![means—graphic, electronic, or mechanical,
including photocopying, recording, taping, Web
distribution, information storage and retrieval
systems, or in any other manner—without the
written permission of the publisher.
Printed in Canada
1 2 3 4 5 6 7 11 10 09 08 07
Library of Congress Control Number:
2007939138
ISBN-13: 978-1-413-03310-6
ISBN-10: 1-413-03310-5
Thomson Higher Education
25 Thomson Place
Boston, MA 02210
USA
For more information about our products, contact
us at:
Thomson Learning Academic Resource Center
1-800-423-0563
For permission to use material from this text or
product, submit a request online at
http://www.thomsonrights.com.
Any additional questions about permissions
can be submitted by e-mail to
[email protected]
v](https://image.slidesharecdn.com/writinganalyticallythispageintentionallyleftb-230105024545-11141dce/85/Writing-AnalyticallyThis-page-intentionally-left-b-docx-3-320.jpg)
![writer begins to connect
these two observations and speculate about what this connection
means.
There are many other examples in Ovid’s Metamorphoses that
show the dominance of man
over woman through speech control. In the Daphne and Apollo
story, Daphne becomes a tree to
escape Apollo, but her ability to speak is destroyed. Likewise,
in the Syrinx and Pan story, Syrinx
becomes a marsh reed, also a life form that cannot talk,
although Pan can make it talk by
playing it. [The writer establishes a pattern of similar detail.]
Pygmalion and Galatea
is a story in which the male creates his rendition of the perfect
female. The female does not
speak once; she is completely silent. Also, Galatea is referred to
as “she” and never given a real
name. This lack of a name renders her identity more silent.
[Here the writer begins to link
the contrasts of speech/silence with the absence/presence of
identity.]
Ocyrhoe is a female character who could tell the future but who
was transformed into a mare
so that she could not speak. One may explain this
transformation by saying it was an attempt by
the gods to keep the future unknown. [Notice how the writer’s
thinking expands as she
sustains her investigation of the overall pattern of men silencing
women: here
she tests her theory by adding another variable—prophecy.]
However, there is a male
character, Tiresias, who is also a seer of the future and is
allowed to speak of his foreknowledge,
thereby becoming a famous figure. (Interestingly, Tiresias](https://image.slidesharecdn.com/writinganalyticallythispageintentionallyleftb-230105024545-11141dce/85/Writing-AnalyticallyThis-page-intentionally-left-b-docx-64-320.jpg)
![during his lifetime has experienced being
both a male and a female.) [Notice how the Ocyrhoe example
has spawned
a contrast based on gender in the Tiresias example. The pairing
of the two
examples demonstrates that the ability to tell the future is not
the sole cause of
silencing because male characters who can do it are not
silenced—though the
writer pauses to note that Tiresias is not entirely male.] Finally,
in the story of
Mercury and Herse, Herse’s sister, Aglauros, tries to prevent
Mercury from marrying Herse.
Mercury turns her into a statue; the male directly silences the
female’s speech.
The woman silences the man in only two stories studied. [Here
the writer searches
out an anomaly— women silencing men—that grows in the rest
of the
paragraph into an organizing contrast.] In the first, “The Death
of Orpheus,” the women
make use of “clamorous shouting, Phrygian flutes with curving
horns, tambourines, the beating of
breasts, and Bacchic howlings” (246) to drown out the male’s
songs, dominating his speech in terms
of volume. In this way, the quality of power within speech is
demonstrated: “for the first time, his
words had no effect, and he failed to move them [the women] in
any way by his voice” (247).
Distinguishing Analysis from Argument, Summary, and
Expressive Writing 11](https://image.slidesharecdn.com/writinganalyticallythispageintentionallyleftb-230105024545-11141dce/85/Writing-AnalyticallyThis-page-intentionally-left-b-docx-65-320.jpg)
![Next the women kill him, thereby rendering him silent.
However, the male soon regains his temporar-
ily destroyed power of expression: “the lyre uttered a plaintive
melody and the lifeless tongue made
a piteous murmur” (247). Even after death Orpheus is able to
communicate. The women were not
able to destroy his power completely, yet they were able to
severely reduce his power of speech and
expression. [The writer learns, among other things, that men are
harder to silence;
Orpheus’s lyre continues to sing after his death.]
The second story in which a woman silences a man is the story
of Actaeon, in which the
male sees Diana naked, and she transforms him into a stag so
that he cannot speak of it:
“he tried to say ‘Alas!’ but no words came” (79). This loss of
speech leads to Actaeon’s inability
to inform his own hunting team of his true identity; his loss of
speech leads ultimately to his
death. [This example reinforces the pattern that the writer had
begun to notice
in the Orpheus example.]
In some ways these four paragraphs of draft exemplify a writer
in the process of
discovering a workable idea. They begin with a list of similar
examples, briefly noted.
As the examples accumulate, the writer begins to make
connections and formulate
trial explanations. We have not included enough of this excerpt
to get to the tentative
thesis the draft is working toward, although that thesis is
already beginning to emerge.
