Writing Analytically, 6th Edition - Rosenwasser, David & Stephen, Jill.original_ [13]
The book will make you much more aware of your own acts of thinking and will show you how to experiment more deliberately with ways of having ideas—for example, by sampling kinds of informal and exploratory writing that will enhance your ability to learn.
As the next few chapters will show, the analytical process is surprisingly formulaic. It consists of a fairly limited set of basic moves. People who think well have these moves at their disposal, whether they are aware of using them or not. Analysis, the book argues, is a frame of mind, a set of habits for observing and making sense of the world.
ANALYSIS: A QUICK DEFINITION
Just about all of the reading and writing you will do in college is analytical. Such writing is concerned with accurate description and with thinking collaboratively (rather than combatively) with readers about ways of understanding what things might mean. The problem is that much of what we hear on television or read online seems to be primarily devoted to bludgeoning other people into submission with argumentative claims. The book’s analytical methods provide a set of moves that derail more unproductive responses, such as agree/disagree, like/dislike, and other forms of gladiatorial opinion-swapping.
Chapter 2 offers the first set of methods, along with discussion of the counterproductive habits of mind they are designed to deflect. Chapter 3 defines analysis in detail (in what we call the five analytical moves) and shows you how it operates differently from other forms of thinking and writing. For now, we offer the following list on the goals of analysis and its identifying traits:
Analysis Defined
Analysis seeks to discover what something means. An analytical argument makes claims for how something might be best understood and in what context.
Analysis deliberately delays evaluation and judgment.
Analysis begins in and values uncertainty rather than starting from settled convictions.
Analytical arguments are usually pluralistic; they tend to try on more than one way of thinking about how something might be best understood.
WHAT DO FACULTY WANT FROM STUDENT WRITING?
Here is a list of faculty expectations based on what faculty across the curriculum say at our seminars on writing:
Analysis rather than passive summary, personal reaction and opinions
Analysis before argument, understanding in depth before taking a stand
Alternatives to agree-disagree & like-dislike responses
Tolerance of uncertainty
Respect for complexity
Ability to apply theories from reading, using them as lenses
Acquiring and understanding the purpose of disciplinary conventions
Ability to use secondary sources in ways other than plugging them in as “answers”
Overall, what faculty across the curriculum want is for students to learn to do things with course material beyond merely reporting it on the one hand, and just reacting to it with personal response on the other. This is the crux of the issue that Writing Analytically addresses: how to locate a middle ground between passive summary and personal response. We call that middle ground analysis.
To these expectations, we would add that the ability to cultivate interest and curiosity is a great desideratum of faculty across the curriculum. They want students to understand that interest need not precede writing; interest is more often a product of writing.
BREAKING OUT OF 5-PARAGRAPH FORM
The shift from high school to college writing is not just a difference in degree but a difference in kind. The changes it requires in matters of form and style are inevitably also changes in thinking. In order to make these changes in thinking, you may need to “unlearn” some practices you’ve previously been taught. At the top of the unlearning list for many entering college students