Writing Analytically, 6th Edition - Rosenwasser, David & Stephen, Jill [175]
Most people would probably agree on the attributes of a really good conversation. There is room for agreement and disagreement, for give and take, among a variety of viewpoints. Generally, people don’t deliberately misunderstand each other, but a significant amount of the discussion may go into clarifying one’s own as well as others’ positions. Such conversations construct a genuinely collaborative chain of thinking: Karl builds on what David has said, which induces Jill to respond to Karl’s comment, and so forth.
There are, of course, obvious differences between conversing aloud with friends and conversing on paper with sources. As a writer, you need to construct the chain of thinking, orchestrate the exchange of views with and among your sources, and give the conversation direction. A good place to begin in using sources is to recognize that you need not respond to everything another writer says, nor do you need to come up with an entirely original point of view—one that completely revises or refutes the source. You are using sources analytically, for example, when you note that two experiments (or historical accounts, or whatever) are similar but have different priorities or that they ask similar questions in different ways. Building from this kind of observation, you can then analyze what these differences imply.
TWO METHODS FOR CONVERSING WITH SOURCES
Choose one sentence from a secondary source and one from a primary source, and put these into conversation. What does each reveal about the other?
Pick one sentence from one source (A) and one from another (B): how does A speak to B? How does B speak to A?
Remember: go local, not global. You will be better off if you bring together two representative moves or ideas from the sources rather than trying to compare a summary of one source with a summary of another. A useful phrase here is “points of contact”: look for ways that an idea or observation in source A appears to intersect with one in source B. Then stage the conversation you can imagine taking place between them.
Conversing with a Source: A Brief Example
Consider, for example, the following quotation, the opening sentences of an essay, “Clichés,” by Christopher Ricks, which is ostensibly a review of a reissued book on the subject:
The only way to speak of a cliché is with a cliché. So even the best writers against clichés are awkwardly placed. When Eric Partridge amassed his Dictionary of Cliches in 1940 (1978 saw its fifth edition), his introduction had no choice but to use the usual clichés for clichés. Yet what, as a metaphor, could be more hackneyed than hackneyed, more outworn than outworn, more tattered than tattered? Is there any point left to—or in or on—saying of a cliché that its “original point has been blunted”? Hasn’t this too become blunted? (Christopher Ricks, “Cliches” in The State of the Language, University of California Press, 1980, p. 54)
A writer would not want to cite this passage simply to illustrate that clichés are “bad”—language uses to be avoided—or to suggest, as a dictionary might, that a cliché is a form of expression one might call “hackneyed” or “outworn” or “tattered,” even though this information is clearly included in Ricks’s sentences. Nor would a writer simply want to reiterate Ricks’s leading claim, that “The only way to speak of a cliché is with a cliché,” because Ricks already said that.
Instead, you’d need to talk about how Ricks treats the topic—that he has uncovered a paradox, for example, in that first sentence. You might go on to say that his point of view provides a useful warning for those who wish to talk about clichés. And then you might make some inferences