Modern education is constantly looking for ways to improve the quality of student training. To provide a graduate student with competitiveness in the labor market, it is necessary, in addition to a set of professional knowledge and skills, to form competencies that will contribute to his/her professional self-realization in the learning process.
Important personal qualities of any future specialist are communication, creativity, the high culture of speech and thinking, independence, professional orientation.
When we speak about the culture of thinking, special attention should be paid to critical thinking, namely the formation of the ability to think critically. Developed critical thinking allows the student, and in the future, a specialist, to grow professionally, self-actualize, solve professional problems and find non-standard approaches to achieving their goals.
Critical thinking is the skill to analyze information from logic and a personal-psychological approach to apply the obtained results to standard and non-standard situations, questions, problems. Critical thinking is the ability to pose new questions, develop various arguments, and make independent, thoughtful decisions.
For the modern system of higher education, training specialists capable of critical thinking is crucial.
Critical thinking significantly expands educational, and future professional opportunities since traditional knowledge, skills, and abilities are replenished with the ability to analyze, reason, solve problem situations arising in professional activity.
Learning how to write a critical thinking essay is considered to be the basis for developing this skill. Learning this type of written work is suitable for developing critical thinking since an essay implies the disclosure of one’s point of view, a critical understanding of the information received.
As part of the training, students study literary texts of different authors. Acquaintance with each work ends with the obligatory writing of an essay.
The essay involves searching for a new look, a new reading, and understanding a given problem. In this type of written work, the student fully demonstrates the formed skills of critical thinking, philological knowledge, and skills.
Nowadays, the composition of the essay is not limited by strict rules, but this text should be concise and harmonious. As for the essay structure, the author’s thoughts on the problem should be presented in the form of short theses and then supported by arguments. Thus, arguments follow the thesis.
Arguments are facts, phenomena of social life, events, life situations and life experience, scientific evidence, references to the opinion of scientists, etc. It is advisable to give two arguments in favor of each thesis since one argument may not be convincing, and three arguments may overload text, which, as noted above, is short and precise.
Thus, the essay acquires a circular structure. When writing the introduction and conclusion, attention is focused on the problem: in the introduction, it is posed; in conclusion, the author’s opinion is summarized. Critical comprehension of new information is closely related to developing the student’s information and communication culture.
Therefore, teaching essay writing is extremely important. It forms students’ ability to clearly and competently express thoughts, systematize and structure information, highlight cause-and-effect relationships, support theses with appropriate arguments, give their examples, make logical conclusions.
All of the above skills contribute to the development of critical thinking. This quality allows the student to realize his/her personal and professional potential fully.