Writing Analytically, 6th Edition - Rosenwasser, David & Stephen, Jill [44]
Analysis of the painting of the woman with three noses, a subject more like the kind you might be asked to write about in a college course, would proceed in the same way. Your result—ideas about the nature of the painting—would be determined, as with the dog, not only by your noticing its various parts but also by your familiarity with the subject. If you knew very little about art history, scrutinizing the painting’s parts would not tell you, for instance, that it is an example of the movement known as Cubism. Even without this context, however, you would still be able to draw some analytical conclusions—ideas about the meaning and nature of the subject. You might conclude, for example, that the artist is interested in perspective or in the way we see, as opposed to realistic depictions of the world.
* * *
Try This 3.1: Description as a Form of Analysis
Describe something you wish to better understand. Initially, don’t interpret; just record significant detail. Say what is there, what details you notice in your subject. Then write a paragraph in which you say what the description revealed to you about the nature of your subject. You might describe, for example, a painting or a photograph, a current event as reported in a newspaper or another source, a conversation overheard, a local scene (such as the college bookstore or a place where students congregate), a math problem, or your favorite song off a new CD.
* * *
Description as a Form of Analysis: Some Academic Examples
The act of describing is just as important to analytical writing—in fact to all kinds of writing—as it is to the writing of poems or fiction. Browse, for example, a history book, an economics textbook, the newspaper, any collection of essays, including those on scientific subjects, and you will find description (and narrative as well, since the two so often go hand in hand). We simply cannot think well without it. Although academic disciplines vary in the ways they use description, all of them call for keeping thinking in touch with telling detail.
It is also essential to recognize that virtually all forms of description are implicitly analytical. When we select particular details and call attention to them by describing them, we are more likely to begin noticing what these details suggest about the character of the whole. Description presents details so that analysis can make them speak.
Here are three excerpts of student papers from different academic disciplines, followed by one evocative example from a professional writer.
The first example, from a draft of an undergraduate honors thesis in biology, shows how a writer uses Move 2—defining significant parts and how they are related—to analyze the relationship between two kinds of aquatic snails. The writer, Emily Petchler Herstoff seeks to understand why a type of snail, Crepidula adunca, attaches itself selectively to one kind of grazing snail, Calliostoma ligatum, and not to other, similar snails.
Studying the effects of predation on host choice can shed insight onto the symbiotic relationship between Calliostoma ligatum and Crepidula adunca, and may illuminate why Calliostoma ligatum is the preferred host for Crepidula adunca in the San Juan Islands. My first experimental goal was to determine if Crepidula adunca confers any benefits to Calliostoma ligatum in the form of predator defense. As Crepidula adunca has already been proven to harm its host Calliostoma ligatum (Vermeij et al, 1987), it may be that Crepidula adunca is in a parasitic, rather than mutualistic relationship with its host. To determine if Crepidula adunca may be mutualistic, I performed predation tests to see if C. adunca conferred any advantages, in the form of defense, to its host Calliostoma ligatum.