Page 136 - Smart Thinking: Skills for Critical Understanding and Writing, 2nd Ed

PLANNING AND CREATING YOUR REASONING 12 3

an effort to understand the assumptions of the other and try to find some
common ground from which to engage in the specific argument about HIV.
While the final resolution of such a clash of frameworks does not necessarily mean
'sticking with' one's original assumptions, effective reasoning requires that the
difference be acknowledged and explained properly before any moment of resolu-
tion.

Exercise 9.1

In relation to an issue that you are working on at the moment, write down a series
of questions that will help you to establish the external dimensions of your topic
(how it relates to the general audiences and knowledge of your reasoning).

Text: the internal dimensions of reasoning

Chapter 3 introduced the idea of a particular planning method, which revolves
around the use of the analytical structure format. Here, as a reminder, are the five
steps involved in this method:
1 Decide what your conclusion will be. Write this claim out carefully, express-
ing exactly what you mean. Number it T .
2 Then think about the reasons that you are giving for this conclusion. These
reasons must be written as proper claims, this time serving as premises that
either explain how that conclusion comes about or show why it should be
accepted. Try to keep related premises together, but as the diagram will show
these relationships clearly, it is not essential to group them perfectly. Write
them out, making sure that you do not use pronouns but express each claim
so that it makes sense in and of itself. Number them from '2 ' onwards. Focus
on giving the main reasons for the conclusion at this stage.
3 Begin to draw the diagram to show the relationships between the claims.
4 Stop and think: are you missing any claims? do you need more premises? have
you got the relationships the way you want them to be?
5 Make changes if required, adding claims and redrawing the diagram if need
be.

We can learn more about each step in the process by thinking through some of
the questions that we might ask to guide us in completing each step effectively. The
following discussion does not, of course, cover every aspect of all situations, but will
give you a general overview of the sorts of smart-thinking 'moves' we can make in
planning and creating our arguments and explanations. Moreover, although this
overview is broken up into specific advice about each step of the process, the actual
application of the ideas discussed will obviously occur in a variety of ways, at a
variety of different stages of your research and analysis. In practice, no step is
isolated from the others, even if, in theory, we can distinguish them in order to
learn more about them.