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a mechanical task. But a summary stops short of analysis because summary typically makes much smaller interpretive leaps. A summary of the painting popularly known as Whistler’s Mother, for example, would tell readers what the painting includes, which details are the most prominent, and even what the overall effect of the painting seems to be. A summary might say that the painting possesses a certain serenity and that it is somewhat spare, almost austere. This kind of language still falls into the category of focused description, which is what a summary is.

Analysis Makes an Interpretive Leap

An analysis would include more of the writer’s interpretive thinking. It might tell us, for instance, that the painter’s choice to portray his subject in profile contributes to our sense of her separateness from us and of her nonconfrontational passivity. We look at her, but she does not look back at us. Her black dress and the fitted lace cap that obscures her hair are not only emblems of her self-effacement, shrouds disguising her identity like her expressionless face, but also the tools of her self-containment and thus of her power to remain aloof from prying eyes. What is the attraction of this painting (this being one of the questions that an analysis might ask)? What might draw a viewer to the sight of this austere, drably attired woman, sitting alone in the center of a mostly blank space? Perhaps it is the very starkness of the painting, and the mystery of self-sufficiency at its center, that attracts us (see Figure 3.2).

Laying out the data is key to any kind of analysis not simply because it keeps the analysis accurate but also because, crucially, it is in the act of carefully describing a subject that analytical writers often have their best ideas. Observations of the sort just offered go beyond describing what the painting contains and enter into the writer’s ideas about what its details imply, what the painting invites us to make of it and by what means. Notice in our analysis of the painting how intertwined the description (summary) is with the analysis.

Figure 3.2

Arrangement in Grey and Black: The Artist’s Mother by James Abbott McNeill Whistler, 1871.

REUNION DES MUSEES NATIONAUX, ART RESOURCE, NY. James Abbott McNeil Whistler.

The writer who can offer a careful description of a subject’s key features is likely to arrive at conclusions about possible meanings that others would share. You may not agree with the terms by which we have summarized the painting, and thus you may not agree with such conclusions as “the mystery of self-sufficiency.” Nor is it necessary that you agree because there is no single, right answer to what the painting means. The absence of a single right answer does not, however, mean that all possible interpretations are equal and equally convincing to readers.

Here are two guidelines to be drawn from this discussion of analysis and summary:

Describe with care. The words you choose to summarize your data will contain the germs of your ideas about what the subject means.

In moving from summary to analysis, scrutinize the language you have chosen, asking, “why did I choose this word?” and “what ideas are implicit in the language I have used?”

Figure 3.3

Summary and Analysis of Whistler’s Mother Diagram

ANALYSIS AND PERSONAL ASSOCIATIONS

Although observations like those offered in the “Interpretive Leaps” column in Figure 3.3 go beyond simple description, they stay with the task of explaining the painting, rather than moving to private associations that the painting might prompt, such as effusions about old age, or rocking chairs, or the character and situation of the writer’s own mother. Such associations could well be valuable as a means of prompting a searching piece of expressive writing. They might also help a writer to interpret some feature of the painting that he or she was working to understand. But the writer would not be free to use pieces of his or her personal history as conclusions about what the painting communicates, unless these conclusions could also