Writing Analytically, 6th Edition - Rosenwasser, David & Stephen, Jill [57]
Eventually, college writers need to learn how to adopt different self-presentations for different academic disciplines. The acceptable ethos of a Chemistry lab report differs in significant ways from the one you might adopt in a Political Science or English paper. For present purposes, we’ll note that the ethoi of most analytical writing across the curriculum share certain significant traits:
nonadversarial tone—is not looking for a fight
collaborative and collegial—treats readers as colleagues who are worthy of respect and who share your interest
carefully qualified—does not making overstated claims
relative impersonality in self-presentation—keeps focus primarily on the subject, not the writer
ANALYSIS VERSUS SUMMARY: THE EXAMPLE OF WHISTLER’S MOTHER
One of the most common kinds of writing you’ll be asked to do in college, other than analysis, is summary. Summary differs from analysis, because the aim of summary is to recount, in effect, to reproduce someone else’s ideas. But summary and analysis are also clearly related and usually operate together. Summary is important to analysis because you can’t analyze a subject without laying out its significant parts for your reader. Similarly, analysis is important to summary because summarizing is more than just copying someone else’s words. To write an accurate summary, you have to ask analytical questions such as:
Which of the ideas in the reading are most significant? Why?
How do these ideas fit together? What do the key passages in the reading mean?
Summary Is a Focused Description
Like an analysis, an effective summary doesn’t assume that the subject matter can speak for itself: the writer needs to play an active role. A good summary provides perspective on the subject as a whole by explaining, as an analysis does, the meaning and function of each of that subject’s parts. Moreover, like an analysis, a good summary does not aim to approve or disapprove of its subject: the goal, in both kinds of writing, is to understand rather than to evaluate. (For more on summary, see Chapter 7, Making Common Topics More Analytical, and Chapter 5, Writing About Reading.)
So, summary, like analysis, is a tool of understanding and not just a mechanical task. But a summary stops short of analysis because summary typically makes much smaller interpretive leaps. A summary of the painting popularly known as Whistler’s Mother, for example, would tell readers what the painting includes, which details are the most prominent, and even what the overall effect of the painting seems to be. A summary might say that the painting possesses a certain serenity and that it is somewhat spare, almost austere. This kind of language still falls into the category of focused description, which is what a summary is.
Analysis Makes an Interpretive Leap
An analysis would include more of the writer’s interpretive thinking. It might tell us, for instance, that the painter’s choice to portray his subject in profile contributes to our sense of her separateness from us and of her nonconfrontational passivity. We look at her, but she does not look back at us. Her black dress and the fitted lace cap that obscures her hair are not only emblems of her self-effacement, shrouds disguising her identity like her expressionless face, but also the tools of her self-containment and thus of her power to remain aloof from prying eyes. What is the attraction of this painting (this being one of the questions that an analysis might ask)? What might draw a viewer to the sight of this austere, drably attired woman, sitting alone in the center of a mostly blank space? Perhaps it is the very starkness of the painting, and the mystery of self-sufficiency at its center, that attracts us (see Figure 3.2).
Laying out the data is key to