Analytical Writing and Thinking

Facing the Tests

Myra J. Linden, Arthur Whimbey

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781000149029
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

This textbook is designed to enhance the thinking and writing skills that students need for both academic and occupational success. It helps to prepare students for the verbal portions of the SAT, PSAT, ACT, GED, and GRE and offers tips on how to pass writing tests often required for promotion/graduation and on-the- job writing assignments.

1     Improve Your Reasoning and Writing Skills with Text Reconstruction and Thinking Aloud Problem Solving

This book will improve your reasoning skill and your writing ability. One benefit will be higher scores on tests like the SAT, PSAT, ACT, GRE, GED, and writing competency examinations given for high school graduation.¹

The reasoning and writing skills you develop will also give you new power in tackling school work. You will be prepared to grasp complicated material in your classes and to communicate your knowledge effectively, leading to higher grades and the academic degrees you seek.

Beyond school, the verbal reasoning and writing skills you develop will form a solid foundation for any career you build. You will be ready to analyze problems, comprehend business reports, understand manuals about the operation of technical equipment, and express your ideas clearly to fellow employees and supervisors. Many companies such as Motorola and Kodak are reporting that a large percentage of students emerging from our schools cannot think and write well enough for today’s complex jobs. You will not be one of them. In fact, to get your career started on the right track, Chapter 30 teaches you how to write convincing job application letters.

Two techniques used in this book have proven effective for strengthening reasoning and expressional (speaking and writing) skills: (1) text reconstruction and (2) thinking aloud problem solving.

Text Reconstruction

Text reconstruction involves analyzing an author’s ideas and copying his language to strengthen your writing skills. Many great writers have used some form of text reconstruction in the early stages of their development.

According to the New York Times Book Review, Jack London, who wrote White Fang and The Sea Wolf, is the most widely read American author in the world. London was raised penniless, and in his youth worked at many difficult, low-paying jobs. When in his mid-twenties he decided to become a professional writer, he “analyzed the stories he liked, or copied them out by hand to learn how they were put together, and wrote his own pieces with their example in mind.”²

Benjamin Franklin, one of America’s first great writers, reports in his autobiography that he also used text reconstruction to sharpen his command of written English. As a youth he worked in his brother’s print shop where articles by many fine writers were published. When he admired an essay, he wrote several words from each sentence. He called these “short hints of the sentiment in each sentence.” Next he mixed the hints into random order and set them aside. Several weeks later he tried to arrange the hints into their original order to recreate the logical organization of the essay. Franklin says, “This was to teach me method in the arrangement of thoughts.” Then he attempted to write each sentence from just the hints, checking back to the original and noting any deviations, trying to master the vocabulary, sentence structure, and style of the writer.³

 

¹See Chapter 32 for the full names and descriptions of these tests.

²E. L. Doctorow, “The Great Oakland Earthquake,” rev. of Letters of Jack London by Jack London, eds. Earle Labor, Robert C. Leitz, 3rd, and I. Milo Shepard, 3 vols., and American Dreamers: Chairman and Jack London by Clarice Stasz, New York Times Book Review, 11 Dec. 1988: 39.

For this book, papers were written like those you might be assigned to write on a standardized test. Then the sentences were jumbled out of order. Here are the jumbled sentences for an amusing paragraph.

Read all the sentences. Decide which should come first and number it 1. Then decide which should come second and number it 2. Continue numbering the remaining sentences this way.

• _____   Therefore when nineteen-year-old Michael Grubbs became this year’s queen, it shocked no one.
• _____   One year its queen was a dog and another year a refrigerator.
• _____   Rice University has had some unusual homecoming queens in the past.
• _____   So Michael has agreed to give up his title and escort his runner-up, Nancy Jones, to the festivities.
• _____   But Cotton Bowl rules prohibit a man from being a princess in the parade.

Check your numbers with a neighbor, if possible. Where you disagree, explain to each other why you arranged the sentences as you did.

Next, copy the sentences in the order you numbered them on a separate sheet of paper. Copying sentences can be especially helpful for improving writing skills if done as Ben Franklin did—from memory. Do not just copy word-for-word. For each sentence, follow these steps:

1. Read as many words as you believe you can write correctly from memory (usually five to ten words).
2. Write these words from memory, including all capitals and punctuation marks.
3. Check back to the original sentence and correct any errors you made.
4. Read the next groups of words and repeat the steps.

