Critical thinking skills are crucial for both academic and everyday life. This paper presents the author's Text Analysis Matrix (TAM), a model for developing skills for the critical examination of texts. The TAM guidelines involve finding and clarifying the main claims of a text, discovering and assessing arguments, uncovering the implications for thinking and for action of the claims made in a text, and, finally, looking at the social and political impact of a text in the form of a critique. Results of the application of the TAM with an introductory Ethics course indicated more sophisticated arguments and more awareness of the broad implications of one's beliefs, as well as a greater awareness of social and political critique, at the end of the semester than at the beginning. (Contains 1 table and 13 footnotes.)