to select some particular aspect on which to focus. But our business at the moment is not to discuss the topic as such but to use it simply as a model to show how you might organize your thoughts on any subject. Simply producing ideas or questions is not enough; you have to find ways of linking them together—to think connectedly as well as creatively.A simple list of points is not the only way, or necessarily the best way, of marshaling your first thoughts. You might prefer to put them down in columns:| Places | Dickens's attitude | Reasons |
|---|
| New England | positive | public adulation
like Europe | | Missouri | negative | too wild
pestered by press
didn't like the people |
Some people find that a graphic presentation enables them to see the links between different aspects of the subject more clearly. They set out their thoughts in the form of a diagram, for example, in what is usually known as a web chart or spider chart. To create such a chart, first put down the main ideas or themes and circle them. Then use straight lines to connect them with subsidiary points or with each other:If it suits you better, it is possible to produce a similar effect over a larger surface than a sheet of paper. You might, for example, write out your main ideas or points on separate cards or pieces of paper and pin them to a board, linking them by pieces of tape or ribbon. This may make it easier to move things around as you spot new connections. Note that questions can figure in columns or diagrams along with statements.The probability is that as you start noting down your ideas, in whatever form, they will suggest other ideas. Your list will grow longer, or your web, more complex. It is important to try to keep things under control so that a rough shape begins to emerge. At the very least, you need to know by the end of this stage where your main areas of interest—and where your main areas of ignorance—are so that you can direct your research accordingly. Your interest, you must remember, is specific to you and is going to give this piece of writing its all-important personal signature.Card IndexesThe sooner you begin to organize your ideas the better. One-tried-and-true method is the use of a card index. Once you know where your main areas of interest lie and what the main topics are that you are likely to be covering, you can make out an index card for each particular subject, with a key word as a heading, and then arrange the cards alphabetically by their headings in a box. As your research proceeds, you can add to the material on a card or add more cards from any sources you consult—always making a note of where a particular item comes from. It takes considerable self-discipline to maintain a card index, or a similar electronic index, and it is probably only worth doing when you are undertaking a large-scale piece of writing, such as a dissertation or long report. The index can, however, save a lot of time at the planning stage if your material from all sources is already at least partially organized.ResearchingThe starting point for your research may well be fairly obvious. If you are a student, you will probably have been provided with a reading list. If you were working on the Dickens project, you would want to read, or reread, American Notes and the relevant sections of Martin Chuzzlewit, before you read anything else. From there you might branch out to a biography of Dickens or books or articles by scholars on Dickens generally or on Dickens's relations with America in particular.The research materials that writers and scholars use are traditionally divided into primary sources and secondary sources. A primary source is a text that forms part of the subject matter that you are writing about. In the Dickens case, the two books mentioned in the previous paragraph would be primary sources, as would any contemporary accounts of what Dickens did in America, such as a diary or journal entry or any articles from newspapers or magazines of the time that show firsthand the reaction of the American public to the novelist's visit or to any opinions he expressed then or later. Mark Twain, for instance, wrote a report on a reading by Dickens that he attended at the Steinway Hall in New York City in January 1868, which can be accessed on the Internet.Material that is written about a subject by consulting primary sources and that discusses the subject or gives someone else's opinion on it is a secondary source. From the point of view of our example, books or articles written by literary critics or other scholars about Dickens and his travels in America are secondary sources.If you were writing about an entirely different subject such as wine making in California, your primary sources would be any material published by actual winemakers, statistics compiled by the wine-making industry or the federal or state government, and so on. Your secondary sources would be books or articles by enologists (people who study wine making scientifically), economists, or journalists about the Californian wine trade. If you write something that discusses a topic rather than describing something that you have actually experienced, your book, article, or report has the potential to be a secondary source for somebody else.In the final analysis, primary sources are more valuable than secondary sources, and any academic work that does not show evidence of consultation of primary sources is likely to be criticized for that very reason. This does not mean that secondary sources have no value, however—far from it. You might equally be criticized for knowing nothing at all of what secondary sources have had to say on the subject in question. Likewise, as anyone who has tried to write an academic essay knows, other people's ideas can stimulate your own, and other people's judgments can support your own or, if you disagree with them