Generally you will be able to read, memorize, and correctly write between five and ten words. Sometimes you may be able to remember an entire simple sentence correctly. But with a large, difficult-to-spell word, you may try to write only that one word correctly from memory.

 

³Benjamin Franklin, Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin, ed., Claries Eliot, Harvard Classics, I (New York: P. F. Collier, 1909) 16.

Writing from memory is a powerful technique for learning the spelling, grammar, punctuation, and word patterns used in standard written English. Write the above sentences in this way before reading further.

You will use this procedure of reconstructing papers to improve your writing skills in several later chapters.

Thinking Aloud Problem Solving

The second special method used in this book is thinking aloud problem solving. It was developed for a simple reason: You cannot directly see someone thinking. This makes teaching thinking more difficult than teaching other skills such as golf, tennis, or driving. A student cannot see the mental activities of an analytical thinker—a teacher or a computer programmer at work—the way he can watch every twist in the swing of a golf pro and every evasive step in the touchdown run of a halfback. He cannot see a good reader stop to clarify an abstract statement by thinking of a concrete example, nor a mathematician stop to visualize a diagram before beginning any computations in solving a word problem.

A method to get around this difficulty is now being used at the Scientific Reasoning Research Institute of the University of Massachusetts, in Project SOAR at Xavier University in New Orleans, in Jacksonville’s Think Camp for junior high school students, and in many other settings. It is called thinking aloud problem solving. Both teachers and students think aloud as much as possible as they interpret complicated material and solve problems. By vocalizing their thoughts as they work through complex ideas and relationships, they reveal the steps they take, so their mental activities can be observed and communicated.

You will see examples of good problem solvers thinking aloud as they interpret material, solve problems, and write sentences describing relationships in later chapters. You will also have an opportunity to think aloud and explain your reasoning as you solve problems. You will find yourself becoming more aware of your thinking style. In addition, your thinking will become more precise and logical because explaining your thoughts will guide your mind towards carefully interpreting symbols and fully spelling out relations. Trying to put your thoughts into words, whether in writing or in speech, is the surest way to pinpoint what you do and do not understand about a subject. At Apopka High School in Florida, a student explained to his teacher, Mrs. Joossens, how thinking aloud helped him:

Thinking aloud problem solving helps me to look carefully at all the parts of the problem, just like looking through a magnifying glass. Then I can fit all the facts and ideas into whole relationships.

You will think aloud shortly. But first turn to Chapter 2 and use text reconstruction with a paper selected to make you smile and to strengthen your reasoning and writing skills for passing tests.

2 Writing Descriptive Papers

Many standardized tests require you to write a paper on an assigned topic. High school certification tests often include a writing section, as do employee selection tests for private and government jobs. The SAT, ACT, and numerous tests given by individual schools have a writing component used to make admission or placement decisions.

The test papers can be divided roughly into five types: description, narration, exposition, persuasion, and letters. The chapters on the different types of papers are not all grouped together but distributed throughout the book. Research shows that people learn skills best when practice is spread over time rather than grouped together. Therefore, the chapters on papers are alternated with exercises that reinforce skills used in all forms of writing and reasoning.

Most papers you write have three parts: introduction, body, and conclusion. Usually you introduce your topic and main idea in the first paragraph. For the papers you study in this book, the first paragraph is called the introduction.

The body of a paper generally consists of several paragraphs in which the main idea is explained, illustrated, and supported.

In the final paragraph you bring your discussion to some logical conclusion, so this paragraph is called the conclusion. You will see these three parts in the following paper.

Descriptive Papers

One of the easiest papers to write is a description of something you have seen or experienced. In a descriptive paper you do not have to analyze a situation or defend an opinion. You just describe a person, place, or thing familiar to you.

The key to writing a good description is to pay close attention to details so you can include them in painting a vivid word picture for your reader. In the following exercise, note the numerous details the writer uses to show you why seeing a dachshund can be amusing.

Exercise 1.

Here is a topic you might be assigned on a writing test:

In about 250 words describe any breed of dog.

The following sentences can be arranged to form a paper describing a dachshund. Number the sentences within e...