Can you analyze this and tell me what settings do i use in word?

OnePage method
The OnePage method aims at improving critical thinking
together with establishing a clear perception of the
disutility of direct information transfer from the internet.
Internet has greatly affected course assignment study
methods. An assignment typically begins by a search for
information in Google. When suitable hits are found,
material is transferred to the assignment. To what extent
that material is edited and refined for the relevant use
depends on the motivation and competences of the student.
In many cases the material found in internet directly
defines the contents of the assignment while a more
beneficial use for the information would be as a source
serving the thought processes of the student. Yet it is the
thought process that becomes bypassed, when time and
resources are limited.
We assume that we are learning while in fact we are only
transferring information from one place to another.
Learning becomes externalised as the reward, that is, the
received grade reflects the quality of the source material,
not the student’s own reasoning. What’s the point in time
and energy consuming thought processing when you can
receive good grades in a more cost-efficient manner?
Information transfer might otherwise appear as a handy
study method, if only there weren’t a major inbuilt problem
with it: The World Does Not Value Manual Information
Transfer! Organisations do not search for graduates who
know how to google, they search for those who are able to
process information and create new knowledge using
capabilities we learn only by thinking and reasoning in a
costly manner.
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I have read course assignments for many years and it is
easy to see how extrinsically many students deal with
knowledge. The aim is simply to fill empty pages with text
and figures to fulfil some external requirements. The
OnePage method recognises the meaninglessness of such
information transfer and replaces it with a more
intrinsically rewarding method of creating one’s own ideas
and using one’s own reasoning and personality when
writing assignments. The intrinsic reward comes from the
nature of the mind itself being curious and looking for
meaningful things in life.
By limiting the treatment of any topic to one page makes
it possible for a student to really process things in their
own mind as they are not required to fill several pages with
copied material. The page limit makes it useless to transfer
material directly from internet as the space is needed for
creating meaningful personal treatment.
Students report both joy and hardship. Joy arises
whenever we are experiencing something authentically
true to us. We all know what learning feels like when our
thinking is genuinely affected and our perception of reality
changes. What makes the method difficult is the fact that
authentic learning takes energy and effort, and also skills
that we are not necessarily so familiar with.
The OnePage method aims at training particular type of
skills that are rare and known to be valuable throughout
our history. Those skills operate at the meta level, meaning
they are valuable for us in all instances, throughout the
world, and for the entire duration of our lives. The skills are
cognitive, meaning they are connected to our ways of
thinking, and they produce something called critical
thinking, for which the world is willing to reward you
abundantly. If you understand what the above sentence
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indicates, I need not explain the logic of reality in any
greater detail. What I do need to explain, however, is what
critical thinking is and how it operates, and especially how
it can be trained by this method.
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Critical thinking
The concept of critical thinking may bring many kinds of
sensations; some may consider critical thinking as
something to be avoided simply because criticism feels
unpleasant due to its common usage connected with fault
finding and critical judgement. We don’t generally like to be
criticised.
Critical thinking is however, when properly perceived,
central to the very sense of being human because it
facilitates knowledge about us and our environment.
Paradoxically, the modern person can live quite easily
without connection to critical thinking because we are
utilising knowledge that has been created by critical
thinking of others before us.
The urgency of critical thinking becomes highlighted in
our time of increasing flow of (dis)information which
decreases our ability to make sense of the world. People
have increasing difficulties in distinguishing between real
and unreal, between causes and effects, etc. So, the task at
hand can be argued to be both vital and urgent.
There are many ways we can categorise elements of
critical thinking. I will provide here a simple taxonomy that
directs our attention toward the operation of the mind.
There is plenty of literature on the subject, so for those of
you who want to dive into the world of critical thinking, a
whole tradition is to be found going through the Greek
philosophers (500 BCE
) in the West as well as the
Buddhist thinkers (also 500 BCE) in the East.