or find them wanting, help you to form your own. The important thing at any level of writing is to resist the temptation to let secondary sources do your work for you. Nobody wants to read somebody else's ideas copied out or warmed up by you. Have confidence that your own ideas are worthwhile. Use secondary sources as a stimulus, not as a crutch.One final note about secondary sources is that they frequently quote from primary ones. It is perfectly proper for you to use primary material from a secondary source, especially if it is difficult for you to consult the primary source yourself, providing that you give a proper reference for it.Collecting MaterialThe first place to look for possible research material is in your own home among the books you own, magazines you subscribe to, pieces you have previously written, or notes you have made that have a bearing on the topic at hand. Do not forget to consult general reference books, such as encyclopedias, dictionaries, atlases, and almanacs. They lie idle in many homes when they ought to be making a positive contribution, and they usually contain a great deal of useful material.Once you have exhausted resources at home, your probable first port of call will be a public library. If you are new to this kind of work, you may be aware of your local library only as a place from which you can borrow books to read for entertainment or instruction at home. Many libraries have a reference section that is almost as extensive as the lending section, the only difference being that you have to study these books on the premises and cannot take them home. In addition to such general works as encyclopedias, dictionaries, atlases, and almanacs, your library's reference section may contain books on the specific topic you are interested in, such as standard editions of works by major authors, technical manuals, or official government publications. It will also subscribe to a large number of periodicals and keep on file previous issues so that you can consult them.The facilities available at any particular library will depend on the size of the community it serves and the demands that community makes on it. Your own library's card catalog or computerized catalog will enable you to see what it has available and to search for what you want by its title, its author, or its subject. If you are looking for something that is not in its own collection, your library may be able to get it for you on loan from another library or at least tell you where to find it. Remember that a library's best resource is often its knowledgeable staff. Librarians are there to help you, and if you have problems locating something on your own, they will usually be able to help.So far, this discussion has taken a very traditional, not to say old-fashioned, line, speaking of research as if all sources were to be found in print. This is, of course, emphatically not the case. It is probably no longer even the case that people reach first of all for a book or a magazine when they require additional information. Modern technology has vastly increased the resources available to anyone who has access to a computer, especially a computer connected to a modem and a phone line. A great deal of information is now available on CD-ROM or, in some cases, on DVD. It is often easier (though not always cheaper) to search a dictionary or encyclopedia, say, on CD-ROM, using a computer, than to thumb through the same work in its printed form.The Internet provides information on almost any subject that you can mention. It too can offer searchable versions of basic texts (for instance Dickens's American Notes). The fact that these texts are searchable by electronic means is probably their most valuable asset. It is much easier and quicker to do a computer search than to thumb backward and forward to a printed index. It is also possible to look for topics that might not be covered in an ordinary index. Anyone who has research to do and is still unable to use a search engine to look for information should learn this basic modern-age skill as soon as possible.There is an art to searching the Internet. If you type, for example, the words Charles Dickens America into the search engine Google, you are given almost a half million options (if you type in wine making California, you are offered more than 2 million). There is a great deal of material on the Internet that either proves to be irrelevant to the specific topic or, frankly, is dross. Nonetheless, an enormous amount of it is extremely valuable and can be accessed from the comfort of your own home. If you can refine your search and make your search criteria (the words that you type into the search engine) as specific as possible, the results can be very useful. Very often you can find a Web site that has links to other sites containing similar or related material. There are several Internet hub sites, for example, devoted to Charles Dickens that provide links to other sites on specific aspects of his life and works or that can put you in touch with individuals or organizations whose main concern is to study them.In some respects, searching the Internet seems to represent an advance on consulting books and other written material, but research does not have to be modern, state-of-the-art, and electronic to be effective. There is a method of research that is in a sense more "primitive" than reading books but can often produce the most valuable information of all: asking other people.Your immediate family and friends may be able to give you useful information and pointers. A straw vote conducted among your circle of friends and relations—or among people in the street, if you feel confident enough to approach them—may provide a useful guide to prevailing opinions on an issue or current preferences. A formal or informal interview with somebody can provide much valuable