Writing Analytically, 6th Edition - Rosenwasser, David & Stephen, Jill.original_ [106]
Another way of limiting your context is to consider how one author or recognizable point of view you have encountered in the course might respond to a single statement from another author or point of view. If you used this strategy to respond to the topic “Does God exist?” you might arrive at a formulation such as “How would Martin Buber critique Paul Tillich’s definition of God?” Although this topic appears to exclude personal response entirely, it does not. Your opinion would necessarily enter because you would be actively formulating something not already evident in the reading (how Buber might respond to Tillich).
FIGURE 7.1
Making Personal Response More Analytical
AGREE/DISAGREE
We offer here only a brief recap of this kind of topic because it is discussed at length in earlier chapters. (In particular, see the discussion of the Judgment Reflex Under Counterproductive Habits of Mind in Chapter 2.) Topics are frequently worded as agree/disagree, especially on essay exams, but the wording is potentially misleading because you are rarely being asked for as unqualified an opinion as agree or disagree.
In most cases, your best strategy in dealing with agree/disagree questions is to choose neither side. Instead, question the terms of the binary so as to arrive at a more complex and qualified position to write about. In place of choosing one side or the other, decide to what extent you agree and to what extent you disagree. You are still responsible for coming down more on one side than the other, but this need not mean that you have to locate yourself in a starkly either/or position. The code phrase for accomplishing this shift (as we’ve suggested in the discussion of Reformulating Binaries in Chapter 4) is “the extent to which”: “To what extent do you agree (or disagree)?”
COMPARISON/CONTRAST
Although comparison/contrast is meant to invite analysis, it is too often treated as an end in itself. The fundamental reason for comparing and contrasting is that you can usually discover ideas about a subject much more easily when you are not viewing it in isolation. When executed mechanically, however, without the writer pressing to understand the significance of a similarity or difference, comparison/contrast can suffer from pointlessness. The telltale sign of this problem is the formulaic sentence beginning, “Thus we see there are many similarities and differences between X and Y”—as “chaos” and “cream cheese” might fit that formula (both begin with the letter “c”).
Comparison/contrast topics produce pointless essays if you allow them to turn into matching exercises—that is, if you match common features of two subjects but don’t get beyond the equation stage (a, b, c = x, y, z). Writers fall into this trap when they have no larger question or issue to explore and perhaps resolve by making the comparison. If, for example, you were to pursue the comparison of the representations of the Boston Tea Party in British and American history textbooks, you would begin by identifying similarities and differences. But simply presenting these and concluding that the two versions resemble and differ from each other in some ways would be pointless. You would need to press your comparisons with the So what? question (see Chapter 2) in order to give them some interpretive weight.
Strategies for Making Comparison/Contrast More Analytical
Strategy 1: Argue for the significance of a key comparison. Rather than simply covering a range of comparisons, focus on a key comparison. Although narrowing the focus might seem to eliminate other important areas of consideration, it usually allows you to incorporate at least some of these other areas in a more tightly connected,