 BCE = Before the Common Era.
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Critical thinking is connected to us in two ways: as 1) an
inherent inclination or trait we are born with and as 2) a
skill that can be practised and cultivated. All of us benefit
from the practice as the results are life-changing and there
is no limit to be found beyond which your mind could not
penetrate. Critical thinking contains 4 elements that we
need to focus and practise here:
❖ Flexibility of thinking and open-mindedness
❖ Abandoning our earlier opinions, beliefs and
(pre)conceptions
❖ Creative thinking
❖ Reflexivity
Flexibility refers to acceptance of new information as
candidate for knowledge. We need to be both open and
alert at the same time which makes our practice both
interesting and demanding. Accepting new information
without scrutiny would be uncritical thinking and rejection
without proper inspection would manifest rigidity of
thinking. So, we need to administer a proper balance
between them, and that takes practice. Readiness to
abandon false (pre)conceptions and ideas is also important.
We need to practise to learn when and with what type of
evidence ideas should be dismissed. Most importantly, we
need to find causes for both accepting and dismissing ideas
and conceptions; and these causes need to be credible and
valid foremost to ourselves and secondarily to others.
Creative thinking enters the picture when we examine
information. Newly adopted information requires
interpretation; we need to fit the new elements into the
existing structure of our knowledge. Both the newly
adopted information and our knowledge structure are
adaptable to some extent. How and to what extent each
adapts to the other depends on the elasticity of our minds.
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Creativity helps us to spontaneously connect between
conceptions and create further ideas. And as soon as this is
said, in marches the reflexive guard who needs to
investigate that we are not doing anything entirely silly.
Reflexivity refers to a thought process by which we make
our thinking intelligible to ourselves. Without reflexivity we
would never learn how we come to learn things and how
we come to think of things we do. Without it we would
remain victims in our own lives, disconnected from the
decision-maker who we should become.
It is entirely possible to live through our lives without a
clear understanding of how our main cognitive capacity
operates in the world of ideas, feelings, opinions,
(pre)conceptions and knowledge. Critical thinking is a twoway arrow; one end points outside and the other inside of
us. By practising critical thinking we learn not only about
how the world operates but more importantly how we
ourselves operate in the world. Through diligent practice
self-knowledge arises and mastery in it liberates us. That
should be something worthwhile (beside the tiny sideeffect of the world rewarding anyone with this capability).
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Assignments
In this section my purpose is to explain how to write
course assignments utilising the OnePage critical thinking
methodology. First, work on the assignment needs to be
divided into two distinguishable and separate phases:
(1) Research phase
(2) Reporting phase
These two phases need to be kept separate because they
serve different purposes and problems arise whenever
writers mix these phases: a hasty writer may try to
construct her page while still investigating, when things
appear anything but clear to her. She ends up constructing
the page by the use of reasoning provided by others (in the
internet and elsewhere).
The research phase begins by studying the theories and
models given in the assignment. These theories and models
serve a purpose and the aim of the student is to understand
how they operate and how they are related to other things.
The research phase requires extensive use of internet
and databases. When going through articles and texts one is
constantly bombarded by ideas and arguments provided by
their authors. How is one to know what to believe and what
to reject?
The less we initially know about something, the more
disordered new inputs of information may appear at the
beginning. By going through a number of different sources,
recurrent patterns start to appear, however, and order
begins to take shape. But this does not happen
automatically, or without effort. Consider two different
types of attitudes toward things we come across and which
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are new to us. First one can be called “short-term costminimisation” because anyone following this principle will
systematically discard anything they are not already
familiar with. They do so because it saves costs in the shortterm as investigation necessarily involves effort and use of
energy. The second type of attitude can be called “long-term
improvement” because this person does not see the shortterm cost as a cost at all, but instead, as an investment. Her
inquisitive mind collects constantly new inputs and her
categorising capacity rearranges phenomena into new
orders. In time these constantly reshaping orders correlate
with reality to a degree unattainable by any costminimising principle.