primary material on a subject. If, for example, you were intending to write a piece for a local newspaper on a topic of interest for people in your locality, the obvious course would be to go and speak to the people most closely involved and record their experiences or views. A pocket tape recorder is vital for this kind of work unless you have a very retentive memory or know shorthand. If you wish to collect the views of a number of different people on the same issue, then it is usually best to draw up a questionnaire. It is much easier to compare the responses of different people if you are sure that you have asked them all precisely the same question. If you want your work to have any scientific credentials, in the broadest sense, then it is essential to use a questionnaire to ensure that you have not affected the responses by perhaps phrasing your questions in slightly different ways to different people. You should also, usually, reproduce the questionnaire you used either in the text or in an appendix or footnote.Any research you do, however, of whatever kind, is only as valuable as the records you make of it. Research that is not recorded well can be a complete waste of time. Those who do not learn from history are compelled to repeat it, we are told. Those who do not take clear, usable, and relevant notes are compelled to do the same with their research.Taking NotesThe most important aspect about taking notes is that you should be able to understand them later when you want to use them to plan or compose the piece you are writing. Most people who have attended a lecture or presentation and tried to take notes of what the speaker was saying have had the galling experience of looking at those notes later and finding that they cannot make head or tails of what they scribbled down, or that what they assumed to be a major point worth noting turned out to be a relatively minor issue in the context of the lecture as a whole.Mishaps of this kind are excusable in a lecture, where information is being fed in a continuous stream and where a lot depends on the skill of the lecturer or presenter. A good speaker will proceed at a moderate pace to allow the audience to take in what he or she is saying, will repeat essential points or information for emphasis, and will also give reference points along the way (firstly, secondly, finally, and so on) that should benefit note takers.When note taking from written sources, however, always read the passage from beginning to end before you start jotting down notes so that you get the writer's overall drift. You might miss something valuable if you do not see where it fits into the overall argument. Likewise, always have your mission statement and your sense of what your own work is to be about at the forefront of your mind when you are taking notes and extracts. The source writer was probably not writing simply to suit the purposes of someone with your particular interest and will have included a lot of material that, while it may be interesting, is not relevant to the task you have in hand. Research is not simply about finding material. It is also about sifting through the material that you do find. Always write clear notes; check your notes again when you have finished to make sure everything is still comprehensible. If you make rough notes in the course of a lecture or talk, go back over them as soon as you have a spare moment and rewrite them in a clear form while the speaker's words and arguments are still fresh in your mind. Always note down precisely where you found the information in the book, journal, or Web site you are studying so that you can find it again if something remains unclear or you want to follow up the material. Always, finally, make sure you note down any bibliographic information you may need for your references: the full title, the name(s) of the author(s), the publisher's name, and the place and date of publication, or the title and author of a Web site, the Web address, and the date on which you accessed the site.Let us assume that you are writing about wine making, in California or elsewhere, and you decide that you had better begin by checking out some of the basics. You might look up an entry on wine in an encyclopedia and find something like this:The wine that is produced from grapes in temperate regions throughout the world falls into three main categories: table wines, sparkling wines, and fortified wines. Table wines, as their name suggests, are drunk primarily as accompaniments to meals. They are further distinguished by their color, as red, white, or rosé (pink). Red wines are made from purple grapes, the skins of which are left in the vats with the juice during the early stages of the fermentation process. White wines are made either from green grapes or from purple grapes. In the latter case, the grape skins are removed before the fermentation process commences. Rosé wines are sometimes produced by mixing red and white wine, but a true rosé is made like a red wine, from purple grapes, except that the skins are left in the vats for a much shorter period and only until the required pink coloring has been achieved. Sparkling wines are distinguished by the fact that they are bubbly and need to be kept in special bottles. Carbon dioxide gas is either introduced artificially into the wine after it is made or produced by a secondary fermentation process. Sparkling wines are drunk mainly to celebrate festive occasions, and the most famous varieties are produced in the Champagne region of France. Fortified wines are so called because a quantity of stronger liquor—usually grape brandy—is added during fermentation. This increases the alcoholic content of the wine from the 9 to 14 percent of standard table wines to between 15 and 22 percent. Some fortified wines, such as sherry and vermouth, are drunk mainly as appetizers before a meal, while others, such as port, are usually drunk after a meal as digestives. If your principal interest is in wine making, there are certain things in this passage that might or might not be relevant. The passage, for instance, remarks on the occasions when the different types of wine are generally drunk. That is quite a handy way of defining their differences but is not necessarily of major importance—not, at least, of equal importance to the fact that there are three basic categories of wine. You need to be able to distinguish between major and minor pieces of information. The easiest method is to emphasize the more important facts by underlining them or highlighting them with a fluorescent marker. With this in mind, your first note might be
