Writing Analytically, 6th Edition - Rosenwasser, David & Stephen, Jill.original_ [174]
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Chapter 13
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Using Sources Analytically: The Conversation Model
THIS CHAPTER SHOWS you how to integrate secondary sources into your writing. That is often a daunting task because it requires you to negotiate with authorities who generally know more than you do about the subject at hand. Simply ignoring sources is a head-in-the-sand attitude and, besides, you miss out on learning what people interested in your subject are talking about. But what role can you invent for yourself when the experts are talking? Just agreeing with a source is an abdication of your responsibility to present your thinking on the subject. But taking the opposite tack by disagreeing with an expert who has studied your subject and written books about it would also appear to be a fool’s game. So what are you to do?
This chapter attempts to answer that question. It lays out the primary trouble spots that arise when writers use secondary materials, and it suggests remedies— ways of using sources as points of departure for your own thinking rather than using them as either “The Answer” or a straw man. We call this approach conversing with sources.
Six Strategies for Analyzing Sources
Strategy 1: Make Your Sources Speak
Strategy 2: Attend Carefully to the Language of Your Sources by Quoting or Paraphrasing
Strategy 3: Supply Ongoing Analysis of Sources (Don’t Wait until the End)
Strategy 4: Use Your Sources to Ask Questions, Not Just to Provide Answers
Strategy 5: Put Your Sources into Conversation with One Another
Strategy 6: Find Your Own Role in the Conversation
The kind of writing you are doing will affect the way you use sources. Analytical writing uses sources to expand understanding—often to allow readers to view a subject from a range of plausible points of view. This approach differs from the kind of research based writing wherein the goal is to locate a single position that beats out the others in a combative mode. One way sources are often used in an academic setting is as lenses for examining other sources and primary materials. (For using a source as a lens, see Chapter 5, Writing About Reading: More Moves to Make with Written Texts.)
We use the terms source and secondary source interchangeably to designate ideas and information about your subject that you find in the work of other writers. Secondary sources allow you to gain a richer, more informed, and complex vantage point on your primary sources. Here’s how primary and secondary sources can be distinguished: if you were writing a paper on the philosopher Nietzsche, his writing would be your primary source, and critical commentaries on his work would be your secondary sources. If, however, you were writing on the poet Yeats, who read and was influenced by Nietzsche, a work of Nietzsche’s philosophy would become a secondary source on your primary source, Yeats’s poetry.
“SOURCE ANXIETY” AND WHAT TO DO ABOUT IT
Typically, inexperienced writers either use sources as “answers”—they let the sources do too much of their thinking—or ignore them altogether as a way of avoiding losing their own ideas. Both of these approaches are understandable but inadequate.
Confronted with the seasoned views of experts in a discipline, you may well feel there is nothing left for you to say because it has all been said before or, at least, it has been said by people who greatly outweigh you in reputation and experience. This anxiety explains why so many writers surrender to the role of conduit for the voices of the experts, providing conjunctions between quotations. So why not avoid what other people have said? Won’t this avoidance ensure that your ideas will be original and that, at the same time, you will be