Writing Analytically, 6th Edition - Rosenwasser, David & Stephen, Jill [25]
Along similar lines, the words revealing and significant work by requiring you to make choices that can lead to interpretive leaps. If something strikes you as revealing or significant, even if you’re not yet sure why, you will eventually begin producing some explanation. What is revealed, and why is it revealing?
Troubleshooting Notice and Focus
In the Noticing phase of Notice and Focus, you will be tempted to begin having ideas and making claims about your subject. Resist this temptation. Many of those first stabs at ideas will be overly general, fairly obvious, and they will block further noticing.
A Quick Note on 10 on 1
In later chapters (4 & 10), you will encounter a key heuristic that is the cousin of Notice and Focus. It is called “10 on 1”—based on the notion that it is productive to say more about less, to make ten points or observations about a single example rather than making the same overly general or obvious point about ten related examples. Like Notice and Focus, 10 on 1 depends on extended observation but it reduces scope to a single representative piece of evidence.
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Try This 2.1: Doing Notice and Focus with a Room
Practice this activity as a class or in small groups with the room you’re in. List a number of details about it, then rank the three most important ones. Use as a focusing question any of the four words suggested above— interesting, significant, revealing, or strange. Or come up with your own focus for the ranking, such as the three aspects of the room that seem most to affect the way you feel and behave in the space. Then you might go home and repeat the exercise alone in the room of your choice. Start out not with “what do I think?” but with “what do I notice?” And remember to keep the process going longer than might feel comfortable: “what else do I notice?”
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Try This 2.2: Notice and Focus Fieldwork
Try this exercise with a range of subjects: an editorial, the front page of a newspaper, a website, a key paragraph from something you are reading, the style of a favorite writer, conversations overheard around campus, looking at people’s shoes, political speeches, a photograph, a cartoon, and so forth. (The speech bank at americanrhetoric.com is an excellent source.) Remember to include all three steps: notice, rank, and say why.
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2. THE METHOD: WORK WITH PATTERNS OF REPETITION AND CONTRAST
THE METHOD
What repeats?
What goes with what? (strands)
What is opposed to what? (binaries)
(for all of these questions) ---> SO WHAT?
What doesn’t fit? (anomalies) So what?
“The Method” is our shorthand for a systematic procedure for analyzing evidence by looking for patterns of repetition and contrast. It offers a way to get the big picture without overgeneralizing—it is insistently empirical. It also has an uncanny ability to help you figure out what is most important in anything you read.
Using The Method induces you to get physical with the data—literally, for you will find yourself circling, underlining, and listing. Although you will thus descend from the heights of abstraction to the realm of concrete detail, the point of tallying repetitions and strands and binaries and then selecting the most important and interesting ones is to trigger ideas. The discipline required to notice patterns in the language will produce more specific, more carefully grounded conclusions than you otherwise might have made.
Like Notice and Focus, The Method orients you toward significant detail; but whereas Notice and Focus is a deliberately unstructured activity, The Method applies a matrix or grid of observational moves to a subject.
Step 1: List exact repetitions and the number of each (words, details). For example, if forms of the word