XYZ ENCYCLOPEDIA ENTRY "WINE" (PAGE XXX)
3 types of wine
–Table wine (drunk with meals)
–Sparkling wine (dr. at celebrations)
–Fortified wine (dr. before/after meals)
Using a certain amount of abbreviation or personal shorthand speeds things up considerably. Just make sure that everything is reexpandable afterward. Safety first suggests that you write out a key word in full the first time before abbreviating it and that you should not be too cryptic; if you reduced (dr. at celebrations) to (dr. celebs), for example, you might find yourself wondering if you had "drunken celebrities" in mind rather than "drunk at celebrations." Omitting all or almost all the vowels in a word is a fairly standard trick, so you might reduce (dr. at celebrations) to, say, (dr. @ celbratns) without forfeiting too much in the way of clarity. People who are used to sending text messages between cell phones are likely to be better at this than people who are not.The other most substantial piece of information in the passage has to do with the different colors of table wine, and color appears to be mainly related to the use or nonuse of grape skins. A note to this effect might read
3 TYPES TABLE WINE—DISTINGUISHED BY COLOR
Red—made from purple grapes—skins in
White—md. fr. white grapes—or fr. purp. grapes (skins out)
Rosé—md. fr. purp. grapes—skins in till pink/sometimes md. by mixing red & white wine
It is often clearer to take your notes in the form of a list rather than to write discursive notes that attempt to follow the style of the source writer. This is especially the case when you are extracting basic factual information. Note again, these jottings are for your eyes only. They do not have to be grammatically perfect (even in shorthand). If you can follow them, that is enough.There are other aspects in this passage that you might want to note, depending on your particular interest at the time. It is also often important to make a note of things that are not covered in a particular passage but that you may wish to find out about later. This passage, for instance, mentions "fermentation" and the "fermentation process" several times but does not describe the process. If you are not clear what fermentation is—it is obviously something essential to wine making—then you should look it up in the same encyclopedia there and then. If you do not have time to do that right away, then leave a message to yourself in your notes—or, better, on a special sheet, pad, or computer file for personal memoranda—to remind yourself to sort out the issue in your next work session.Critical ThinkingIf you are obtaining simple basic facts from an encyclopedia, then you can be fairly certain that the information it contains is accurate. Research would be a lot simpler if you could have the same degree of trust in every source in print or on the Web as you can in the text of a respectable encyclopedia.Unfortunately, this is not the case. Consequently, the writing process involves a good deal of critical thinking, in addition to creative thinking, and from a very early stage. The ability to think critically is vital when you are revising your own work, but critical thinking also ought to come into play while you are doing your research, firstly so that you can distinguish between what is useful and valuable for your own purposes in your sources and what is not, and secondly so that you do not necessarily take everything as absolutely true and accurate because it happens to appear on paper or the Web.Perhaps we should first clear up a common misapprehension. Critical thinking is not the same thing as negative thinking or censorious thinking. Assessing a piece of writing critically does not mean that you deliberately set out to try to find fault with it or prove it to be worthless. A good literary critic picks out and praises what is good in something at the same time that he or she recognizes and, if appropriate, censures anything that is inaccurate, carelessly thought out, or poorly expressed. The main work of criticism is to analyze and evaluate things as to their nature and their quality. Critical thinking, to put it another way, is all about making distinctions: distinguishing the good from the bad, the useful from the useless, the accurate from the inaccurate, and so on. You may or may not be called on to pass judgment on the intrinsic literary merits of a piece of writing, but you will certainly need to be able to decide whether a source is valuable and/or trustworthy.The first distinction that we usually need to make is between fact and opinion. A fact is something that is objectively and demonstratively true or something that actually happened and can be proved to have happened. An opinion is what someone believes to be the case. There is nothing wrong with having opinions or with having beliefs or preferences, but what one person believes, another person may dispute, and as the proverb says, "One man's meat is another man's poison." Opinion is always debatable and does not have the same credibility as fact.This much is obvious. Problems arise, however, from the fact that people are