Writing Analytically, 6th Edition - Rosenwasser, David & Stephen, Jill.original_ [42]
Traditional depictions of the family present it as a voluntary site of intimacy and warmth, but it also functions as a site of consumption. At the same time capitalism lauds the work ethic and the family as spheres of morality safe from the materialism of the outside world. These contradictions produce a ‘legitimation crisis’ by which capitalist societies become ever more dependent for legitimacy on the very sociocultural motivations that capitalism undermines. (186; rpt in Rhetorical Visions by Wendy Hesford, pp. 177–200).
3. Experiment with Notice and Focus and The Method. Find a subject to analyze using Notice and Focus and then The Method. Your aim here initially is not to write a formal paper but to do data-gathering on the page. Notice as much as you can about it. Then organize your observations using The Method: What details repeat? What is opposed to what?
After you have written the paragraph that is the final part of The Method, revise and expand your work into a short essay. Don’t worry too much at this point about form (introductory paragraph, for example) or thesis. Just write at greater length about what you noticed and what you selected as most revealing or interesting or strange or significant, and why.
You can do this writing with either print or nonprint materials. For some suggestions, see Try This 2.2 and 2.4. The Method could yield interesting results applied to the architecture on your campus, the student newspaper, campus clothing styles, or the latest news about the economy.
4. Analyze an Image in Relation to Text. The Adrian Tomine New Yorker covers that we referred to in Try This 2.3 could produce a good short paper. You could do The Method on the two covers in order to write a comparative paper. Or, you could do The Method on the Tomine cover called “Double Feature” and the two paragraphs from “The End of Solitude” above, and write about them comparatively. (Note: the entire article is available online.)
What do you think Tomine’s cover says about the issues raised in “The End of Solitude” by William Deresiewicz? How might Tomine see the issues differently? And how might Deresiewicz interpret Tomine’s cover, and so what?
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Chapter 3
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Analysis: What It Is and What It Does
NOW THAT YOU HAVE acquired an overview of the study of writing (Chapter 1) and an acquaintance with some essential tools for doing analysis (Chapter 2), it is time to focus in on the process of analysis itself—how a writer uses these tools to produce better, smarter, more interesting thinking on the page.
This chapter defines analysis as the search for meaningful pattern. It asks how something does what it does or why it is as it is. Analysis is a form of detective work that typically pursues something puzzling, something you seek to understand rather than something you believe you already know. Analysis finds questions where there seemed not to be any, and it makes connections that might not have been evident at first. Analysis is, then, more than just a set of skills: it is a frame of mind, an attitude toward experience.
A. Five Analytical Moves
At the heart of this chapter are what we call the Five Analytical Moves. These represent our attempt to present a template for the analytical frame of mind.
Move 1: Suspend judgment (understand before you judge).
Move 2: Define significant parts and how they are related.
Move 3: Look for patterns of repetition and contrast and for anomalies (aka The Method).
Move 4: Make the implicit explicit (convert to direct statement meanings that are only suggested—make details “speak”).
Move 5: Keep reformulating questions and explanations (what other details seem significant? what else might they mean?).
We have seized upon analysis as the book’s focus because it is the skill most commonly called for in college courses and beyond. When asked in faculty