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“Reserving judgments is a matter of infinite hope.” Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsy

“See better, Lear.” Shakespeare, King Lear

FOCUS ON THE DETAILS

This chapter offers a set of tools for training your ways of seeing and making sense of things—the world, images, and especially written texts. Rhetoricians call these tools heuristics, from the Greek word for discovery. Heuristic has the same root as Eureka— “I’ve found it!” All of the heuristics in this chapter seek to help you to discover things to say about whatever you are studying. The final third of the chapter surveys the counterproductive habits of mind that these activities seek to replace.

NOTICING

Noticing significant detail is a skill that can be improved through practice.

The ability to notice is blocked by common habits of mind: judging and generalizing and leaping prematurely to conclusions.

One solution: experiment with eliminating the words like, dislike, agree, and disagree from your vocabulary, at least for a while.

Another solution: slow down. Dwell longer in the open-ended, exploratory, information-gathering stage.

A. The Heuristics

There are two broad categories of heuristics in this chapter—observation strategies and interpretive prompts. Both seek to retrain the way you focus your attention from the global (general) to the local. Here is a list of the chapter’s heuristics, each with a very brief summary of what it involves. We will then go on to explain each in more detail.

HEURISTICS

1. Notice and Focus + Ranking

(select a few details as most important: What do you find most “Interesting” or “Strange”?)

2. The Method: Looking for Patterns of Repetition and Contrast

(organize details into groupings based on similarity or opposition)

3. Asking So What?

(make the leap from observing X to querying what X means)

4. Paraphrase × (times) 3

(recast the key words in new language to question what they mean)

5. Identifying a “Go To” Sentence

(locate the sentence shape a writer habitually uses; then ponder how that shape reveals the writer’s habitual ways of seeing)

Note: these heuristics are not formulae for organizing papers. They are “thinking moves” designed to produce higher quality material that will eventually go into an essay or argument or report. The heuristics lend themselves to group work, to collaborative thinking, as well as individual work. The best way to get good at these observation and thinking skills is to try them out repeatedly with other writers. In Unit II, you’ll be invited to put them to work in writing papers and other kinds of assignments.

1. NOTICE AND FOCUS + RANKING

RULES OF NOTICE & HABITS OF MIND: SLOW DOWN

Not “What do you think?” &

Not “What do you like or dislike?”

but

“What do you notice?”

A few prompts:

What do you find most INTERESTING?

What do you find most STRANGE?

What do you find most REVEALING?

The activity called Notice and Focus guides you to dwell longer with the data before feeling compelled to decide what the data mean. Repeatedly returning to the question, “What do you notice?” is one of the best ways to counteract the tendency to generalize too rapidly. “What do you notice?” redirects attention to the subject matter itself and delays the pressure to come up with answers.

Start by noticing as much as you can about whatever it is you are studying. Next, narrow your scope to a representative portion of your evidence, and then dwell with the data. Record what you see. Don’t move to generalization, or worse, to judgment. What this procedure will begin to demonstrate is how useful description is as a tool for arriving at ideas. If you stay at the description stage longer, deliberately delaying leaps to conclusions, you are more likely to arrive at better ideas. Training yourself to notice will improve your memory and your ability to think.

Step 1: Cast a wide net by continuing to list details you notice. Go longer than you normally would before stopping—often the tenth or eleventh detail is the one that will eventually