Writing Analytically, 6th Edition - Rosenwasser, David & Stephen, Jill [75]
* * *
Try This 4.8: Apply the Formula “Seems to Be About X, But Could Also Be (Is “Really”) About Y”
As we have been saying, this formula is useful for quickly getting past your first responses. An alternative version of this formula is “Initially I thought X about the subject, but now I think Y.” Take any reading or viewing assignment you have been given for class, and write either version of the formula at the top of a page. Fill in the blanks several times, and then explain your final choice for X and Y in a few paragraphs. You might also try these formulae when you find yourself getting stuck while drafting a paper. Seems to Be About X… is a valuable revision as well as interpretive tool.
* * *
* * *
Assignment: Using the Toolkit
Putting the Tools to Work: Composing an Analytical Portfolio. The heuristics introduced in this chapter have been included in the toolkit because they are “all-purpose” analytical moves. In a more extended assignment, try using several of them together. First, review the Try This exercises through the chapter, which suggest a variety of subjects to which you might apply the heuristics. Once you have selected a subject—which could be a film, an advertising campaign, a political campaign, a television series, something you are currently reading for a course or on your own, and so forth—do a series of passage-based focused freewritings as a way of generating ideas.
Try to use both reformulating binaries and uncovering assumptions in the same or consecutive freewrites. Alternatively, try to shake up your thinking by doing Seems to Be About X or Difference Within Similarity in the same or subsequent free writes.
Once you have produced at least four 20-minute free writes, survey them and choose the one you find most interesting. Then do the following:
*Type up three of the free writes, spending 10 or 15 minutes polishing each to achieve some kind of focus and coherence.
*Spend an hour or more expanding and revising your most interesting free write (or some combination of them) into a longer piece, perhaps 3–4 pages. Place this document at the front of the portfolio.
* * *
Chapter 5
* * *
Writing About Reading: More Moves to Make with Written Texts
THIS BOOK IS ABOUT ANALYZING two kinds of subjects, one of which we might call “the world” (anything and everything you want to better understand), and the other, the world of reading—that is, other people’s ideas as these are developed in writing. Throughout the book’s first four chapters, we have been concentrating, implicitly or explicitly, on ways of analyzing both worlds. In this chapter, we dwell on this second world—the world of reading.
Here is a list of the chapter’s strategies for writing about reading, each with a brief summary of what it involves. We will then go on to explain each in more detail.
READING ANALYTICALLY
Find alternatives to reading for the gist: become conversant with the reading.
Go local—start with sentences (pointing, passage-based focused freewriting, paraphrasing, commonplace book)
Situate the reading rhetorically—find what it seeks to accomplish and what it is set against: the pitch, the complaint, and the moment
Seek to understand the reading fairly on its own terms—track the thinking of the piece as it moves through complication and qualification
Use the reading as a model
Apply the reading as a lens
THE THREE LIVES OF A READING
This chapter focuses on how to approach readings analytically, especially the kinds of complex reading you are likely to encounter in college and ultimately in the workplace. The chapter offers you ways to accomplish two primary tasks: (1) how to own a difficult reading, that is, how to make the thinking in a reading yours; and (2) how to use the reading, once you own it.
In practical terms, this chapter will focus on writing about reading in three contexts, which we refer to as