Researched Writing: Fact vs. Opinion
Rush Limbaugh
I will close my program on Friday by saying 'Look, I know weekends are here and you don't want to think about this stuff, you don't want to worry about the news, you don't want to care about what's happening, well, I'll do it for you. It is my job, I promise you, I'll take care of everything. I'll watch the news, I'll go through the arduous task of watching those boring Sunday morning shows, and I'll come here Monday, as long as you're here Monday morning, I'll tell you exactly everything you need to know about what happened on the weekend. As an added bonus, I'll tell you what to think about it.' Well, when I first started and did this, the very people I am satirizing lampooned me as a guy creating an army of mind-numbed robots. They didn't get the sense of humor in it. And I'm trying to be funny. It's the exact opposite of what I'm trying to do. To tell people, I do tell them what I think, and if they're wise, they'll agree with me. But I mean the point is that I'm attempting to get them to actually watch the stuff themselves. The psychology of that is, I'm not going to let this guy tell me what I should think. Nobody should let somebody else tell them what they should think.

Charles Turner
Students, it's been my experience, have been trained to regurgitate factual information. They've been taught to do that at the lower levels. And they come into a classroom like mine and they find, oh, this is very different here. I have to think, for a change. So critical thinking to me is that element of thinking on your feet. It's putting information together, carefully thinking about the reading material and in history…the controversies in history are very crucial. Most students have been taught just to throw back historical fact without considering the controversies; where this information? Who's the historian who wrote this information? And so I drill students in that area to think on their feet and be critical thinkers.

Akua Duku Anokye
I'm not certain just how critically everybody wants their students to think. And so that's where my problem is. So here we are in freshman comp, preparing our students to think critically, to ask questions and to assess, and to evaluate from a variety of perspectives, and then they may get into a history class. And that history teacher may not want to be questioned.

Dave Daley
I go to the referee journals, or to credible sources, that I trust. I'm a bit jaundiced about anything I see on agriculture in the popular press. Generally it is not based on scientific evidence. And so that's given me almost a, an unfair or maybe an overly critical expectation of when I read articles about agriculture in the popular press. And so I really think, we talked about levels of evidence, I'm one of those typical critical scientists that I need to have solid documentation, and unfortunately it's caused me to discount a lot of what I read.

John Lovas
This critical discrimination between what supports your idea and what doesn't, the ability to do that, the techniques for doing that are essentially what's involved in critical thinking. You end up with two different emphases; one is how to treat information, and decide what is good information and what's bad information: that's one part of critical thinking. How do you sift through material, decide that the authorities really are authoritative, they really know what they're talking about. And the other is knowing some techniques of logic.

Helen Gillmor
Taking a course in logic, that would be something that would really help you get rid of the access in formation that can interfere with you understanding what is the essential elements of a problem. It's the same thing in writing. You have a lot of things in your mind when you sit down to write but the organization and the ability to figure out what's really important here, is what's really going to enable you to put down on paper what will solve the problem and be persuasive.

Lynn Troyka
I think that differentiating between fact and opinion can either be very easy because it's quite on the face of things. One can tell what's a fact, one can tell what somebody's saying about that fact and giving an opinion. The more subtle and therefore probably the more college-level sort of approach to fact versus opinion which is a very neat kind of categorization and isn't always true. But what college students learn, I hope, largely is to unpeel the layers and to peel off the layers…unpeel an onion…whatever the metaphor is…to see how the use of a particular phrase or word is there to manipulate you rather than to inform you. And some of those manipulations are very subtle.