Writing Analytically, 6th Edition - Rosenwasser, David & Stephen, Jill.original_ [104]
Strategy 3: Reduce scope and say more about less. Both The Method and Notice and Focus involve some loss of breadth; you won’t be able to cover everything. But this is usually a trade-off worth making. Your ability to rank parts of your subject or choose a revealing feature or pattern to focus on will give you surer control of the material than if you just reproduce what is in the text. You can still begin with a brief survey of major points to provide context, before narrowing the focus. Reducing scope is an especially efficient and productive strategy when you are trying to understand a reading you find difficult or perplexing. It will move you beyond passive summarizing and toward having ideas about the reading.
If, for example, you are reading Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales and start cataloguing what makes it funny, you are likely to end up with unanalyzed plot summary—a list that arranges its elements in no particular order. But narrowing the question to “How does Chaucer’s use of religious commentary contribute to the humor of ‘The Wife of Bath’s Tale’”? reduces the scope to a single tale and the humor to a single aspect of humor. Describe those as accurately as you can, and you will begin to notice things.
Strategy 4: Get some detachment: shift your focus from what? to how? and why? Most readers tend to get too single-minded about absorbing the information. That is, they attend only to the what: what the reading is saying or is about. They take it all in passively. But you can deliberately shift your focus to how it says what it says, and why.
To focus on how and why something is presented in a given way—whether it be a sign on a subway or the language of a presidential speech—is to focus rhetorically. Like analysis in general, rhetorical analysis asks what things mean, why they are as they are and do what they do. But rhetorical analysis asks these questions with one primary question always foregrounded: how does the thing achieve its effects on an audience? Rhetorical analysis asks not just what do I think, but what am I being invited to think (and feel) and by what means?
One way to distinguish a summary is to concentrate on rhetorical matters. If, for example, you were asked to discuss the major discoveries that Darwin made on The Beagle, you could avoid simply listing his conclusions by redirecting your attention to how he proceeds. You could choose to focus, for example, on Darwin’s use of the scientific method, examining how he builds and, in some cases, discards hypotheses. Or you might select several passages that illustrate how Darwin proceeded from evidence to conclusion and then rank them in order of importance to the overall theory. Notice that in shifting the emphasis to Darwin’s thinking—the how and why—you would not be excluding the what (the information component) from your discussion.
PERSONAL RESPONSE: THE REACTION PAPER
The biggest advantage of reaction papers is that they give you the freedom to explore where and how to engage your subject. They bring to the surface your emotional or intuitive response, allowing you to experiment with placing the subject in various contexts.
Interestingly, a response paper is not actually asking for your response, at least not primarily. Instead, it is asking you to locate something you think is interesting, revealing, especially significant, and/or perhaps difficult (and thus in need of discussion) in the reading (or observing), and to analyze what you