Writing Analytically, 6th Edition - Rosenwasser, David & Stephen, Jill [7]
So we read what our faculty had to say about what they’d learned in our writing seminars and what they wanted from student writing and used this information to develop a book that might sustain a faculty writing cohort on campus, allowing its members to talk to each other about writing across disciplinary lines. Six editions later, we are still working on that goal and learning about what college students need in order to succeed at academic writing both in first-year composition courses and in the various discourse communities they migrate among during their undergraduate careers.
The clearest consensus we’ve found among faculty is on the kind of writing that they say they want from their students: not issue-based argument, not personal reflection (the “reaction” paper), not passive summary, but analysis, with its patient and methodical inquiry into the meaning of information. And yet, most books of writing instruction devote only a chapter, if that, to analysis.
Among the reader reports that we pondered for this edition, we found faculty reporting that students are coming to them prepared to do five-paragraph themes and arguments but radically unprepared in thinking analytically. This edition of Writing Analytically remains committed to the goal of giving students the tools they need in order to engage in the analytical habits of mind that will be expected of them in their courses and in the world they encounter after graduation. Students who learn to analyze information and who know how to use writing in order to discover and develop ideas will continue to be in demand in the workplace, regardless of the form that writing takes or the medium in which it appears.
As the book demonstrates, the analytical process is surprisingly formulaic. It consists of a fairly limited set of basic moves. People who think well have these moves at their disposal, whether they are aware of using them or not. Analysis, the book argues, is a frame of mind, a set of habits for observing and making sense of the world.
Entering this analytical frame of mind requires specific tasks that will reduce students’ anxiety for instant answers, impede the reflex move to judgments, and encourage a more hands-on engagement with materials. Writing Analytically supplies these tasks for each phase of the writing and idea-generating process: making observations, inferring implications, and making the leap to possible conclusions. The root issue here is the writer’s attitude towards evidence. The book argues that the ability of writers to discover ideas and improve on them in revision depends largely on their ability to use evidence as a means of testing and developing ideas rather than just supporting them.
Writing Analytically’s employment of verbal prompts like “So what?” and its recommendation of step-by-step procedures, such as the procedure for making a thesis evolve, should not be confused with prescriptive slot-filler formulae for writing. Our book does not prescribe a fill-in-the-blank grid for producing papers. Instead it offers schematic descriptions of what good thinkers do—as acts of mind—when they are confronted with data.
We continue to believe that the book’s way of describing the analytical thought process will make students more confident thinkers, better able to contend with complexity and to move beyond the simplistic agree/disagree response and passive assembling of information. We have faith in the book’s various formulae and verbal prompts for their ability to spur more thoughtful writing but also for the role they can play in making the classroom a more collaborative space. When students and teachers can share the means of idea production, class discussion and writing become better connected, and students