Writing Analytically, 6th Edition - Rosenwasser, David & Stephen, Jill.original_ [55]
An idea may make explicit and explore the meaning of something implicit—an unstated assumption upon which an argument rests, or a logical consequence of a given position.
An idea may connect elements of a subject and explain the significance of that connection.
An idea often accounts for some dissonance, that is, something that seems to not fit together.
B. Distinguishing Analysis from Argument, Summary, and Expressive Writing
How does analysis differ from other kinds of thinking and writing? A common way of answering this question is to think of communication as having three possible centers of emphasis—the writer, the subject, and the audience. Communication, of course, involves all three of these components, but some kinds of writing concentrate more on one than on the others. Autobiographical writing, for example, such as diaries or memoirs or stories about personal experience, centers on the writer and his or her desire for self-expression. Argument, in which the writer takes a stand on an issue, advocating or arguing against a policy or attitude, is reader-centered; its goal is to bring about a change in its readers’ actions and beliefs. Analytical writing is more concerned with arriving at an understanding of a subject than with either self-expression or changing readers’ views.
These three categories of writing are not mutually exclusive. So, for example, expressive (writer-centered) writing is also analytical in its attempts to define and explain a writer’s feelings, reactions, and experiences. And analysis is a form of self-expression since it inevitably reflects the ways a writer’s experiences have taught him or her to think about the world. But even though expressive writing and analysis necessarily overlap, they also differ significantly in both method and aim. In expressive writing, your primary subject is your self, with other subjects serving as a means of evoking greater self-understanding. In analytical writing, your reasoning may derive from your personal experience, but it is your reasoning and not you or your experiences that matter. Analysis asks not just “what do I think?” but “how good is my thinking? how well does it fit the subject I am trying to explain?“
In its emphasis on logic and the dispassionate scrutiny of ideas (“what do I think about what I think?”), analysis is a close cousin of argument. But analysis and argument are not the same.
FIGURE 3.1
Diagram of Communication Triangle
ANALYSIS AND ARGUMENT
Analysis and argument proceed in the same way. They offer evidence, make claims about it, and supply reasons that explain and justify the claims. In other words, in both analysis and argument, you respond to the questions “what have you got to go on?” (supply evidence) and “how did you get there?” (supply the principles and reasons that caused you to conclude what you did about the evidence).
Although analysis and argument proceed in essentially the same way, they differ in the kinds of questions they try to answer. Argument, at its most dispassionate, asks, “what can be said with truth about x or y?” In common practice, though, the kinds of questions that argument more often answers are more committed, directive, and should-centered, such as “which is better, x or y?,” “how can we best achieve x or y?,” and “why should we stop doing x or y?”
Analysis, by contrast, asks, “what does x or y mean”? In analysis of the evidence (your data) is something you wish to understand, and the claims are assertions about what that evidence means. The claim that an analysis makes is usually a tentative answer to a what, how, or why question; it seeks to explain why people watch professional wrestling or what a rising number of sexual harassment cases might mean, or how certain features of government health care policy are designed to allay the fears of the middle class.
The claim that an argument makes is often an answer to a “should” question: for example,