• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

So far, you have been working through the solutions. For the rest of the chapter, we will spell out in more detail the problems. Here’s a quick review of the solutions.

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SOLUTIONS THE CHAPTER HAS OFFERED:

Slow down: describe what you are studying; give yourself more chances to see what you think.

Start your thinking with the local rather than the global; trace impressions back to causes; apply the heuristics

Recognize and reject the reflex move to generalization and judgment

Assume you don’t completely understand what you are studying; look for questions rather than answers; invite rather than flee uncertainty

THE PROBLEM

* * *

REACTING IS NOT THINKING

A lot of what passes for thinking is merely reacting. Ask someone for a description of a place, a movie, a new CD, and see what you get: good/bad, loved it/hated it, couldn’t relate to it, boring. Responses like these are habits, reflexes of the mind. And they are surprisingly tough habits to break. All of the tools in the toolkit seek to slow down unthinking (reflex) reactions.

We live in a culture of inattention and cliché. It is a world in which we are perpetually assaulted with mind-numbing claims (Arby’s offers “a baked potato so good you’ll never want anyone else’s”), flip opinions (“The Republicans/Democrats are idiots”) and easy answers (“Be yourself ” ; “Provide job training for the unemployed, and we can do away with homelessness”). We’re awash in such stuff.

On this note, we turn to a closer examination of four of the most stubbornly counterproductive habits of mind: (1) premature leaps, (2) the judgment reflex, (3) generalizing, and (4) naturalizing assumptions (overpersonalizing).

1. PREMATURE LEAPS

In a way, the premature leap is the most fundamental bad habit. The others—reflex judgments, generalizing, and overpersonalizing—are all versions of leaping too quickly to conclusions.

A classic example of the premature leap is the one that inexperienced writers make to arrive at a thesis statement before they have observed enough and reflected enough to find one worth using. These writers end up clinging to the first idea that they think might serve as a thesis, with the result that they stop looking at anything in their evidence except what they want and expect to see. Typically, they find themselves proving the obvious—some too general and superficial idea. Worse, they miss opportunities for the better paper lurking in the more complicated evidence screened out by the desire to make the thesis “work.”

You’ll know you are becoming a more accomplished analytical writer when the meaning of your evidence starts to seem less rather than more clear to you, perhaps even strange—and you don’t panic. Then you will begin to see details you hadn’t seen before and a range of competing meanings where you had thought there was only one.

Make It Strange

Making it strange rather than trying to normalize what you see and read is a productive habit of mind. It opposes our more usual habit to quickly render things familiar by locating them in comfortable and habitual categories. One purpose of writing, as the writer David Lodge suggests, “is to overcome the deadening effects of habit by representing familiar things in unfamiliar ways.” Defamiliarization is a term used by artists, philosophers and psychologists to talk about the need to fight against the deadening effects of habit. The man who coined the term defamiliarization, Victor Shklovsky, wrote, “Habitualization devours works, clothes, furniture, one’s wife, and the fear of war… . And art exists that one may recover the sensation of life” (David Lodge, The Art of Fiction. New York: Penguin, 1992, p.53).

The following quotation from an article entitled “The Transition to College Reading” remarks on the need for defamiliarizing in its account of students’ misunderstandings of readings:

“I find that [students] are most inclined to substitute what they generally think a text should be