Writing Analytically, 6th Edition - Rosenwasser, David & Stephen, Jill.original_ [103]
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Chapter 7
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Making Common Topics More Analytical
THE FIRST UNIT OF THIS BOOK, The Analytical Frame of Mind, has sought to persuade you that analysis is worth the challenge—that you can unlearn less productive ways of thinking and take on fresh habits that will make you smarter. In this final chapter of Unit 1, we offer concrete advice about how to succeed in creating writing that fulfills some of the most common basic writing tasks you will be asked to produce at the undergraduate level and beyond.
A unifying element of the chapters in this unit is their focus on the stage of the composing process that rhetoricians call invention. This chapter takes up several of classical rhetoric’s “topics of invention.” These are “places” (from the Greek topoi) from which a writer or orator might discover the things he or she needs to say. These topics include comparison/contrast and definition to which we have added summary, reaction papers, and agree/disagree topics because these are such common forms in college and other writing settings. The chapter offers you strategies for making the best use of these topics as analytical tools.
The remainder of the chapter offers strategies for upping the analytical quotient of the staple forms of academic and so-called “real world” writing. We can’t guarantee these strategies will succeed, but if you follow them, you are likely to have more and better ideas and to achieve greater success in writing inside the traditional forms.
COMMON TOPICS
Summary
Personal Response: The Reaction Paper
Agree/Disagree
Comparison/Contrast
Definition
SUMMARY
Summary and analysis go hand-in-hand; the primary goal for both is to understand rather than evaluate. Summary is a necessary early step in analysis because it provides perspective on the subject as a whole by explaining the meaning and function of each of that subject’s parts. Within larger analyses—papers or reports—summary performs the essential function of contextualizing a subject accurately. It creates a fair picture of what’s there.
Summarizing isn’t simply the unanalytical reporting of information; it’s more than just shrinking someone else’s words. To write an accurate summary, you have to ask analytical questions, such as the following:
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?
Summarizing is, then, like paraphrasing, a tool of understanding and not just a mechanical task.
When summaries go wrong, they are just lists, a simple “this and then this” sequence. Often lists are random, as in a shopping list compiled from the first thing you thought of to the last. Sometimes they are organized in broad categories: fruit and vegetables here, dried goods there. At best, they do very little logical connecting among the parts beyond “next.” Summaries that are just lists tend to dollop out the information monotonously. They omit the thinking that the piece is doing—the ways it is connecting the information, the contexts it establishes, and the implicit slant or point of view.
Writing analytical summaries can teach you how to read for the connections, the lines that connect the dots. And when you’re operating at that level, you are much more likely to have ideas about what you are summarizing.
Strategies for Making Summaries More Analytical
Strategy 1: Look for the underlying structure. Use The Method to find patterns of repetition and contrast (see Chapter 2). If you apply it to a few key paragraphs, you will find the terms that get repeated, and these will suggest strands, which in turn make up organizing contrasts. This process works to categorize and then further organize information and, in so doing, to bring out its underlying structure.
Strategy 2: Select the information that you wish to discuss on some principle other than general coverage. Use Notice and