Finding your critical voice

Looking beyond the surface

One of the key attributes of high quality scientific writing is its accuracy and logical development of argument. We call this critical writing but this doesn't mean that it is negative. In academic circles critical writing means that you must first question the information and opinions in a text or field and then present your own evaluation or judgement.

In today's session I chose two recently published pieces of text for consideration. The first was an article from this week's Age newspaper that purported to quote a speech, delivered on the weekend by a highly respected australian professor. The second was a very recent publication written by the same professor as an editorial in a medical journal. In both cases the professor was calling on politicians to take action by introducing new legislation in several areas relating to community behaviour. Since the ramifications of changing legislation can be far-reaching, I saw this as an opportunity for the students to discuss whether the underlying arguments could be substantiated. I asked them to imagine that they were scientists advising political parties.

When presented with material of this sort, I suggest that the reader starts by listing the arguments made in each paragraph and determining whether these arguments stand alone or whether, and how, they link to one another. Sometimes it's useful to use diagrams or mind maps to show these connections. Having determined these, it's usually necessary to do some further literature research to discover whether the arguments are supported by others' work. For today's examples I had already performed some simple searches that revealed research that showed that several of the arguments in the texts were not only unsubstantiated but invalid.

A key take home message here is that you cannot rely on a person's academic credentials or position to give them credibility. As a responsible scientist, you need to read carefully and thoroughly, develop your arguments logically, and then document