Will Lynch Critical Thinking

Do any of the descriptions of "critical thinking" described below apply to your experience of composing hypertext? If so, which ones? Why? Specifically, which aspects of the composing process are most relevant to which parts of the "critical thinking" process? Does your engagement in these elements differ in some ways from your writing habits before you took this class or composed hypertextually?


Close to all of these definitions of critical thinking were required when I was writing my hypertext. At first I had great difficulty finding things to write, I only had a very vague sense of what my topic was about. As I researched and read more about my topic however, I began to think about how my research pointed towards a certain debate and how they differed. It wasn’t until I started actually started absorbing and understanding this research that I was able to have “formations of logical inferences” as Simon and Kapplan said critical thinking is. What helped me the most was making detailed annotations of my research and compiling it all together in my literature review. After that it wasn’t all that difficult because all the hard work was done. All my thoughts on what I wanted my hypertext to be about had already been put down in my review. Writing hypertextually has been a very different experience from traditional writing. It has taken me a while to get used to it and trust the process of creating a hypertext. I realized that hypertexts are not read linearly and therefore should not be written in that manner. Writing a 2000 word paper and then chopping it up and putting them on different pages does not then make it a hypertext. By the final hypertext however I did not do this. I researched and annotated, wrote a review which helped me figure out what I wanted my hypertext to be about then outlined how my website would show this. I have no single word document with all my words on the entire site that I transferred to Dreamweaver, instead I have many different pages split into sections that if copy and pasted into one document would not read like a linear essay. What I found was most useful about this was that I had no single idea that I was trying to prove by asking my readers read from start to finish. I now have many different ideas that all pertains to my topic but coming from different directions.