Writing Analytically, 6th Edition - Rosenwasser, David & Stephen, Jill [182]
How, in the first option, do you take a source somewhere else? Rather than focusing solely on what you believe your source finds most important, locate a lesser point, not emphasized by the reading, that you find especially interesting and develop it further. This strategy will lead you to uncover new implications that depend on your source but lie outside its own governing preoccupations. In the preceding humanism example, the writer might apply Kristeller’s principles to new geographic (rather than theoretical) areas, such as Germany instead of Italy.
The second option, researching new perspectives on the source, can also lead to uncovering new implications. Your aim need not be simply to find a source that disagrees with the one that has convinced you and then switch your allegiance because this move would perpetuate the problem from which you are trying to escape. Instead, you would use additional perspectives to gain some critical distance from your source. An ideal way of sampling possible critical approaches to a source is to consult book reviews on it found in scholarly journals. Once the original source is taken down from the pedestal through additional reading, there is a greater likelihood that you will see how to distinguish your views from those it offers.
You may think, for example, that another source’s critique of your original source is partly valid and that both sources miss things you could point out; in effect, you referee the conversation between them. The writer on Kristeller might play this role by asking herself: “So what that subsequent historians have viewed his objective—a disinterested historical pluralism—as not necessarily desirable and in any case impossible? How might Kristeller respond to this charge, and how has he responded already in ways that his critics have failed to notice?” Using additional research in this way can lead you to situate your source more fully and fairly, acknowledging its limits as well as its strengths.
In other words, this writer, in using Kristeller to critique Tillyard, has arrived less at a conclusion than at her next point of departure. A good rule to follow, especially when you find a source entirely persuasive, is that if you can’t find a perspective on your source, you haven’t done enough research.
Evaluating Sources in the Sciences: A Biology Professor Speaks
In the following Voice from Across the Curriculum, molecular biologist Bruce Wightman suggests the range of tasks he expects students to do when they engage a source—not only to supply ongoing analysis of it and to consider its contributions in light of other research, but also to locate themselves in relation to the questions their analysis of the source has led them to discover.
Voices from Across the Curriculum
One of the problems with trying to read critical analyses of scientific work is that few scientists want to be in print criticizing their colleagues. Th at is, for political reasons, scientists who write reviews are likely to soft en their criticism or even avoid it entirely by reporting the findings of others simply and directly.
What I want from students in molecular biology is a critical analysis of the work they have researched. This can take several forms.
First, analyze what was done. What were the assumptions (hypotheses) going into the experiment? What was the logic of the experimental design? What were the results?
Second, evaluate the results and conclusions. How well do the results support the conclusions? What alternative interpretations are there? What additional experiments could be done to strengthen or refute the argument? This is hard, no doubt, but it is what you should be doing every time you read anything in science or otherwise.
Third, synthesize the results and interpretations of a given experiment in the context of the field. How does this study inform other studies? Even though practicing scientists are hesitant to do this in print, everyone does it informally in journal clubs held usually on a weekly basis in every lab all