naturally comfortable with their own opinions and generally believe that other people ought to share them. Consequently, they may present them as if they were facts. People also sometimes present opinion—or allegations—as fact because they are not conscientious enough about distinguishing the two or because they deliberately set out to mislead others. Whatever the motives, it is important for us as readers and researchers not to be misled. We should apply our minds critically to what is presented to us and retain a degree of skepticism until convinced.Let us examine the distinction between fact and opinion a little further on the basis of a few examples. The statement "Charles Dickens was born in 1812" is a statement of fact. No normal person would want to go to the bother of checking through the official records to verify a date given in thousands of reliable sources. That is something we can take on trust. The statement "Charles Dickens was a great writer" is not a statement of fact, however. Millions of readers over a period of more than 150 years may have believed Dickens to be a great writer, but that does not make it an indisputable fact. Some people—a small minority, admittedly—dispute his greatness. The precise meaning of the word great when applied to a creative artist is also sometimes a matter of debate. In any event, the word great implies a judgment, and judgments are always open to question. This does not mean that we cannot venture to make such statements, simply that when we make them we should be aware that we may be called upon to justify them. Likewise, when we read them, we should expect the persons who wrote them to be able to back them up.The statement "Red wines are made from purple grapes, the skins of which are left in the vats with the juice during the early stages of the fermentation process" is another statement of fact. The statement "Red wine is the perfect accompaniment to a steak," on the other hand, is a statement of opinion. It sounds rather similar to what was said in the passage quoted in the previous section, but the encyclopedia-type article was more guarded. It put forward a more general proposition: "Table wines, as their name suggests, are drunk primarily as accompaniments to meals." Not only is it speaking of table wines in general, but it adds the important qualifying word primarily, precisely because the author knows that people often drink ordinary red or white wine on its own. Similar qualifying words, mainly and usually, are also used in the passage with respect to the circumstances under which the other types of wine mentioned are normally drunk.Since they contain these qualifications, we can accept these statements as generally true, that is as having more or less an equivalent status to fact. If we formulate the statement in a more specific way, however, and say, as above, "Red wine is the perfect accompaniment to a steak," then we are on less factual ground. Plenty of people might argue that a steak tastes better if you drink beer with it, or plain water, or nothing at all. Again, the use of the judgmental adjective perfect is an indicator that we are dealing with an opinion, as was the use of great in the statement about Dickens. If we were determined not to stray from strict fact, we should have to say something like "Red wine is often drunk with a steak" or add a phrase to show that we recognize that what we are saying represents a commonly held belief: "Many people think that red wine is the perfect accompaniment to a steak."In the examples given above, the distinction between fact and opinion is pretty clear, and the issues being discussed are relatively minor insofar as the question of whether red wine goes well with steak is not a matter of life and death. But if in the course of researching a piece on the subject of wine you came across the statement "Drinking red wine can prevent heart disease," how ought you to treat it? Is it a fact or an opinion?You will notice that statement says "can prevent," not "prevents," so the writer is exercising some caution. Does that make it safe to present this slightly qualified assertion as a fact? Unless you are a medical specialist, you are unlikely to have at your fingertips the knowledge that would enable you to answer that question. So you have to think critically. You might first want to investigate the credentials of the publication in which you found the information. If it appeared, for example, in something published or sponsored by the wine industry, you might feel that it would be in the industry's interests to suggest that drinking one of its products had important health benefits and treat the information with caution. If you discovered it in a reputable scientific journal, you might be more inclined to believe it, especially if it were to be supported by a battery of statistics. Even so, you might well be aware from experience that even experts disagree. What one scientist claims to have proved today, another scientist will often claim to have disproved tomorrow. If you are able to consider the evidence and weigh it and decide definitely in favor of one side or the other, then all well and good. But if you do not have the knowledge or cannot do the necessary research to reach clarity on the issue, then you ought not to suggest to your reader that you know the true facts. The safest rule is to treat everything that you do not know for certain to be fact as opinion, and to word what you write in such a way as to make it clear to your reader where facts end and opinions start.To summarize this subsection,- critical thinking is the art of making distinctions;
- critical thinking should be used first and foremost to ascertain what is valuable and useful for your project and what is not;
- the distinction between fact and opinion is of primary importance;
- if in doubt, be skeptical.
