Writing Analytically, 6th Edition - Rosenwasser, David & Stephen, Jill.original_ [47]
THE METHOD
What repeats?
What goes with what? (strands)
What is opposed to what? (binaries)
(for all of these questions) ---> SO WHAT?
What doesn’t fit? (anomalies) So what?
In virtually all subjects, repetition and close resemblance (strands) are signs of emphasis. In a symphony, for example, certain patterns of notes repeat throughout, announcing themselves as major themes. In Shakespeare’s King Lear, references to seeing and eyes call attention to themselves through repetition, causing us to recognize that the play is about seeing. Binary oppositions, which often consist of two strands or repetitions in tension with each other, suggest what is at stake in a subject. We can understand King Lear by the way it opposes kinds of blindness to ways of seeing.
Along with looking for pattern, it is also fruitful to attend to anomalous details— those that seem not to fit the pattern. Anomalies help us to revise our assumptions. Picture a baseball player reading Dostoyevsky in the dugout: a TV commercial that did that to advertise a team was working through anomaly. In this case, the anomaly, a baseball player who reads serious literature, is used to subvert (question, unsettle) the stereotypical assumption that sports and intellectualism don’t belong together.
People tend to avoid information that challenges (by not conforming to) views they already hold. Screening out anything that would ruffle the pattern they’ve begun to see, they ignore the evidence that might lead them to a better theory. Most advances in thought, for example, have arisen when someone has observed some phenomenon that does not fit with a prevailing theory.
Looking for Patterns: An Example
Examine the following excerpt from a draft of a paper about Ovid’s Metamorphoses, a collection of short mythological tales dating from ancient Rome. We have included annotations in boldface to suggest how a writer’s ideas evolve as she looks for pattern, contrast, and anomaly, constantly remaining open to reformulation.
The draft begins with two loosely connected observations: that males dominate females and that many characters in the stories lose the ability to speak and thus become submissive and dominated. In the excerpt, the writer begins to connect these two observations and speculate about what this connection means.
1. There are many other examples in Ovid’s Metamorphoses that show the dominance of man over woman through speech control. In the Daphne and Apollo story, Daphne becomes a tree to escape Apollo, but her ability to speak is destroyed. Likewise, in the Syrinx and Pan story, Syrinx becomes a marsh reed, also a life form that cannot talk, although Pan can make it talk by playing it. [The writer establishes a pattern of similar detail.] Pygmalion and Galatea is a story in which the male creates his rendition of the perfect female. The female does not speak once; she is completely silent. Also, Galatea is referred to as “she” and never given a real name. This lack of a name renders her identity more silent. [Here the writer begins to link the contrasts of speech/silence with the absence/presence of identity.]
2. Ocyrhoe is a female character who could tell the future but who was transformed into a mare so that she could not speak. One may explain this transformation by saying it was an attempt by the gods to keep the future unknown. [Notice how the writer’s thinking expands as she sustains her investigation of the overall pattern of men silencing women: here she tests her theory by adding another variable—prophecy.] However, there is a male character, Tiresias, who is also a seer of the future and is allowed to speak of his foreknowledge, thereby becoming a famous figure. (Interestingly, Tiresias during his lifetime has experienced being both a male and a female.) [Notice how the Ocyrhoe example has generated a contrast based on gender in the Tiresias example. The pairing of the two