Writing Analytically, 6th Edition - Rosenwasser, David & Stephen, Jill [61]
REFERENCES
Frank, T. (1997). Liberation marketing and the culture trust. In E. Barnouw et al. (Ed.), Conglomerates and the media (pp. 173–190). New York: The New Press.
Jhally, S. (Ed.). (1998). Advertising and the end of the world [Videotape]. Northampton, MA: Media Education Foundation.
Kilbourne, J. (2003). The more you subtract, the more you add: Cutting girls down to size. In G. Dines & J. Humez (Eds.), Gender, race and class in media (pp. 258–267). Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage.
GUIDELINES FOR ANALYSIS: WHAT IT IS AND WHAT IT DOES
Avoid deciding what your subject means before you analyze it, and remember that analysis often operates in areas where there is no one right answer.
As a general rule, analysis favors live questions—where something remains to be resolved—over inert answers, places where things are nailed down and don’t leave much space for further thinking.
As you analyze a subject, ask not just “What are its defining parts?” but also “How do these parts help me to understand the meaning of the subject as a whole?”
Look for patterns of repetition and organizing contrasts in the data, as well as anomalies, and ask yourself questions about what these mean.
Make the implicit explicit: convert the suggested meanings of particular details into overt statements.
When you describe and summarize, attend carefully to the language you choose, since the words themselves will usually contain the germs of ideas.
The analytical process is one of trial and error. Learning to write well is largely a matter of learning how to frame questions. Whatever questions you ask, the answers will often produce more questions.
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Assignments
1. Expand a Try This into a Longer Essay. Two of the Try This exercises in this chapter are suitable for more extended pieces of writing: Try This 3.2: Making Inferences and Try This 3.4: Apply the Five Analytical Moves to a Speech. Develop either into a piece of several pages in length.
2. Analyze a Portrait or Other Visual Image. Locate any portrait, preferably a good reproduction from an art book or magazine, one that shows detail clearly. Then do a version of what we’ve done with Whistler’s Mother.
Your goal is to produce an analysis of the portrait with the steps we included in analyzing Whistler’s Mother. First, summarize the portrait, describing accurately its significant details. Do not go beyond a recounting of what the portrait includes; avoid interpreting what these details suggest.
Then use the various methods offered in this chapter to analyze the data. What repetitions (patterns of same or similar detail) do you see? What organizing contrasts suggest themselves? In light of these patterns of similarity and difference, what anomalies do you then begin to detect? Move from the data to interpretive conclusions. This process will produce a set of interpretive leaps, which you may then try to assemble into a more coherent claim of some sort—a short essay about what the portrait “says.”
3. Describe a Neighborhood. Revisit the paragraphs from Jane Jacobs’ book, The Death and Life of Great American Cities (1961), which are offered earlier in this chapter under the heading Description as a Form of Analysis: Some Academic Examples. These paragraphs offer an implicitly analytical description of city life in Greenwich Village, a neighborhood in New York City, in the 1950s. Use these paragraphs as the basis of a writing assignment to be done in two steps.
First, find an example of Jacobs’ “go-to sentence,” following the instructions offered in Chapter 2, the section entitled Identifying the “Go To” Sentence. Be sure to relate the shape of the sentence you select to Jacobs’ way of thinking and of communicating her point of view in the piece.
Second, write several descriptive paragraphs of your own in which you try to capture the character of a neighborhood by presenting significant detail.
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We are offering you two further assignments,