Critical Thinking

Critical Thinking Essay

The habits of critical thinking are most valuable in determining the truth or untruth behind hidden meanings. It can be very difficult to try and decipher a meaning to something without using some sort of method. Asking Questions, Examining the Evidence, and Accepting the uncertainties are very useful skills in interoperating Charlotte Perkins Gilman's The Yellow Wallpaper.

When using critical thinking habits one should pick the skills that will be the most helpful for him/her to determine the meaning of something. Random questions are inevitable to avoid when just starting to narrow down ideas. Asking questions helps one narrow down his/hers ideas from just random ones to more defined ones. When reading Gilman's The Yellow Wallpaper random questions such as "why is Jane sick? And "why is John so controlling?" seem to be important but are really just random. When asking questions about a story one should start with questions that he/she may already know the answer to. I found Asking the more defined question "Is Jane insane?" to be helpful because I already assumed that Jane was by her lack of sleep and her strange infatuation with the wallpaper. In Gilman's The Yellow Wallpaper Jane says "At night in any kind of light, in twilight, candlelight, lamplight, and worst of all by moonlight, it becomes bars!" she is referring to the wallpaper. Not sleeping can cause people to become delusional and obsessive. Asking more direct questions instead of questions about specific details in the story seemed to be more useful in figuring out the meaning behind Gilman's The Yellow Wallpaper. Asking generalized questions Such as "Why is Jane sick?", and "Is the woman in the wallpaper Jane?" helped me more than asking questions about details like "Why was the room yellow?" or "Why does Jane dislike the wallpaper so much?" when it came to figuring out meaning to the story. This skill is very important to use as a first step to critical thinking when interpreting a story.

Examining evidence is one of the most crucial critical thinking skills. Examining evidence helps one find if the questions asked were answered in the text or not. When reading Gilman's The Yellow Wallpaper it is easy to assume that Jane and her husband are at this house for a kind of vacation to give Jane sometime to clear her head and get better. After examining the evidence I realized that Jane is not on vacation to get better. In Gilman's The Yellow Wallpaper Jane says I heard him ask Jennie a lot of professional questions about me. She had a very good report." Jane is referring to Dr. John and Caretaker Jennie. She is actually in a mental institution because of her nervous disorder. After finding that Jane is institutionalized it made it easier to determine that Jane was in fact the woman in the wallpaper.