The Future of Thinking

Learning to think is a complex activity made up of reading, writing, listening, speaking and remembering textual materials. The Future of Thinking adapts rhetorical exercises such as paraphrase, precis, summary and transcription to give students a versatile range of strategies for making sense of texts, and encourages the rapid development of practical, critical skills in a wide range of humanities students. In this approach short, written and spoken exercises are given as much weight as the formal essay and the emphasis is always on the understanding and analysis, rather than the regurgitation of information.

The authors have been successfully using this method of teaching for some time, and the book includes examples of exercises they have used, with the results and feedback from their students.