emPOWERED Critical Thinking

“Writing is thinking on paper.”
—William Zinsser

emPOWERED Critical Thinking helps you to pinpoint the thinking strategy needed for any business-writing task. Each page of this useful Job Aide covers a type of critical thinking related to different business-writing forms:

• Analysis: Use for incident and progress reports, activity and policy reviews, proposals, business plans, and executive summaries.
• Synthesis: Use for instructions, résumés, proposals, sales letters, reports, requests, and complaints.
• Evaluation: Use for reports, proposals, complaints and responses, recommendations, and thank-you messages.
• Application: Use for proposals, sales letters, annual reports, incident reports, and instructions.

Each of these approaches is applied to five or six different writing tasks and illustrated with a brief example of each.

Read the emPOWERED Critical Thinking Job Aide to understand how these four thinking strategies relate to your own work. Then review it in order to focus your efforts and produce effective work each time you face a difficult writing task.