The research phase comes to a close when a plan, a
strategy starts to take shape. The writer understands now
how the concepts and models of the assignment operate
and how they can be applied in a real world setting, and
how they can help us make sense of phenomena inside and
outside of organisations.
The research phase may have accumulated much
material and now the writer has to carefully choose what to
include in the report. A common tendency needs to be
resisted where everything one has collected is poured into
the report for the reader to pick and choose. The page
limitation is there to drive the writer to critically think and
select when constructing the page. One cannot say
everything there is, so one needs to have a meaningful plan
to what one wants to say.
There is a general pattern to be followed when applying
critical thinking to economic phenomena. Our task is
typically to apply a given theory or model in an empirical
setting and analyse its intended and unintended
consequences. An analysis consists of examination of causal
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relations between phenomena. The writer’s task is then to
show how different things lead to other things and thus
how the model operates in reality. The reader is interested
in seeing how the mind of the writer perceives and
differentiates things, how it reasons and concludes, what
type of things it takes for granted and how it provides
evidence. Much too seldom a train of thought can be found
going something like this: “This happens for the following
reason …”.
When searching for relevant information for
assignments, we need to use sources (often in digital form)
extensively. The OnePage method does not do away the
need to filter information, it only advises us not to present
discovered information as an outcome of our own learning.
However, we need to google extensively in order to create a
solid understanding of the arrays of applications of models
and theories. However, googling alone does not always
bring information of expected quality, so we may need to
use databases that contain edited articles and journals as
well. To what extent this is so depends on the subject at
hand.
Since we need to use referential information when
constructing our assignments, referencing standards come
into play. And since our OnePage method limits the space
available, we don’t want to waste that limited space by
listing references at the end of each assignment, that is, at
the end of each page. Instead, we attach a separate list of
references at the end of the course report containing
references of all assignments.
Listing references in a standard way at the end of the
course report should be unproblematic. How about the
other end of a reference, the one in the text, inside brackets,
like (Kaisla 2012), what should we do about those? This
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question may sound silly to those who know what
referencing is all about, but around 50 % of students do not
make any in-text references. They simply create a list of
references at the end of the report and consider the job
done. The in-text reference is of course what the whole
business of referencing is about. By the exact placing and
style of that reference marking we show the reader how we
are using the source information.
Contrary to the reporting guidelines of the school, the
overall layout of the course report can be designed to stand
out in the crowd and attract the reader. This is because
visual design can be an important sales factor and training
in that competency is also beneficial. Another central
guideline deals with the tiny but important detail of row
height. Use only row height of 1 and not the 1.5 as
instructed in the reporting guidelines of the school. The
rationale for this should be self-evident as our space is
limited to one page only (and besides the 1.5 row height is
a residual from the stone age when space was needed
between the lines in hard copies).
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Lectures and discussions
Our courses consist typically of lectures or discussions
and assignments that are pursued in groups or individually.
The spirit of lectures varies greatly, depending on various
elements, such as skills and moods and motivations of the
students. To enhance our mutual understanding of the
purpose of lectures, let us look into their nature a bit.
Lectures are essentially about thinking together. This
means we get together to think and exchange our
understandings and views on themes by the method of
reasoning. Critical thinking can on the one hand be active
exchange of views and arguments among the participants,
yet on the other hand, it can be silent reflection while the
teacher opens new themes and horizons. The thing that
connects all variations of critical thinking is our
concentration on a mutual theme which is moving and
developing during the discourse.
What I said about the nature of lectures above looks
fairly easy and straight forward to understand. Yet in
reality pursuing such a simple goal can sometimes be
extremely difficult. Concentrating on a theme and listening
to what other people have to say can become tiresome,
especially if one’s mind is not engaged. Degreasing span of
concentration is a universal topic in education. A popular
remedy is to bring entertainment, replicating tools and
methods students already enjoy using such as games and
gadgets.
