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[16] Out of this anxiety, dentist jokes are born. Comedy is often a vehicle for truth: dentist jokes indicate that our fear of the dentist—physical discomfort or pain, the power the dentist holds over an important part of our body—is real. And jokes are a way to ease that fear, to make dentistry accessible and, occasionally, even funny.

[17] So today, on our inaugural day as dentists, let’s embrace the dentist joke! Teeth are important, and we like them! We’re going out into the world to change smiles and lives. And we’re going to make jokes when opportunities arise—not because what we do isn’t serious, but because we can’t and shouldn’t take ourselves too seriously.

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Try This 3.4: Apply the Five Analytical Moves to a Speech

Speeches provide rich examples for analysis, and they are easily accessible on the Internet and on You Tube. We especially recommend a site called American Rhetoric (You can Google it for the URL). Choose any speech and analyze it for its use of the five analytical moves. Where, for example, does the speech locate pattern? How does it define significant parts and locate them in relation to the whole? Where does the speaker make inferences? To what extent does it reformulate its questions and explanations?

On the basis of your results, draw a few conclusions about the speech’s point of view and its way of presenting that point of view, which is to say its rhetoric. Try to get beyond the obvious and the general. What does applying the moves cause you to notice that you might not have noticed before?

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WHAT IT MEANS TO HAVE AN IDEA

In the final sections of this chapter, we will go on to distinguish analysis from other forms of writing: argument, summary, and personal response. We conclude this opening section of the chapter, on the Five Analytical Moves, with discussion of what counts as an idea in analytical writing.

Thinking, as opposed to reporting or reacting, should lead you to ideas. But what does it mean to have an idea? It’s one thing to acquire knowledge, but you also need to learn how to produce knowledge, to think for yourself. The problem is that people get daunted when asked to arrive at ideas. They dream up ingenious ways to avoid the task. Or they get paralyzed with anxiety.

What is an idea? Must an idea be something entirely “original”? Must it revamp the way you understand yourself or your stance toward the world?

Such expectations are unreasonably grand. Clearly, a writer in the early stages of learning about a subject can’t be expected to arrive at an idea so original that, like a Ph.D. thesis, it revises complex concepts in a discipline. Nor should you count as ideas only those that lead to some kind of life-altering discovery. Ideas are usually much smaller in scope, much less grand, than people seem to expect.

Some would argue that ideas are discipline-specific, that what counts as an idea in Psychology differs from what counts as an idea in History or Philosophy or Business. Surely the context does affect the way ideas are shaped and expressed. This book operates on the premise, however, that ideas across the curriculum share common elements. All of the items in the list below, for example, are common to ideas and to idea-making in virtually any context.

It is easiest to understand what ideas are by considering what ideas do and where they can be found. Most strong analytical ideas launch you in a process of resolving problems and bringing competing positions into some kind of alignment. They locate you where there is something to negotiate, where you are required not just to list answers but also to ask questions, make choices, and engage in reasoning about the significance of your evidence.

Here is a partial list of what it means to have an idea:

An idea usually starts with an observation that is puzzling, with something you want to figure out rather than something you think you already understand.

An idea may be the discovery of a question where there seemed not to be one.

An idea answers a question; it explains