Writing Analytically, 6th Edition - Rosenwasser, David & Stephen, Jill [202]
In summary, your aim in the first paragraph is to define the source’s particular angle of vision and articulate its main point or points, including the definition of key terms used in its title or elsewhere in its argument.
Once you’ve set up this overview of the source’s central position(s), you should devote a paragraph or so to the source’s organization (how it divides its subject into parts) and its method (how it goes about substantiating its argument). What kind of secondary material does the source use? That is, how do its own bibliographic citations cue you to its school of thought, its point of view, its research traditions?
Your concluding paragraph should briefly recount some of the source’s conclusions (as related to, but not necessarily the same as, its thesis). In what way does it go about culminating its argument? What kind of significance does it claim for its position? What final qualifications does it raise? The following model is a good example of an abstract:
Abstract of “William Carlos Williams,” An Essay
By Christopher MacGowan in The Columbia History of American Poetry, pp. 395–418, Columbia University Press, 1993.
MacGowan’s is a chronologically organized account of Williams’ poetic career and of his relation to both modernism as an international movement and modernism as it affected the development of poetry in America. MacGowan is at some pains both to differentiate Williams from some features of modernism (such as the tendency of American writers to write as well as live away from their own cultural roots) and to link Williams to modernism. MacGowan argues, for example, that an essential feature of Williams’s commitment as a poet was to “the local—to the clear presentation of what was under his nose and in front of his eyes” (385).
But he also takes care to remind us that Williams was in no way narrowly provincial, having studied in Europe as a young man (at Leipzig), having had a Spanish mother and an English father, having become friendly with the poets Ezra Pound and H. D. while getting his medical degree at the University of Pennsylvania, and having continued to meet important figures in the literary and art worlds by making frequent visits to New York and by traveling on more than one occasion to Europe (where Pound introduced him to W. B. Yeats, among others). Williams corresponded with Marianne Moore, he continued to write to Pound and to show Pound some of his work, and he wrote critical essays on the works of other modernists. MacGowan reminds us that Williams also translated Spanish works (ballads) and so was not out of contact with European influences.
Williams had a long publishing career—beginning in 1909 with a self-published volume called Poems and ending more than fifty years later with Pictures from Brueghel in 1962. What MacGowan emphasizes about this career is not only the consistently high quality of work, but also its great influence on other artists (he names those who actually corresponded with Williams and visited with him, including Charles Olson, Robert Creeley, Robert Lowell, Allen Ginsberg, and Denise Levertov). MacGowan observes that Williams defined himself “against” T. S. Eliot—the more rewarded and internationally recognized of the two poets, especially during their lifetimes—searching for “alternatives to the prevailing mode of a complex, highly allusive poetics,” which Williams saw as Eliot’s legacy (395). MacGowan depicts Williams as setting himself “against the international school of Eliot and Pound—Americans he felt wrote about rootlessness and searched an alien past because of their failure to write about and live within their own culture” (397).
GUIDELINES FOR FINDING, CITING, AND INTEGRATING SOURCES
Examine bibliographies at the end of the articles