Courses in Critical Thinking are offered by many Philosophy and English Departments within the United States. Many institutions extol "critical thinking skills" as a core competency. This book is written by a long term philosophy instructor who has evaluated scores of potential textbooks over the last 20 years. For various reasons, this text was written to capture the essential nature of what is often called the informal fallacies and how they play out in oral conversations and writing composition. Additionally, this book covers the basic elements of a "position" paper and how to develop such a paper when writing on controversial political and social issues. The goal is provide a student with the essentials that once understood will have long lasting value.