Writing Analytically, 6th Edition - Rosenwasser, David & Stephen, Jill.original_ [92]
As this paragraph suggests, rituals depend on rules and conventional behaviors that provide order and stability, thereby easing “difficult passages.” Use the tools you’ve acquired in this and previous chapters to uncover the implications in this paragraph. Then use it as a lens to analyze some ritual from everyday life. Obviously, Visser is concentrating on the ritual functions surrounding food—which you can use as a model for your investigation of some other ritual, perhaps one that you never noticed as a ritual before. It could be any system regulated by manners:
handling a pet in public,
ordering drinks for a group of friends,
visiting a professor during office hours,
participating in class discussion,
attending a baseball game, or
socializing in the library.
And the list is endless. Choose any ritual activity, and use Visser as a model and a lens to analyze it. Describe carefully its rules, and explore what these rules control and why such control is useful.
* * *
Chapter 6
* * *
Making Interpretations Plausible
IN THIS CHAPTER, we focus on the move from description to interpretation and address some of the issues that interpretation typically raises. What makes some interpretations better than others? What makes interpretations more than a matter of personal opinion?
The book has so far offered two kinds of prompts for making interpretive leaps: ranking (what is most important, or interesting, or revealing and why?) and asking “So what?” We’ve also demonstrated that the writer who can offer careful description of a subject’s key features is likely to arrive at conclusions about possible meanings that others would share. We will now add another necessary move: specifying and arguing for a context in which the evidence might be best understood—the interpretive context.
Here are two key principles:
Everything means; that is, everything in life calls on us to interpret—even when we are unaware of doing so.
Meaning is contextual; that is, meaning-making always occurs inside of some social or cultural or other frame of reference.
WHAT INTERPRETATION DOES
Offers a theory of what X means, not fact
Supplies a context for understanding X that is suggested by the details
Strives for the plausible, not the certain: explains individual details
and patterns of evidence
Supplies reasons for why evidence means what you claim it means
MOVING FROM DESCRIPTION TO INTERPRETATION
Throughout this book, we have been defining analysis as a search for meaning, a search conducted primarily through discovery of significant patterns in your evidence. In Chapter 3, Analysis: What It Is and What It Does, we noted that the process of noticing, of recording selected details and patterns of detail (analysis), is already the beginning of interpretation. Analysis differs from description and summary because it triggers larger interpretive leaps.
As we also argued in Chapter 3, the first step toward arriving at and persuading others to accept your interpretation is to make the most of the observation stage by following these two rules:
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 and interpretation, look consciously at the language you have chosen, asking, “Why did I choose this word? What ideas are implicit in the language I have used?”
Your readers’ willingness to accept an interpretation is powerfully connected to their ability to see its plausibility, that is, how it follows from both the supporting details you selected and the language you used in characterizing those details. An interpretive conclusion is not a fact, but a theory. Interpretive conclusions stand or fall not so much on whether they can be proved right or