One of the crucial cognitive processes in academic writing is that of problem-finding in the critical reading stage before planning an essay. With the focus of our study being on the process of critical reading—a writer's in-depth reading of an article in order to find issues that are capable of being addressed from her/his viewpoint—we are currently on the way to developing an affective critical reading tool. Further, we had originally predicted that affective clues during the reading of an article would prompt a learner who is writing an essay to engage more effectively in the critical analysis of issues contained in the article. Subsequently, we conducted an experiment to examine this hypothesis, and the results corroborated our assumption of the advantage of using affective clues.