Writing Analytically, 6th Edition - Rosenwasser, David & Stephen, Jill [50]
The sidewalk is disappearing as a feature of the American residential landscape. [Here are a couple of implications to prime the pump: people don’t walk anywhere anymore; builders lack much sense of social responsibility.]
New house designs are tending increasingly toward open plans in which the kitchen is not separated from the rest of the house.
“Good fences make good neighbors.”—Robert Frost
In the female brain, there are more connections between the right hemisphere (emotions, spatial reasoning) and the left hemisphere (verbal facility). In the male brain, these two hemispheres remain more separate.
In America, an increasing number of juveniles—people under the age of 18—are tried and convicted as adults, rather than as minors, resulting in more minors serving adult sentences for crimes they committed while still in their teens.
Neuroscientists tell us that the frontal cortex of the brain, the part responsible for judgment and especially for impulse control, is not fully developed in humans until roughly the age of 21. What are the implications of this observation relative to observation 5?
Linguists have long commented on the tendency of women’s speech to use rising inflection at the end of statements as if the statements were questions. An actual command form—Be home by midnight!—thus becomes a question instead. What are we to make of the fact that in recent years, younger men (under 30) have begun to end declarative statements and command forms with rising inflections?
Shopping malls and grocery stores rarely have clocks.
List as many plausible implications as you can for this statement (which has been contested by other researchers).
“In the eye-tracking test, only one in six subjects read Web pages linearly, sentence by sentence. In this study, Nielsen found that people took in hundreds of pages ‘in a pattern that’s very different from what you learned in school.’ It looks like a capital letter F. At the top, users read all the way across, but as they proceed their descent quickens and horizontal sight contracts, with a slowdown around the middle of the page. Near the bottom, eyes move almost vertically, the lower-right corner of the page largely ignored.”
—Mark Bauerlein, “Online Literacy Is a Lesser Kind,” The Chronicle Review, 9/19/08, http://chronicle.com/free/v55/i04/04b01001.htm.
(For an extended example of a writer who moves from implications, see “2:30,” the commencement address by Bob Tarby, which is located after Move 5 on page 67.)
* * *
MOVE 5: KEEP REFORMULATING QUESTIONS AND EXPLANATIONS
Analysis, like all forms of writing, requires a lot of experimenting. Because the purpose of analytical writing is to figure something out, you shouldn’t expect to know at the start of your writing process exactly where you are going, how all of your subject’s parts fit together, and to what end. The key is to be patient and to know that there are procedures— in this case, questions—you can rely on to take you from uncertainty to understanding.
The following three groups of questions (organized according to the analytical moves they’re derived from) are typical of what goes on in an analytical writer’s head as he or she attempts to understand a subject. These questions will work with almost anything you want to think about. As you will see, the questions are geared toward helping you locate and try on explanations for the meaning of various patterns of details.
Which details seem significant? Why?
What does the detail mean?
What else might it mean?
(Moves: Define Significant Parts; Make the Implicit Explicit)
How do the details fit together? What do they have in common?
What does this pattern of details mean?
What else might this same pattern