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contemporary documents that reveal a cultural divide in America now. Be sure to explain how the details of the documents disclose this cultural rift. You could also choose two political cartoons from different points of view on the same subject. Note: please refrain from taking a stand on the cultural divide that your documents embody. Focus instead on careful description and inferring implications. Here is the original assignment:

In a three-page paper use the attached transcript from the “Chicago Seven” trial—the circus-like prosecution of prominent DNC protestors— to support the thesis that the exchange between Abbie Hoffman (Yippie leader) and Julius Hoffman (judge) represents, in microcosm, the cultural divide then gripping America. (The excerpt is a verbatim transcript from the infamous 1969 trial of Hoffman and six other New Left leaders.)

Your task in this paper is to organize your evidence in some coherent way. The legal theatrics of the Hoffman-Hoffman exchange provide you with an abundance of material to work with. A strong paper will discuss the trial transcript according to some organizing logic, though the specific structure is up to you.

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Chapter 4

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Toolkit of Analytical Methods II: Going Deeper

A TEACHER COMMENT found in the margins of many essays and famous for bewildering students is the single word “develop”—or just “dev.” Faculty who write that term seem to be saying they want more thinking, that what’s on the page is too simple or uncomplicated. But it’s no easy matter to develop your ideas. This chapter offers you tools for doing so—hence, the chapter’s subtitle, Going Deeper.

This chapter is the logical next step to be taken. Where Chapter 2 equips you with foundational observational skills, and Chapter 3 incorporates them into a five-step analytical sequence, Chapter 4 offers you a set of analytical activities that can enable you to extend, complicate, and deepen your understanding of whatever you are analyzing. In effect, this new set of strategies seeks to give you more concrete ways of carrying out the last two of the five analytical moves featured in Chapter 3—to make what is implicit explicit and to reformulate questions and explanations.

Here is the list of the chapter’s heuristics, each with a very brief summary of what it involves. We will go on to explain each in more detail.

1. Passage-Based Focused Freewriting

(analyze a representative passage to understand better how the whole works)

2. Uncovering Assumptions

(determine the givens, what must be believed first in order to posit what the thing you are analyzing has said)

3. Reformulating Binaries

(question the accuracy of a basic contrast and determine the extent to which one side prevails over the other)

4. [Looking for] Difference within Similarity and Similarity Despite Difference

(move beyond a mechanical matching exercise by exploring how two things are alike, and So What, and then different, and So What)

5. “Seems to Be About X, but Could Also Be (or Is ‘Really’) about Y”

(assume that you got it wrong the first time to get somewhere new and interesting the second time)

Note: these heuristics, although not intended as formulae for organizing papers, can to some extent function in this way. They are primarily “thinking moves” designed to produce better, more in-depth thinking for essays, arguments or reports. The best way to learn these thinking skills is to practice them out repeatedly in your own work and with other writers.

1. PASSAGE-BASED FOCUSED FREEWRITING

WHAT IT DOES

Find an interesting passage

Sketch its context

Target and paraphrase key words and phrases

Explore why (so what that) the passage is interesting

Draw out implications

Ask how the passage is representative of the larger reading

WHAT IT DOES NOT DO

Voice reactions and criticisms

Free-associate with other subjects

Passage-based focused freewriting increases your ability to learn from what you read. The passage-based version differs from regular freewriting