Writing Analytically, 6th Edition - Rosenwasser, David & Stephen, Jill [29]
The Method can help you to control in condensed form a wealth of information. The organizational grids will bring out the features of the subject that are most important, what the reading or image is most concerned with (which repeats), and what it is concerned or worried about (what is opposed to what).
The Method can spur you to discover things to say about whatever you are analyzing. In the normal process of observing, and especially of reading, we are often not attending to what repeats or contrasts. We’re just taking in the information—not doing anything with it. But when you do things with information, that promotes thinking; it makes you an active learner.
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Try This 2.3: Experiment in a Group Setting with The Method—Use a Visual Image by Adrian Tomine
Often, it will seem strange at first to read or analyze in the somewhat mechanical form that The Method prescribes, so it makes sense to work collaboratively at first, in small groups or with everyone in the class, to collect the data. Appoint one group member as scribe. Keep each other on task—do each step discretely. As with Notice and Focus, prolong the observation phase and refrain from judgments and big claims, at least until you begin writing about what is important (step 4).
Try an image by Adrian Tomine—a frequent contributor to The New Yorker magazine and a graphic novelist. Just use Google Images for “New Yorker covers + Tomine” to obtain a range of possibilities. We suggest his August 24, 2009 cover, “Double Feature”—an image of a crowd at dusk beneath the Brooklyn Bridge. Then, for homework, repeat the exercise alone, using a second Tomine cover—we suggest the November 8, 2004 cover, “Missed Connection,” featuring a man and a woman looking at each other from passing subway cars.
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Try This 2.4: Apply The Method to Arts & Letters Daily
Select any article from our favorite website, Arts & Letters Daily (aldaily.com), and do The Method on it. You can actually apply The Method to anything you are reading, especially a piece you wish to understand better. You can use the front page of the newspaper, a speech from the American Rhetoric website, perhaps a series of editorials on the same subject, an essay, one or more poems by the same author (because The Method is useful for reading across texts for common denominators), and so on. You can work with as little as a few paragraphs or as much as an entire article or chapter or book. The key is to practice the procedure so that it becomes familiar: so that you will begin to look for repetitions and contrasts almost naturally.
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3. ASKING “SO WHAT?”
PUSHING OBSERVATIONS TO CONCLUSIONS: ASKING SO WHAT?
(shorthand for)
What does the observation imply?
Why does this observation matter?
Where does this observation get us?
How can we begin to theorize the significance of the observation?
Asking So what? is a universal prompt for spurring the move from observation to implication and ultimately interpretation. Asking So what?—or its milder cousin, And so?—is a calling to account, a way of pressing yourself to confront that essential question, “Why does this matter?” It is thus a challenge to make meaning through a creative leap—to move beyond the patterns and emphases you’ve been observing in the data to tentative conclusions about what these observations suggest. In step 4 of The Method, when you select a single repetition, strand, or contrast and write about why it’s important, you are essentially asking So what? and answering that question.
Step 1: describe significant evidence, paraphrasing key language and looking for interesting patterns of repetition and contrast.
Step 2: begin to query your own observations by making what is implicit explicit.
Step 3: push your observations and statements of