Suspending Judgment

One of the most important steps in the process of thinking and writing analytically is to suspend judgment about topics, artifacts, ideas, or whatever it is you want to analyze. Critical thinking yields the best results when you approach something with an open mind. When we bring our biases and presuppositions to a topic, we aren’t allowing a truly organic research process to happen. This isn’t to say that we can ever be completely objective or somehow erase our minds of prior knowledge; however, if we try to at least suspend judgments about that knowledge, we increase our likelihood of being open to new discoveries in the research process.

It is also important to suspend judgment when undertaking analysis so that we will not implicitly signal to our reader that our mind is already made up concerning the issue or object at hand. Implying this kind of rigidity, whether in the tone or the single-mindedness of our approach, suggests to our audience that our work is not really attempting to methodically discover or clarify anything. The result can be a paper or presentation that seems presumptuous, as if we do not have to do any work to convince our readers. This can be very off-putting, and will likely not result in a successful analysis.