Evaluating SourcesLet us now look at another piece of prose—with the remarks made in the previous paragraphs in mind—and see how we can apply critical principles to the task of producing valuable notes.One Hundred Fiftieth Anniversary of First Recorded Flight The Chinese, Marco Polo reported, were able to build kites large and strong enough to be able to lift a full-grown man into the air at a time when Western aviators were still covering themselves with feathers and trying to imitate the birds. It was only when Western aviation went counterintuitive and started to rely on science that it finally got off the ground. The first person ever to fly in a heavier-than-air machine was probably the coachman of British baronet and engineer, Sir George Cayley. Today marks the 150th anniversary of the day the anonymous charioteer took to the air, and some experts regard it as a more important occasion than the 100th anniversary of the Wright brothers' much shorter hop later this year. Cayley, who lived from 1773 to 1857, is generally known as the father of aerodynamics. His identification of the four forces that act on bodies moving through the air—lift, thrust, drag, and weight—revolutionized thinking on the subject. It was based on the work of Swiss physicist Daniel Bernoulli on the behavior of fluids in motion. But Cayley was no mere theoretician. He was a prolific inventor. To him we owe the invention of artificial limbs, the caterpillar tractor, a new type of telescope, and an internal-combustion engine powered by gunpowder. He was also interested, as were most men of his time, in railroad engineering. Naturally, then, his interest in flight led him to spend a large part of his time designing, constructing, and flying model and full-sized gliders, and his crowning achievement came in 1853, when the man who was usually drawn by four white horses along the Queen's highway was hauled up into the air by teams of workers from Cayley's estate and flew a total distance of 900 feet. When he came down again, the first thing the coachman did was to quit his job. "I was hired to drive, not to fly," he said. Some people have no sense of occasion. In assessing this passage, we have to perform a fairly complex sifting operation. There appears to be a good deal of useful information in it, but it is not presented in what we might call an "encyclopedic" style. There is very little in it that is presented as opinion, but that does not necessarily mean that it is all true-blue fact. There is also a certain amount of what we might, perhaps unkindly, call "decoration" in it, and most of that is likely to be dispensable.The tone and style of the passage mark it as essentially journalistic. The reader has the sense that the author is trying to "write up" a story, making the material more interesting and entertaining for the reader than it would be if presented in plain terms. The clearest evidence for this is at the beginning, where the writer provides information that, although picturesque, is only loosely related to the remainder of the passage, and in the jokiness of certain sections, such as the references to the coachman or the "anonymous charioteer." The writer also does not seem to be quite sure whether this really is a momentous anniversary. How does Cayley's feat compare with that of the Wright brothers? An expert in aviation history would probably have an opinion on the subject that would be worth listening to. To be told that "some experts regard it" as a more important anniversary is of no great value, and we should be wary of simply repeating a comment like that without finding out the opinion of at least one genuine expert or authoritative source. Furthermore, in what sense do we "owe" a gunpowder-fueled internal-combustion engine to Sir George, when very few of us nowadays are filling up our tanks with saltpeter? Finally, did the coachman really say the words he is quoted as saying—it is an extremely quotable quote—or did some journalist then or now invent them because they make such a neat ending to the story?In other words, we ought not to trust this passage too far. It does not carry the same weight as an entry in an encyclopedia. On the other hand, we ought not to dismiss it out of hand. The fact that it is journalistic and not scholarly and that it contains a few attempts at humor does not mean that it is of no interest at all. Someone who was intending to write about the history of aviation, someone who was interested in technological progress in the 19th century in general, or even someone who wanted to write about relations between the upper classes in 19th-century England and their servants might find this passage useful or stimulating. Most people have heard about Orville and Wilbur Wright; the name George Cayley is far less well known. He seems to have done enough to merit some attention, however, with or without a journalist's help.With all this in mind, how should we go about taking notes? Probably the best course in this instance, given the fact that we have some doubts about the total reliability of the passage is to jot down points to be followed up and verified. Assuming that our major interest was in the aeronautical angle, we might note the following:
Cayley, Sir George (1773–1857)
Check out:
Coachman made first heavier-than-air flight in 1853 (?)
What kind of machine?
Is there a picture?
Other gliders designed by Cayley?
More important than Wright brothers?
If we were interested in Cayley's general contribution to 19th-century technology, we might make a rather different set of notes:
Cayley, Sir George (1773–1857)
aviator, scientist, inventor
Chiefly known for building machine in which first heavier-than-air flight was made in 1853
Check out:
How did he apply Bernoulli's theory?
"Father of aerodynamics"?
Other inventions
Artificial limbs, caterpillar tractor, telescope, internal-combustion engine powered by gunpowder
Value of these inventions, relation to present-day forms?
Nature of interest in railroad engineering?
In both cases, the next step is to consult a weightier volume or do a Web search. You should continue to delve into the questions until you feel confident that you have established the facts and can take notes without queries.In summing up, therefore, we might say that valuable and interesting information may be found in almost any source. We must, however, be careful to evaluate sources critically and if we have any doubts about their accuracy seek corroboration elsewhere.
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