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When I get home after work, the ballet is reaching its crescendo. This is the time of roller skates and stilts and tricycles, and games in the lee of the stoop with bottle tops and plastic cowboys; this is the time of bundles and packages, zigzagging from the drugstore to the fruit stand and back over to the butcher’s; this is the time when teenagers, all dressed up, are pausing to ask if their slips show or their collars look right; this is the time when beautiful girls get out of MG’s; this is the time when the fire engines go through; this is the time when anybody you know around Hudson Street will go by.

As darkness thickens and Mr. Halpert moors the laundry cart to the cellar door again, the ballet goes on under lights, eddying back and forth but intensifying at the bright spotlight pools of Joe’s sidewalk pizza dispensary, the bars, the delicatessen, the restaurant and the drug store. The night workers stop now at the delicatessen, to pick up salami and a container of milk. Things have settled down for the evening but the street and its ballet have not come to a stop.

I know the deep night ballet and its seasons best from waking long after midnight to tend a baby and, sitting in the dark, seeing the shadows and hearing the sounds of the sidewalk. Mostly it is a sound like infinitely pattering snatches of party conversation and, about three in the morning, singing, very good singing. Sometimes there is sharpness and anger or sad, sad weeping, or a flurry of search for a string of beads broken. One night a young man came roaring along, bellowing terrible language at two girls whom he had apparently picked up and who were disappointing him. Doors opened, a wary semicircle formed around him, not too close, until the police came. Out came the heads, two, along Hudson Street, offering opinion, “Drunk … Crazy … A wild kid from the suburbs.”

Writing that is not markedly academic in style, such as these paragraphs from Jane Jacobs, often makes its way into academic discussions. Descriptive detail is as valuable in academic writing as it is in more popular forms.

MOVE 3: LOOK FOR PATTERNS OF REPETITION AND CONTRAST AND FOR ANOMALIES (AKA THE METHOD)

We have been defining analysis as the understanding of parts in relation to each other and to a whole. But how do you know which parts to attend to? What makes some details in the material you are studying more worthy of your attention than others?

The heuristic we call The Method offers a tool for uncovering significant patterns. In its most reduced form, The Method organizes observation and then prompts interpretation by asking the following sequence of questions. (See Chapter 2, The Method.)

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?

In virtually all subjects, repetition and close resemblance (strands) are signs of emphasis. In a symphony, for example, certain patterns of notes repeat throughout, announcing themselves as major themes. In Shakespeare’s King Lear, references to seeing and eyes call attention to themselves through repetition, causing us to recognize that the play is about seeing. Binary oppositions, which often consist of two strands or repetitions in tension with each other, suggest what is at stake in a subject. We can understand King Lear by the way it opposes kinds of blindness to ways of seeing.

Along with looking for pattern, it is also fruitful to attend to anomalous details— those that seem not to fit the pattern. Anomalies help us to revise our assumptions. Picture a baseball player reading Dostoyevsky in the dugout: a TV commercial that did that to advertise a team was working through anomaly. In this case, the anomaly, a baseball player who reads serious literature, is used to subvert (question, unsettle) the stereotypical assumption that sports and intellectualism don’t belong together.

People tend to avoid information that challenges (by not conforming to) views