Critical thinking operates contrary to entertainment
factors, however, because if it did not, everyone would be a
millionaire. Critical thinking becomes developed by critical
thinking, and it is precisely with this skill that students are
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at their weakest. If you have never experienced
independence in thinking, accepting your self as the primary
source of the thinking activity, it is very hard to perceive
how it works. I cannot blame the students for not having
been offered something that should have been throughout
their schooling: The European Union has in 2006 put
critical thinking into the centre of life-long learning
capabilities. Yet, instead of promoting independence of
thinking, universities educate politically correct followers.
How do I know this? I have met countless students in and
from universities around the world, and if they collectively
lack something, it is independent and reliable thinking.
What could explain this systematic deficiency in the very
core of capabilities that we should master? The answer lies
in how conventions operate in this world. See, many
teachers themselves have no experience of critical thinking
because they have gone through the same domestication
that they now offer to their students; that learning is about
collecting and memorising facts about reality as presented
in books and elsewhere.
Sometimes students may be confused about the task of
the teacher in this era of information overflow. They may
wonder why the teacher doesn’t provide them with a
ready-made path to “the correct solution”. The task of a
teacher becomes clearer when we understand how this
thinking together operates. There needs to be knowledge
present to give guidance to the moving themes, but what is
essential in learning is the personal processing of thoughts
interconnected with the shared ideas of the group. Thus
solutions may vary, but the central point is how we arrive
at our own conclusions, that is, how we construct our very
own path of reasoning, starting from an open question and
ending somewhere we can, looking back, clearly see the
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realistic explanations and justifications for our reasoning.
We are inescapably and mutually interdependent but the
only one who can make this world understandable to us is
our own mind.
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Assessment
Since critical thinking is a meta cognitive skill,
assessment emphasises capabilities that are trained when
thinking critically. The following are central elements of
assessment in the OnePage method:
1. Capability to understand assignments’ purpose
2. Capability to discern causalities
3. Capability to provide evidence
4. Capability to provide credible arguments
5. Capability to conclude and create one’s own ideas
6. Capability to construct a coherent and consistent
page
The method creates some requirements for the design of
assignments as well. Assignments need to be open-ended in
the sense that there is no predetermined or exact “correct
answer” toward which students should navigate if they are
to succeed. If a mainstream idea of assessing knowledge
refers to the correspondence between the endpoint
reached by the student and the predefined, correct
interpretation by the supervisor, in critical thinking
methodology, it is the journey itself which is the object of
assessment. This fits well to business economics because
we have a way too long history of pretence of knowledge in
this field already.
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Frequently answered
How to know whether or not one is on the right track
when applying the OnePage method?
1. Do not just present what others write or say about a
subject (in books, articles, internet, lectures, etc.).
2. Do not construct your page before the research
phase is properly finished.
3. Do not construct your page before you know what
you want to say.
4. If you do not know what you want to say, it means
you are not yet ready for it, so keep researching.
5. A moment comes when you quite naturally connect
separate ideas and are able to perceive what the
assignment is about; this of course does not come
without effort.
6. Then collect your ideas and write a coherent page.
7. Do not try to fit in all the possible ideas you may
have; the method is not about that.
8. Think of the page as a complete whole in which you
only say what is truly important and meaningful.
9. Your reader is knowledgeable, so you can rely on
their wisdom.
10. Aim at mastery of your thinking and use the white
canvas to show it to the reader.
11. Apply the timeless method of critical thinking
throughout your processes of thinking and
expressing.
12. Do not accept information without scrutiny;
especially direct your examination to your own
thought processes. What can you really say you
know and how do you come to know it?
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13. When you truly feel you know it, then it is yours.
14. Be the best and toughest reviewer of your own
thinking.
15. Remember, critical thinking does not aim at
becoming perfect; its goal is to open to more
questions.