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the period suggest that for the artist the Civil War was in some way a continuation of the noble Revolutionary War, providing Americans with the opportunity to exhibit heroism in the likeness of the fathers of the nation. A close examination of the language Whitman used in his Civil War poetry anthology Drum Taps and in Memoranda During the War demonstrates that the poet consciously sought ways to cast President Lincoln as the George Washington of the Civil War, both northerners and southerners as the virtuous patriots of the Civil War, and to curiously leave the loathsome loyalist of the American Revolution without a corresponding double in his literary representation of the 1861–1865 conflict. In doing so, Whitman was ironically able to reinvent the so called “Secession War,” which threatened to divide and destroy the United States, as a unifying conflict as worthy of celebration as the American War for Independence from Britain.

Two parallel features drive this writer’s analysis of Whitman: that he treats both northerners and southerners as Civil War patriots and that he focuses only on patriots in the Revolutionary War, ignoring colonists who remained loyal to the crown.

We take our final example from a classic early text in Urban Studies, The Death and Life of Great American Cities (1961), by Jane Jacobs. Notice how she weaves a pattern of descriptive detail to build her implicit argument that sidewalks in cities are sites where people police themselves, providing safety not only for friends but for strangers.

When I get home after work, the ballet is reaching its crescendo. This is the time of roller skates and stilts and tricycles, and games in the lee of the stoop with bottle tops and plastic cowboys; this is the time of bundles and packages, zigzagging from the drugstore to the fruit stand and back over to the butcher’s; this is the time when teenagers, all dressed up, are pausing to ask if their slips show or their collars look right; this is the time when beautiful girls get out of MG’s; this is the time when the fire engines go through; this is the time when anybody you know around Hudson Street will go by.

As darkness thickens and Mr. Halpert moors the laundry cart to the cellar door again, the ballet goes on under lights, eddying back and forth but intensifying at the bright spotlight pools of Joe’s sidewalk pizza dispensary, the bars, the delicatessen, the restaurant and the drug store. The night workers stop now at the delicatessen, to pick up salami and a container of milk. Things have settled down for the evening but the street and its ballet have not come to a stop.

I know the deep night ballet and its seasons best from waking long after midnight to tend a baby and, sitting in the dark, seeing the shadows and hearing the sounds of the sidewalk. Mostly it is a sound like infinitely pattering snatches of party conversation and, about three in the morning, singing, very good singing. Sometimes there is sharpness and anger or sad, sad weeping, or a flurry of search for a string of beads broken. One night a young man came roaring along, bellowing terrible language at two girls whom he had apparently picked up and who were disappointing him. Doors opened, a wary semicircle formed around him, not too close, until the police came. Out came the heads, two, along Hudson Street, offering opinion, “Drunk … Crazy … A wild kid from the suburbs.”

Writing that is not markedly academic in style, such as these paragraphs from Jane Jacobs, often makes its way into academic discussions. Descriptive detail is as valuable in academic writing as it is in more popular forms.

MOVE 3: LOOK FOR PATTERNS OF REPETITION AND CONTRAST AND FOR ANOMALIES (AKA THE METHOD)

We have been defining analysis as the understanding of parts in relation to each other and to a whole. But how do you know which parts to attend to? What makes some details in the material you are studying more worthy of your attention than others?

The heuristic we call The Method offers a tool for uncovering significant patterns. In its most reduced