ABSTRACT
The critical thinking generates multiple expectations and definitions arising from the fact that there is no single philosophical or scientific tradition that informs either its definition or its teaching. Academic writing textbooks that give advice about essays place emphasis on the need to develop an overall argument or case through the presentation and development of a thesis statement and the use of critical/evaluative thinking in the development of the argumentation. In academic writing, they involve a small range of coherence relations, specifically those that involve different types of causality and concessive contrast; embedded within these are frequently metadiscourse devices, particularly hedging and attitude markers. The chapter analyses each critical statement to identify the generic elements that it employed to construct its evaluation. The social genre/cognitive genre model is used to analyse texts manually using a combination of induction and deduction.
