Writing Analytically, 6th Edition - Rosenwasser, David & Stephen, Jill [35]
a. Earlier steel studies compared work, family, and community in ethnically defined neighborhoods surrounding the mills—in the case of Bethlehem within the “shadow of the steel stacks—until the lure of suburbia disrupted working class living patterns, changed neighborhood ethnic composition, and dispersed extended families, thereby complicating the very nature and definition of a steel community.” (Susan Clemens, Professor of History)
b1. But there is another burden which, although also strongly related to the external political and historical events of the time, is internal to the text itself.
b2. But it is evident that, after the arguments that Adorno presents against Kierkegaard have been examined, Adorno’s claims have less to do with Kierkegaard than with a desire to read something else into and against Kierkegaard. (Marcia Morgan, Professor of Philosophy)
c1. BCM 441 is a course concerned with the content, presentation, and evaluation of modern biochemistry.
c2. It is through metabolism that stored nutrients, ingested foods, and the energy of light are converted to complex biomolecules and the energy to drive cellular processes.
c3. As part of the project, Joe and his lab partner performed a pull down assay to detect stable protein-protein interactions, a chemical cross linking assay to detect transient interactions, and then prepared target protein bands for analysis by mass spectrometry. (Keri Colabroy, Professor of Biochemistry)
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Try This 2.9: Find One of Your Own “Go To” Sentences
Locate a sentence in something you have written. Reading for repetition will help you find a characteristic sentence shape. You might try looking for key connecting words, such as “and” or “but” or “however” or “because” or for characteristic ways that your sentences begin and end. Remember that you are not looking for bad examples or to criticize your own writing. You’re looking to identify and understand the sentence shapes you rely on. This exercise is useful to do in small groups. When time allows, we like having students present their “go to” sentence and analysis to the class.
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B. Counterproductive Habits of Mind
Analysis, we have been suggesting, is a frame of mind, a set of habits for observing and making sense of the world. There is also, it is fair to say, an anti-analytical frame of mind with its own set of habits. These shut down perception and arrest potential ideas at the cliché stage.
So far, you have been working through the solutions. For the rest of the chapter, we will spell out in more detail the problems. Here’s a quick review of the solutions.
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SOLUTIONS THE CHAPTER HAS OFFERED:
Slow down: describe what you are studying; give yourself more chances to see what you think.
Start your thinking with the local rather than the global; trace impressions back to causes; apply the heuristics
Recognize and reject the reflex move to generalization and judgment
Assume you don’t completely understand what you are studying; look for questions rather than answers; invite rather than flee uncertainty
THE PROBLEM
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REACTING IS NOT THINKING
A lot of what passes for thinking is merely reacting. Ask someone for a description of a place, a movie, a new CD, and see what you get: good/bad, loved it/hated it, couldn’t relate to it, boring. Responses like these are habits, reflexes of the mind. And they are surprisingly tough habits to break. All of the tools in the toolkit seek to slow down unthinking (reflex) reactions.
We live in a culture of inattention and cliché. It is a world in which we are perpetually assaulted with mind-numbing claims (Arby’s offers “a baked potato so good you’ll never want anyone else’s”), flip opinions (“The Republicans/Democrats