Argumentative Academic Essay – Individual
Assignment Brief
The purpose of this Assignment is to develop students’ critical thinking skills and to test their knowledge of relevant theory and course content learnt.
In this Assignment you are given the following statement: ‘Organizations can make very little impact on strengthening creativity, innovation and design thinking processes as these are dependent on individual employees’.
Using this statement as a prompt, you are required to write an argumentative academic essay of 2000 words (excluding reference list). In your essay, identify and define what is meant by creativity, innovation and design thinking, whether you agree, do not agree or partially agree with the statement and why you agree/disagree/partially disagree using relevant theory. You must also use real-world corporate examples (e.g., examples from companies like Google, Tesla etc) to justify your stance.
What is an argumentative academic essay?
An argumentative academic essay is a piece of writing that examines and interprets a given ‘claim’ or ‘statement’ and defends or refutes it with the use of theoretical and practical evidence. In such an essay, you are essentially building up and presenting your own argument(s) on the statement while using scholarly (i.e., journal articles, textbooks, theories etc.) and practical evidence (e.g., corporate stories, news items relating to companies etc) to support your arguments. Hence, you are not simply describing or summarizing what others have said about a given statement but introducing and developing your own arguments on it. Your arguments must be backed by evidence if they are to be valid. In summary, in writing an argumentative academic essay, you are using your critical thinking skills.
VERY IMPORTANT: Please refer to the following links for further information on:
- Argumentative academic essays: Link (Links to an external site.)
- Critical thinking: What is critical thinking? (Links to an external site.)
The importance of critical thinking skills
As students undertaking undergraduate study in Singapore, you are expected to develop your critical thinking skills. Critical thinking goes beyond just describing and summarizing phenomena or criticizing phenomena to find their faults. It involves higher level thinking and reasoning skills to independently ‘analyse (break things down), evaluate (make judgements based on evidence) and synthesize or create (put parts together into a coherent whole)’ (RMIT University n.d). Critical thinking involves doing independent research, reading critically (questioning what you read with an open mind), analyzing and evaluating what your findings, developing your arguments based on solid evidence and synthesizing your arguments and presenting them appropriately.
These skills will help you to become good researchers, independent thinkers and challenge established ideas and perspectives.
Reference:
RMIT University n.d., What is critical thinking?, RMIT University, viewed 1 February 2020 <https://emedia.rmit.edu.au/learninglab/content/what-critical-thinking>