Critical thinking requires students to be actively involved with their reading assignments. Instructors may want to share with their students the following list of some of the more commonly used propaganda techniques. Students should be on the alert for those as they read the Taking Sides debates. Generalizations One kind of generalization that can be hard to identify, interpret, or test is the reification . To reify means to treat a vague general term as if it were a concrete, even living, thing.
Reifications tend to obscure important questions about responsibility, cost, and benefit.
In addition, they are frequently used to demean or demonize entire groups of people. We encounter reifications every day. Here are a few headlines from a major metropolitan newspaper with possible reifications italicized. These are story headlines, and, in most cases, in the body of the story, we learn who in the drug company failed to act, which city and union officials extended the strike deadline, and so forth. Sometimes, however, these vital details never emerge.