• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

* * *

WHAT IT MEANS TO HAVE AN IDEA

In the final sections of this chapter, we will go on to distinguish analysis from other forms of writing: argument, summary, and personal response. We conclude this opening section of the chapter, on the Five Analytical Moves, with discussion of what counts as an idea in analytical writing.

Thinking, as opposed to reporting or reacting, should lead you to ideas. But what does it mean to have an idea? It’s one thing to acquire knowledge, but you also need to learn how to produce knowledge, to think for yourself. The problem is that people get daunted when asked to arrive at ideas. They dream up ingenious ways to avoid the task. Or they get paralyzed with anxiety.

What is an idea? Must an idea be something entirely “original”? Must it revamp the way you understand yourself or your stance toward the world?

Such expectations are unreasonably grand. Clearly, a writer in the early stages of learning about a subject can’t be expected to arrive at an idea so original that, like a Ph.D. thesis, it revises complex concepts in a discipline. Nor should you count as ideas only those that lead to some kind of life-altering discovery. Ideas are usually much smaller in scope, much less grand, than people seem to expect.

Some would argue that ideas are discipline-specific, that what counts as an idea in Psychology differs from what counts as an idea in History or Philosophy or Business. Surely the context does affect the way ideas are shaped and expressed. This book operates on the premise, however, that ideas across the curriculum share common elements. All of the items in the list below, for example, are common to ideas and to idea-making in virtually any context.

It is easiest to understand what ideas are by considering what ideas do and where they can be found. Most strong analytical ideas launch you in a process of resolving problems and bringing competing positions into some kind of alignment. They locate you where there is something to negotiate, where you are required not just to list answers but also to ask questions, make choices, and engage in reasoning about the significance of your evidence.

Here is a partial list of what it means to have an idea:

An idea usually starts with an observation that is puzzling, with something you want to figure out rather than something you think you already understand.

An idea may be the discovery of a question where there seemed not to be one.

An idea answers a question; it explains something that needs to be explained or provides a way out of a difficulty that other people have had in understanding something.

An idea may make explicit and explore the meaning of something implicit—an unstated assumption upon which an argument rests, or a logical consequence of a given position.

An idea may connect elements of a subject and explain the significance of that connection.

An idea often accounts for some dissonance, that is, something that seems to not fit together.

B. Distinguishing Analysis from Argument, Summary, and Expressive Writing

How does analysis differ from other kinds of thinking and writing? A common way of answering this question is to think of communication as having three possible centers of emphasis—the writer, the subject, and the audience. Communication, of course, involves all three of these components, but some kinds of writing concentrate more on one than on the others. Autobiographical writing, for example, such as diaries or memoirs or stories about personal experience, centers on the writer and his or her desire for self-expression. Argument, in which the writer takes a stand on an issue, advocating or arguing against a policy or attitude, is reader-centered; its goal is to bring about a change in its readers’ actions and beliefs. Analytical writing is more concerned with arriving at an understanding of a subject than with either self-expression or changing readers’ views.

These three categories of writing are not mutually exclusive. So, for example, expressive (writer-centered) writing is also analytical in its