• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

UNIT I

THE ANALYTICAL FRAME OF MIND: INTRODUCTION TO ANALYTICAL METHODS

Finding Your Way in This Book: A Note to Readers

WRITING ANALYTICALLY’S CHAPTERS can stand alone and can be used in any order, but there are organizing principles that determine the sequence of chapters.

The book’s overall method is recursive. In addition to moving to increasingly complex writing tasks, the book assumes you will keep using the tools from Unit I as habitual practices in the writing you are invited to do in later chapters.

Unit I (Chapters 1–7), The Analytical Frame of Mind: Introduction to Analytical Methods, concentrates on ways of training yourself to be more observant and to push observations to implications and conclusions.

Unit II (Chapters 8–14), Writing Analytical Papers: How to Use Evidence, Evolve Claims, and Converse with Sources, incorporates the essential methods of Unit I into strategies for writing various kinds of analytical papers, including papers that require you to synthesize secondary sources and orchestrate a conversation among them. Thesis and evidence are key terms of Unit II.

Unit III (Chapters 15–19), Matters of Form: The Shapes That Thought Takes, addresses such topics as organization, disciplinary formats, introductions and conclusions, and grammar and style. The emphasis throughout is rhetorical, focusing on the relationship between forms and the thinking these forms enable.

The book provides a view of writing in different academic disciplines and how they vary in their expectations of student writing. Interspersed throughout the text are sections labeled Voices from Across the Curriculum—discussions of disciplinary practices solicited from our colleagues in a variety of disciplines. Although the book respects stylistic difference, we argue that there is an underlying purpose and thought structure that the disciplines share.

Chapter 1

* * *

Introduction: Fourteen Short Takes on Writing and the Writing Process

This is a “HOW TO THINK ABOUT …” and “Where to Look for …” chapter, consisting of a sequence of short takes on topics that are especially helpful to understand at the beginning of a writing course. Although you will find more extended discussions of most of these topics later in the book, we think you will find it useful to have them assembled here in compact, browseable form. Learning to be a better writer is not just a matter of acquiring skills. To a significant extent it involves learning new ways of thinking about what writing is and what it does.

Because the organization of the chapter is modular, you can easily skip around in it to sample what it has to offer. There is, however, a logic to the order of the short takes, which is why the chapter is not arranged alphabetically. Typically, each short take triggers the next. Cumulatively, the short takes tell a story about making the transition to college writing. Some of the entries will be more pertinent for you now than others. Return to the chapter from time to time and browse for concepts and key terms you have come to need.

ORDER OF THE SHORT TAKES

Thinking About Writing as a Tool of Thought

Analysis: A Quick Definition

What Do Faculty Want from Student Writing?

Breaking Out of 5-Paragraph Form

Writing Traditional Papers in the Digital Age

What’s Different About Writing Arguments in College?

Rhetoric: What It Is and Why You Need It

Writing about Reading: Beyond “Banking”

Freewriting: How and Why to Do It

Process and Product: Some Ways of Thinking About the Writing Process

How to Think About Grammar and Style (Beyond Error-Catching)

A Quick Word on Style Guides

How to Think About Writing in the Disciplines

Academic vs. Nonacademic Writing: How Different Are They?

THINKING ABOUT WRITING AS A TOOL OF THOUGHT

Learning to write well means more than learning to organize information in appropriate forms and construct clear and grammatically correct sentences. Learning to write well means learning ways of using writing in order to think well.

The achievement