Synthesis

When working on writing projects that require you to use sources you might struggle with which of your sources you should use where and when and how much. As you know—say it with me now—this will depend on the discourse community, genre, and rhetorical situation of the project.

For example, your purpose in some sort of position paper is to state and develop your stance—your argument, your overall claim—about an issue; therefore, you would use sources only as evidence to support your position (and acknowledge others’ positions). In such a position paper, your voice—your ideas and reasoning—would dominate with sources used sparingly. Your purpose in a literature review, however, is mostly to present and discuss what others have researched and written about that issue, which means you wouldn’t state and develop your position at all. Rather in a literature review your voice as the writer in that project would be evident in how you choose to organize the relevant literature (as it’s called—your sources), how you summarize and explain them to your readers, and how you make connections, discussing themes and patterns among them. In this way, in a literature review you would use your sources more extensively. Of course, there are a number of other kinds of academic writing projects that fall between these two examples, in which you are expected to strike an effective balance between your voice—your ideas, analytical insights, claims, connections, etc.—and those of sources.

You might find that the first draft you compose for a writing project is too source-driven in that it’s mostly a string of disconnected summaries and information from sources; both the structure (how it is organized) and the content is dominated by sources. Or you might compose a first draft that is nicely focused in your own words with your ideas, which is great, but you’ve barely used any sources at all both to show readers what others have written before you as well as for support for your points. It can be difficult to find the right balance between your ideas and contributions and those of your sources.

In all writing projects, your goal should be to use your sources in your writing, rather than allowing the sources to use you. A way to accomplish this is by synthesizing your sources in your writing, which means to bring two or more of them together to support or question new ideas.

An Example of Synthesis

Let’s say my research question is to what extent have women students been taken seriously or not in college? I came up with this question because I read Adrienne Rich’s piece “Taking Women Students Seriously”; it’s one of my sources. I also have a primary source—an interview that was conducted for the StoryCorps project of Tia Smallwood; she went to college around the time Rich wrote the piece. I’m struck by how what Smallwood says about her experiences in college at the time speak to what Rich has to say—how they relate. (Listen to and/or read the transcript of Smallwood’s brief StoryCorps interview.)

Critically reading the Rich source, I annotate by underlining and starring what I think is an important quote related to my research question (I include it in the left-hand “record” column of my double-entry notes for this text in my writer’s notebook):

“At a time when adult literacy is generally low, we need to demand more, not less, of women, both for the sake of their futures as thinking beings, and because historically women have always had to be better than men to do half as well.”

Annotating the StoryCorps interview transcript, I highlight the following passage (also including it in my left-hand “record” column of my double-entry notes for this text in my writer’s notebook):

“All the girls I went to high school with would talk about being teachers and when I went to college I started to study things I really loved and that’s when I started taking finance and accounting courses. And this miserable old man – I had him for second year accounting and business law – he said to me, ‘Ms. Casciato, you are the only woman who has ever gotten this far in my class. And I will make sure every day is a living hell for you.’ And he used to grade us on our class participation and how we would answer questions. And he said to me at the beginning of every class, ‘I hope you are prepared, Ms. Casciato, because the most difficult question of the period will be yours.’ And I would smile. I mean, this is how backward the world was.”

I decide to write about these two quotes, responding to them in my writer’s notebook (in the right-hand “respond” column of my double-entry notes). In the StoryCorps interview, Smallwood describes how her professor singled her out for being a woman and describes how hard he was on her, giving her the most difficult questions to answer in class. How might I synthesize these two sources? What do I think Rich would say about Smallwood’s experience? Then I wonder, isn’t Smallwood’s experience an example of a professor “taking women students seriously”? I decide to include a paragraph synthesizing these two sources in my draft as Smallwood’s experience for me questions not so much the validity of Rich’s claim but how it looks in practice.

In the next chapter, read an example of what this synthesis looks like in a paragraph, to examine features of writing in academic contexts.