Kantz

Synthesis literally means "a combination"

or "a blend" of two or more substances.

So...

"Shirley, first of all, is intelligent and well-motivated. She is a native speaker of English. She has no extraordinary knowledge deficits or emotional problems. She comes from a home where education is valued, and her parents do reading and writing tasks at home and at their jobs. Shirley has certain skills. When she entered first grade, she knew how to listen to and tell stories, and she soon became proficient at reading stories and at writing narratives.

During her academic life, Shirley has learned such studying skills as finding the main idea and remembering facts. In terms of the relevant research, Shirley can read and summarize source texts accurately (cf. Spivey; Winograd). She can select material that is relevant for her purpose in writing (Hayes, Waterman,and Robinson; Langer). She can make connections between the available information and her purpose for writing,including the needs of her readers when the audience is specified (Atlas). She can make original connections among ideas (Brown and Day; Langer). She can create an appropriate, audience-based structure for her paper (Spivey), take notes and use them effectively while composing her paper (Kennedy), and she can present information clearly and smoothly (Spivey), without relying on the phrasing of the original sources(Atlas; Winograd). Shirley is, in my experience, a typical college student with an average academic preparation" (p. 430).

Is Kantz's creation accurate? Are there any

generalizations/inaccuracies that make her

creation skewed in any way?

If her interpretation is skewed, what might be the consequences be for her study?

How is what Shirley does here NOT synthesis?

On Wednesday, we'll talk about how a guy rubbing lemon juice all over his face led to a very important scientific discovery. And, of course, what this means for scientific communication.

Your last round of conferences are coming up. You should be composing a draft (as complete as you can) of your literature review. We'll talk about that more on Wednesday.

Your annotated bibliographies are due tonight.

Quintilian: Best/most ethical orator

is "the good man speaking well."

Tyson has, for better or worse, adopted an ambassador role for science. While a brilliant scientific thinker, do you think his interactions with the world around him (be it online or in person) have an impact on:

a) just how he's perceived

b) how science is perceived

c) both a and b

d) none of these things

Helping Students Use Textual Sources Persuasively

Margaret Kantz

Wait a minute...synthesis?

What's that?

These templates may seem simplistic and a bit

rudimentary, but they can be starting points for more complex ways of interacting with and creating moments of conversation (synthesis) between your insights and your sources.

Kantz's Thesis

Existing Ideas (Research)

To understand how to teach students to write [research papers], we also need a better understanding of the demands of synthesis tasks.

Your Ideas ("New/Original")

Synthesis

I have provided an extended list of templates on our course website.

Where does Shirley make her mistakes?

Kantz creates, by using research about research,

her own experiences as a student, her own students'

experiences, what she considers a "typical college

student."

Shirley,who likes English history, decided to write about the Battle of Agincourt. She found half a dozen histories that described the circumstances of the battle in a few pages each. Although the topic was unfamiliar, the sources agreed on many of the facts. Shirley collated these facts into her own version, noting but not discussing discrepant details, borrowing what she assumed to be her sources' purpose of retelling the story, and modeling the narrative structure of her paper on that of her sources. Since the only comments Shirley could think of would be to agree or disagree with her sources, who had told her everything she knew about the Battle of Agincourt, she did not comment on the material; instead, she concentrated on telling the story clearly and more completely than her sources had done. She was surprised when her paper received a grade of C- .

This might be even more difficult in writing bound by classes/academia because the material is often more foreign, dense, and/or inaccessible.

They Say/I Say: The Moves That Matter in Academic Writing

The conclusions by Smith (2010) will have important applications in how widely used poison Kool-Aid is used in social systems that deem it a meaningful way to eliminate particular populations. However, it may also have impact in peripheral populations, which could cause harm, even death, to others.

Templates can help.

Gerald Graff

Cathy Birkenstein

Russel Durst

Don't pay for it,

you can get free

by search for the book

title + PDF.

Let's look at some.

Kantz notes the difficulty

Besides the obvious problems of citation format and coordination of source materials with the emerging written product, writing a synthesis can vary in difficulty according to the number and length of the sources, the abstractness or familiarity of the topic, the uses that the writer must make of the material, the degree and quality of original thought required, and the extent to which the sources will supply the structure and purpose of the new paper.

On the one hand, Smith (2010) believes that poison Kool-Aid will help thin what he believes are unnecessary populations. On the other hand, that idea does not align with other studies (Jones, 2011; Davis 2014), which state strong evidence that poison Kool-Aid will, indeed, count as murdering people.

Kantz says that rhetorical analysis, what you did in your article reviews and with the complaint letter, can help with learning to engage with sources in meaningful ways.

"Yet if we want students to learn to build original arguments from texts, we must teach them the skills needed to create divergent interpretations.

We must teach them to think about facts and opinions as claims that are made by writers to particular readers for particular reasons in particular historical contexts....Reading sources rhetorically gives students a powerful tool for creating a persuasive analysis."

For Thursday

Want time away from class to work on your papers?

Smith (2010) overlooks what it is considered an important part about poison Kool-Aid. Poison Kool-Aid, if ingested by the wrong person, can murder someone who is innocent and did not want or deserve to die. This flaw in Smith's work is important in the the larger argument about poison Kool-Aid because it inserts a moral perspective not addressed in her research.

Research writing is creative writing

"And after all, creativity is what research should be about...Creativity is an inherently rhetorical quality."

Do you ever feel like a research paper could be creative writing?