Writing Analytically, 6th Edition - Rosenwasser, David & Stephen, Jill.original_ [26]
(for all of these questions) ---> SO WHAT?
What doesn’t fit? (anomalies) So what?
“The Method” is our shorthand for a systematic procedure for analyzing evidence by looking for patterns of repetition and contrast. It offers a way to get the big picture without overgeneralizing—it is insistently empirical. It also has an uncanny ability to help you figure out what is most important in anything you read.
Using The Method induces you to get physical with the data—literally, for you will find yourself circling, underlining, and listing. Although you will thus descend from the heights of abstraction to the realm of concrete detail, the point of tallying repetitions and strands and binaries and then selecting the most important and interesting ones is to trigger ideas. The discipline required to notice patterns in the language will produce more specific, more carefully grounded conclusions than you otherwise might have made.
Like Notice and Focus, The Method orients you toward significant detail; but whereas Notice and Focus is a deliberately unstructured activity, The Method applies a matrix or grid of observational moves to a subject.
Step 1: List exact repetitions and the number of each (words, details). For example, if forms of the word seems repeat three times, write “seems × 3.” With images, the repeated appearance of high foreheads would constitute an exact repetition.
Concentrate on substantive (meaning-carrying) words. Only in rare cases will words like “and” or “the” merit attention as a significant repetition. At the most literal level, whatever repeats is what the thing is about.
Step 2: List repetitions of the same or similar kind of detail or word—which we call strands (for example, polite, courteous, decorous). Be able to explain the strand’s connecting logic with a label: manners.
Step 3: List details or words that form or suggest binary oppositions—pairs of words or details that are opposites—and select from these the most important ones, which function as organizing contrasts (for example, open/closed, ugly/beautiful, global/local). Binaries help you locate what is at stake in the subject—the tensions and issues it is trying to resolve.
Step 4: Choose ONE repetition or strand or binary as most important or interesting and explain in one healthy paragraph why you think it’s important. (This ranking, as in Notice and Focus, prompts an interpretive leap.)
Step 5: Locate anomalies: exceptions to the pattern, things that seem not to fit. Anomalies become evident only after you have discerned a pattern, so it is best to locate repetitions, strands, and organizing contrasts—things that fit together in some way—before looking for things that seem not to fit. Once you see an anomaly, you will often find that it is part of a strand you had not detected (and perhaps one side of a previously unseen binary).
Discussion The method of looking for patterns works through a series of steps. Hold yourself initially to doing the steps one at a time and in order. Later, you will be able to record your answers under each of the three steps simultaneously. Although the steps of The Method are discrete and modular, they are also consecutive. They proceed by a kind of narrative logic. Each step leads logically to the next, and then to various kinds of regrouping, which is actually rethinking.
Tip: Expect ideas to suggest themselves to you as you move through the steps of The Method. Strands often begin to suggest other strands that are in opposition to them. Words you first took to be parts of one strand may migrate to different strands. This process of noticing and then relocating words and details into different patterns is one aspect of doing The Method that can push your analysis to interpretation.
The Method can be applied to virtually anything you wish to analyze—an essay, a political campaign, a work of visual or verbal art, a dense passage from some secondary source you feel is important but can’t quite figure out, and—last but not least—your own writing.
It may be helpful to think of this method