SUMMARY, SYNTHESIS, and ANALYSIS
Summary
Summarizing texts is a staple research exercise in composition classrooms. Since research paper writers must incorporate the ideas of others into their projects, rather than just generate text from personal experience, observations, and general knowledge, their summarizing other people’s written communications introduces them to communities of writing; students researching a topic such as Fourth Amendment rights will find that not only is the subject written about by journalists, academics, and law enforcement, but that the writers’ perspectives differ widely in each field of discourse. Each field of discourse has its own audience, too, whose expectations, reading levels, and levels of knowledge differ from one another. After writing a few summaries of newspaper articles and academic articles, students will soon find how writing is shaped by the field of discourse and audience, as well as to whom the most useful information is being disseminated. If students are going to write about subjects, synthesizing what they know with what other people know, they will need good summary skills. They will also need good sources.
Synthesis
All research papers, whether they are informative or persuasive, will require the synthesizing of source material. A researched report on global warming, for instance, is a synthesis of source material, all of which has been reorganized around the central theme of the report. If the report’s purpose is to show the history of global warming, then materials presented in the report will probably be arranged chronologically, not source by source.
Analysis
Of the more difficult tasks students learn in ENG 102 is how to analyze source material or other resources for use in their research papers. The final researched effort of many students shows that they can summarize, cite properly, and even synthesize resources on their subject. Indeed, in informative reports, those skills might be enough. In persuasive essays or in those projects in which analyses of a subject is supposed to be the centerpiece of the effort, analyses are often lacking. Students who want to argue that ‘cloning’ humans is a great idea might find a number of articles supporting their ideas, as well as those that argue against. They might manage to state a problem, take a position, and review the literature in their position paper on cloning. You will find that analyzing the literature or analyzing central issues, however, proves difficult for most students. The critical thinking skills required for analyses are often not easily mastered. You might want to consider daily exercises or practice in critical thinking as part of your course plan so that students will have less difficulty using those skills in a longer written effort such as the research paper.
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Published by: Department of English Language and Literature
Last Update: July 14, 2003 by English Web Manager
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