Page 69 - Smart Thinking: Skills for Critical Understanding and Writing, 2nd Ed

56 SMART THINKING: SKILLS FOR CRITICAL UNDERSTANDING & WRITING

be well formed, but they make claims about the world that our audience
finds hard to accept precisely because they appear to have no foun-
dation.

Well-formed claims

Writing clear claims

Smart thinking requires, first of all, that our claims be well formed. Before we
even think about how the links between claims might develop—and before we
even consider whether or not our claims are acceptable—we need to write or
speak clear claims. While this task is similar to all clear writing or speaking, it is
not exactly the same. Some of the rules of narrative exposition (such as not
repeating words too frequently, the proper use of clauses within sentences, and so
on) do not apply at this stage. Most of these rules generate implied links between
clauses and sentences; but since your analytical diagram clearly shows these links,
we do not need to complicate the claims in this way. Remember, the analytical
structure format is designed first and foremost for planning; the good exposition
will come later.
So, the primary aim in writing well-formed claims in an analytical structure
format is to make each a separate statement that contains all the information
necessary for it to express what we mean. The very act of writing the claim
carefully will, of itself, help us to understand better what it means. For example,
the claim 'Violence against indigenous Australians is wrong' is unclear and
vague—even though we would all agree with the sentiment, it is not a 'good'
claim. If it is rewritten (for example, to read 'Violence against indigenous
Australians by white settlers colonising Australia had and continues to have a
negative effect on the moral order of the nation'), then the claim is not as easy
to read but clearly shows the meaning of the claim, ready for linking analytically
to other claims.
Even at this first stage, as we put together our claims as the basis for our text,
we cannot avoid the role of context. The meaning of every word we use is not a
fixed absolute, but a socially and culturally constructed convention. By this I mean
that the meaning of a word is always determined in relation to all the other words
1
and meanings that are in use within a particular society. Though, for most
purposes, the words (and hence the claims) we use seem to be clear in what they
mean, we can never simply assume that our audience will always grasp our exact
meaning. In particular, while the surface meanings of various words are usually
commonly accepted, the connotations (or hidden implications and understand-
ings) of words can vary subtly between different groups of people.
For example, many people in Cuba (still governed within a Marxist system)
would not consider the USA a democracy, since people in the USA do not have
equal access to education, health, and welfare, whereas in Cuba they do (and thus