Writing Analytically, 6th Edition - Rosenwasser, David & Stephen, Jill [102]
a. Apply The Method—looking for patterns of repetition and contrast—to the cover, so that you arrive at key repetitions, strands, and organizing contrasts and begin to ponder a range of possible interpretive leaps to what they signify.
b. Use these data to suggest plausible interpretive contexts for the cover. Remember that interpretive contexts are not simply imposed from without; they’re suggested by the evidence.
c. Then move to the other covers. Perform similar operations on them to arrive at an awareness of common denominators among the covers, and to analyze what those shared traits might reveal or make more evident in the particular cover you are studying. You will be trying to figure out how the magazine conceives of itself and its audience by the way it characteristically represents its “face.”
It might be illuminating to survey a range of covers by a single artist, such as Ian Falconer, who created the cover we analyze in the chapter.
3. Write an Essay in Which You Make Observations About Some Cultural Phenomenon, Some Place and Its Social Significance, or an Event (in terms of its significance in some context of your choice) and then push these observations to tentative conclusions by repeatedly asking “So what?”
Be sure to query your initial answers to the “So what?” question with further “So what?” questions, trying to push further into your own thinking and into the meaning of whatever it is you have chosen to analyze. Trends of some sort are good to work with. Marketing trend? So what? Trends in movies about unmarried women or married men or… So what? And so forth.
Since the chapter offers sample analyses of paintings and advertisements, you might choose one of these. Cartoons are interesting subjects. Here you would really have to think a lot about your choice of interpretive context. Gender? Politics? Humor? Family life? American stereotypes? What are we invited to make of this, by what means, and in what context?
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Chapter 7
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Making Common Topics More Analytical
THE FIRST UNIT OF THIS BOOK, The Analytical Frame of Mind, has sought to persuade you that analysis is worth the challenge—that you can unlearn less productive ways of thinking and take on fresh habits that will make you smarter. In this final chapter of Unit 1, we offer concrete advice about how to succeed in creating writing that fulfills some of the most common basic writing tasks you will be asked to produce at the undergraduate level and beyond.
A unifying element of the chapters in this unit is their focus on the stage of the composing process that rhetoricians call invention. This chapter takes up several of classical rhetoric’s “topics of invention.” These are “places” (from the Greek topoi) from which a writer or orator might discover the things he or she needs to say. These topics include comparison/contrast and definition to which we have added summary, reaction papers, and agree/disagree topics because these are such common forms in college and other writing settings. The chapter offers you strategies for making the best use of these topics as analytical tools.
The remainder of the chapter offers strategies for upping the analytical quotient of the staple forms of academic and so-called “real world” writing. We can’t guarantee these strategies will succeed, but if you follow them, you are likely to have more and better ideas and to achieve greater success in writing inside the traditional forms.
COMMON TOPICS
Summary
Personal Response: The Reaction Paper
Agree/Disagree
Comparison/Contrast
Definition
SUMMARY
Summary and analysis go hand-in-hand; the primary goal for both is to understand rather than evaluate. Summary is a necessary early step in analysis because it provides perspective on the subject as a whole by explaining the meaning and function of each of that subject