Critical Thinking Piece Introduction

To best show my critical thinking and analysis skills I chose my timed write based on the movie AmericanEast.  This paper asked us to use the movie to show what it is meant to be an outsider.  I had to look at this movie in many ways in order to really analyze what the movie was saying.  From the actions and the reactions of each character and the Muslim community as a whole, each area had to be explored.  At one point in my paper I wrote “Being an outsider by definition means “someone who is excluded from or is not a member of a group.”.  Muslims were picked out of a crowd just by their appearance.  When Mustafa was at the airport and lost sight of his son he began to panic like any parent would, but because of his culture and son’s name (Mohammed) he was automatically seen as a threat.”  I feel I did well not describing the paper but using the paper to support the purpose of the paper.  I improved immensely on doing this from the start of the class.  I use to often write about what happened in the movie, and then try to explain it and/or touch it to the topic of the paper.  I now see that, that is not truly analytical writing.  But that you have to do the opposite, and look deeper into what is happening in the movie and see how it supports the intentions of your paper.  This paper best showed my ability to analyze the film AmericanEast and use what I learned to support the purpose of my paper.