Critical Thinking Essay: How to Write a Good One

The main purpose of this type of essay is to understand, estimate viewpoints and be able to solve problems. If you want to become a critical thinking person, you should identify the problem, ask questions provoking thoughts, find new good solutions and of course be a good listener. Critical thinking essay needs you to add your own ideas on a certain work (movie, book, poem, article, etc) not just relying on opinion of other people.

The concept of this essay is to start without having anything in mind. You will have a range of arguments instead of one and consider the strength and weak points of different problem solutions. The essay starts with a question and shows how your thoughts change when researching the idea. Do you want to get A+? Then  learn about the main requirements to writing a good critical thinking essay.

Critical essay writing steps

So here are the basic steps you should follow when writing a critical thinking essay. Of course, everything depends but this is the structure that will help you organize your work and understand the main goal.

1. What is your thesis statement? This is your main argument because the entire essay will be based upon that. You need something powerful so spend some time on creating a good thesis. It has to express the main point of your essay and provide enough details and an arguable claim. You should not include any obvious information or your own opinion which is subjective. Just make an argument that can be supported with evidence.
2. Did you outline it? This step will help you structure all the ideas and info in an effective way. You can do it as detailed as you want but make sure then that all these details are included into your essay. Choose any format you like and be ready to analyze all the points in your outline.
3. What to start with? It will be great to start writing with an engaging sentence because the first sentence should get right into the required topic. In your introduction you need to provide your opinion and clarify the main idea of the essay. If your first paragraph is engaging, you will grab the attention of the readers just at once. You may use different statistics, interesting facts or a question but avoid using any cliches.
4. Write the main body. It actually should support your argument so devote your paragraphs to your evidences and mention all aspects that prove your thesis statement. You can also write some background or additional info to help people understand your point. Use the paragraphs for discussing specific components and estimate the value of work discussed.
5. Strong conclusion is a must. Summing up you need to summarize all your arguments and stress the ones you tried to prove. Before writing it you need to spend some time thinking and try to call the reader to action. Have a look at the main ideas and write how the topic impacts the readers. Connect earlier points into a single argument.

Things to remember

After you have finished with your essay you need to spend some time on revising. You will have time to rest and read it once again for any mistakes and typos which may have negative effect. You may even ask your relatives or friends to check it for you and make comments. You should also check you did cite all sources correctly. Remember: papers started in last minute always suffer from poor structure and grammar, so take care of it in advance.