Why Literature Matters By Dana Gioia

Critical thinking could be best defined as finding ways to see the best judgment with open, imaginative, and honest thinking. The most important aspects of critical thinking starts with clear communication with the people around you and complete lack of judgment when making decisions. This is important because being closed minded and judgemental will negatively affect any decisions that concern more than one group and can negatively affect decisions that concern more than one person. Next is having the ability to properly weigh the importance of each separate idea and belief of each group in order to make a sound decision that benefits every group. Being able to identify and separate ideas by how important and how they affect each group in

He believes that “Reading requires sustained and focused attention as well as active use of memory and imagination” (Gioia, 2) which helps with being more open to lives other than our own. According to Bell Hooks, critical thinking can be defined as “the longing to know—to understand how life works” (Hooks, 1) and that it requires imagination and curiosity. Hooks also goes on to explain how fragile children are when it comes to their want to learn and how easy it is for that curiosity to simply go away. Personally, I agree more with Bell Hooks because she relies more on the instinctual aspect of critical thinking and empathy, where Dana Gioia sees critical thinking as a learned ability. Critical thinking should be seen as something that comes naturally with being human, for example, in Bell Hooks’ article, she connects the curiosity of a child to critical thinking with how the child wants to understand the world around them and learn. In addition to this, young children are also completely unbiased and only usually see the fun and new parts of other people instead of comparing themselves to others and forming biases. Children are great critical thinkers, they manage to find very creative ways around problems that end up helping them and not upsetting the people around them. With their developing brains and their need to absorb more knowledge, children often

One example of when critical thinking is needed is during online interactions between two users, or even groups of users, who have conflicting arguments. One example that comes to mind is any conflict between the two anime called One Piece and Naruto. These anime both have dedicated fan bases who constantly argue over which show is better or put down the other show by picking out minor flaws that show up in only one of many episodes. Lots of people get into full blown arguments over the power systems, which are the inhuman abilities characters have, in each anime. These fans will argue about how the power system in Naruto allows the characters to grow and were “reworked to create more characters with new and more powerful abilities” (Quora) or how the power system in One Piece has “always remained the same” (Quora) and how the devil fruits; a fruit that takes away a person’s ability to swim and replaces it with a unique power; do not allow a character to grow. Sometimes these arguments turn into fighting matches with little to no logic behind them and no understanding that each anime is unique to their authors and their creative liberties. I personally think the fighting is pointless and if people would just think about how their opinion does not always match others’ then maybe they will also realize that people’s likes and dislikes cannot always be swayed. In this situation,