Writing Critically: Key Skills for Post-Secondary Success

Writing Critically: Key Skills for Post-Secondary Success is organized into two parts. Part 1 deals with the three sets of inter-related skills: critical reading, critical thinking, and critical response, while Part 2 presents basic grammar, mechanics, and style topics as they relate to effective critical response writing.

Part 1 takes a step-by-step approach to help students develop their skills in numerous key areas of writing. It presents detailed, carefully sequenced explorations of crucial critical-reading skill topics, including discrimination between main and supporting points, and includes both basic material regarding types of statements and the types of evidence that they require, as well as proper summary skills, including the use of signal phrases. Detailed explorations of two author-created prompts help students develop strategies for critically responding to arguments. Grammar, punctuation, and stylistic topics are embedded along the way, arising out of the demands of particular writing situations, rather than as topics in and of themselves.

While certain grammatical and stylistic topics are integrated into Part 1 as needed, the Part 2 modules present grammar topics in a more through and analytical way. Unlike the content in Part 1, which is designed for students to follow in order, material in Part 2 can be integrated into activities at almost any point in the sequence.