Critical Thinking in News and Politics

For the first major course assignment we had, I found it useful because it helped me to find the premises, claims, and argument within someone else's writing. It helped me to locate where everything was and helped me to understand how someone organizes their argument. It was useful because I learned how to pick holes in a person's argument and learned how an argument can be good or bad. It helped me to determine whether the argument is valid, strong, or weak. It also taught me the usefulness of evidence within an argument, if there is no evidence then you aren't credible enough to be believable in your argument. Just like for the assignment that my group and I did on the health care reform. We found the premises, claims, and argument the author made by reading the whole editorial. Sometimes an argument or a claim isn't stated so we had to assume what the author was trying to get at, and this is also where I found this assignment useful. Sometimes an argument or claim isn't stated and this helped me figure out how to find it when it's unstated or how to find it when it is stated.