Smart Thinking
This book has concentrated on the analytical structure format, primarily as a way
of learning about reasoning, but also with an eye to its practical application as a tool
for helping you plan the creation and presentation of arguments and explanations.
Yet it would be wrong to think that the format is, of itself, something essential to
reasoning. It is not. This format—along with the idea of analytical questions—is
one way of representing the thought processes that we must go through to be smart
thinkers. It enables us to see that the key elements of smart thinking are:
• being thoughtful in considering issues in depth and with breadth, and without
'missing' any element of reasoning
• being critical in the way we assess information, not taking things for granted
or making easy assumptions, either about the truth of claims or their interrelationships
with other claims
• being smart in the way we relate the texts of reasoning to the contexts in
which they are produced, prese
