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This chapter is the logical next step to be taken. Where Chapter 2 equips you with foundational observational skills, and Chapter 3 incorporates them into a five-step analytical sequence, Chapter 4 offers you a set of analytical activities that can enable you to extend, complicate, and deepen your understanding of whatever you are analyzing. In effect, this new set of strategies seeks to give you more concrete ways of carrying out the last two of the five analytical moves featured in Chapter 3—to make what is implicit explicit and to reformulate questions and explanations.

Here is the list of the chapter’s heuristics, each with a very brief summary of what it involves. We will go on to explain each in more detail.

1. Passage-Based Focused Freewriting

(analyze a representative passage to understand better how the whole works)

2. Uncovering Assumptions

(determine the givens, what must be believed first in order to posit what the thing you are analyzing has said)

3. Reformulating Binaries

(question the accuracy of a basic contrast and determine the extent to which one side prevails over the other)

4. [Looking for] Difference within Similarity and Similarity Despite Difference

(move beyond a mechanical matching exercise by exploring how two things are alike, and So What, and then different, and So What)

5. “Seems to Be About X, but Could Also Be (or Is ‘Really’) about Y”

(assume that you got it wrong the first time to get somewhere new and interesting the second time)

Note: these heuristics, although not intended as formulae for organizing papers, can to some extent function in this way. They are primarily “thinking moves” designed to produce better, more in-depth thinking for essays, arguments or reports. The best way to learn these thinking skills is to practice them out repeatedly in your own work and with other writers.

1. PASSAGE-BASED FOCUSED FREEWRITING

WHAT IT DOES

Find an interesting passage

Sketch its context

Target and paraphrase key words and phrases

Explore why (so what that) the passage is interesting

Draw out implications

Ask how the passage is representative of the larger reading

WHAT IT DOES NOT DO

Voice reactions and criticisms

Free-associate with other subjects

Passage-based focused freewriting increases your ability to learn from what you read. The passage-based version differs from regular freewriting by limiting the focus to a piece of text. It prompts in-depth analysis of a representative example, on the assumption that you’ll attain a better appreciation of the whole after you’ve explored how a piece of it works. (Please review the short take from Chapter 1, Freewriting: How and Why to Do It.)

The impromptu nature of passage-based focused freewriting encourages you to take chances, to think out loud on the page. It invites you to notice what you notice in the moment and take some stabs at what the passage might mean without having to worry about formulating a weighty thesis statement or maintaining consistency. It allows you to worry less about what you don’t understand and instead start to work things out as you write.

A lot of great papers start as in-class writings—not as outlines.

Step 1: Choose a limited piece of concrete evidence to focus on and write about it without stopping for 10 to 20 minutes. Pick a passage you find interesting and that you probably don’t quite understand. Copy out the passage at the beginning of your freewrite. This act will encourage attention to the words and induce you to notice more about the particular features of your chosen passage.

Step 2: Contextualize the evidence. Where does the passage come from in the text? Of what larger discussion is it a part? Briefly answering these questions will prevent you from taking things out of context.

Step 3: Focus on what the text is inviting you to think—its point of view— not on what you think, your point of view of that subject.

Step 4: Make observations about the evidence. Stay close to the data you’ve quoted, paraphrasing