What we want to emphasize here is the writer’s willingness to
accumulate data and to](https://image.slidesharecdn.com/writinganalyticallythispageintentionallyleftb-230105024545-11141dce/85/Writing-AnalyticallyThis-page-intentionally-left-b-docx-66-320.jpg)
![If you look closely at Camilo Vergara’s photo of Fern Street,
Camden, 1988,
you’ll notice a sign on the side of a dilapidated building:
Danger: Men Working
W. Hargrove Demolition
Perhaps that warning captures the ominous atmosphere of these
very different kinds of photographic documents by Camilo
Vergara and
Edward Burtynsky: “Danger: Men Working.” Watch out—
human beings
are at work! But the work that is presented is not so much a
building-up
as it is a tearing-down—the work of demolition. [Strange:
tearing down
is unexpected; writer asks So what? and answers.] Of course,
demolition
is often necessary in order to construct anew: old buildings are
leveled
for new projects, whether you are building a highway or bridge
in
an American city or a dam in the Chinese countryside. You
might call
modernity itself, as so many have, a process of creative
destruction,
a term used variously to describe modern art, capitalism, and
technological innovation. The photographs in this exhibit,
however,
force us to pay attention to the “destructive” side of this modern
At some point the So what? question will begin to trigger a
move from
implications to possible conclusions.](https://image.slidesharecdn.com/writinganalyticallythispageintentionallyleftb-230105024545-11141dce/85/Writing-AnalyticallyThis-page-intentionally-left-b-docx-163-320.jpg)
![Observation So what? Implication(s)
Implications So what? Conclusions(s)
FIGURE 4.1
So What?
52 Chapter 4 Interpretation: What It Is, What It Isn't, and How
to Do It
equation. [Strange: photos emphasize destruction and not
creation;
writer asks So what? and answers.] What both Burtynsky and
Vergara
do in their respective ways is to put up a warning sign—they
ques-
tion whether the reworking of our natural and social
environment leads
to a sustainable human future. And they wonder whether the
process
of creative destruction may not have spun recklessly out of
control,
producing places that are neither habitable nor sustainable. In
fact, a
common element connecting the two photographic versions is
the near
absence of people in the landscape. [Writer points to supporting
feature
of evidence, which he will further theorize.] While we see the
evidence
of the transforming power of human production on the physical
and
social environment, neither Vergara’s urban ruins nor
Burtynsky’s indus-](https://image.slidesharecdn.com/writinganalyticallythispageintentionallyleftb-230105024545-11141dce/85/Writing-AnalyticallyThis-page-intentionally-left-b-docx-164-320.jpg)
![trial sites actually show us “men working.” [Writer continues to
move
by noticing strange absence of people in photographs of sites
where
men work.] Isolated figures peer suspiciously out back doors or
pick
through the rubble, but they appear out of place. [Writer asks a
final So
what? and arrives at a conclusion.] It is this sense of
displacement—of
human beings alienated from the environments they themselves
have
created—that provides the most haunting aspect of the work of
these
two photographers.
The Gambino paragraph is a good example of how interpretive
paragraphs
are generated. Notice the pattern by which the paragraph moves:
the observation
of something strange, about which the writer asks and answers
So what? several
times until arriving at a final So what?—the point at which he
decides what his
observations ultimately mean. We call the final So what? in this
chain of think-
ing “the ultimate So what” because it moves from implications
to the writer’s
culminating point.
The Gambino paragraph is also a good example of the way
paragraphs
operate as smaller units or stages on the way to a longer paper.
We’ll say more
in Chapter 10 about paragraph structure. For now, think of
paragraphs as the](https://image.slidesharecdn.com/writinganalyticallythispageintentionallyleftb-230105024545-11141dce/85/Writing-AnalyticallyThis-page-intentionally-left-b-docx-165-320.jpg)
![building blocks of a piece of thinking in which movement of
mind creates the
structure (not the too-simple notion of topic sentence +
evidence). Ideas evolve
one paragraph at a time; there is no rule that says you can’t
write a paper in
paragraph-length chunks and later line these up in a way that
best reveals the big
picture.
Try this 4.1: Tracking the Interpretive Process in a Student
Paper
The following paper offers you an opportunity to further
observe how a writer moves
from observation to interpretation. We’ve inserted the phrase So
what? at the places
in the first four paragraphs where that prompt seems to be
allowing the writer to
draw out the implication of an observation. We have left the last
three paragraphs
unmarked so that you can supply the interpretive prompts
wherever you see the writer
moving from observations to implications and conclusions. Also
watch for—and
mark—places where the writer moves forward by seeking to
explain some feature of
the dance that she found strange.
Asking So What?: An Example 53
Hua dan: The Dance of Values in the Beijing Opera
[1] Lanfang says in his autobiography that ′′The beautiful
dance movements created by](https://image.slidesharecdn.com/writinganalyticallythispageintentionallyleftb-230105024545-11141dce/85/Writing-AnalyticallyThis-page-intentionally-left-b-docx-166-320.jpg)
![past artists are all based on gestures in real life, synthesized and
accentuated to
become art′′ . . . (36). In this quote Lanfang emphasizes a
representation of life
through ′′beautiful′′ movement. As he is a product of his
culture, he is describing what
his culture deems ′′beautiful.′′ The female roles in the Beijing
Opera, particularly the
Hua dan, convey their own set of cultural values about
femininity in Chinese culture.
[2] There is much posing and holding of shapes within the Hua
dan role. [So what?] There
is a gentle, poised focus in these moments. This allows the
viewers time to take in the
elegance of the shape, costumes, makeup, music, and artistry of
the performer. The fruit
of these efforts becomes evident and framed by the pausing. [So
what?] The work the
performers put in is valued in the pause.
[3] All the movements are very clear in their choices between
making angles and using the full
extension of the limbs, particularly the arms. The angular
shapes give a sharp contrast to
the extension of the arms and legs. Circular formations of the
arms are seamlessly round
and often repeated to emphasize their distinctness. [So what?]
This exactness and
clarity emphasizes the importance and power of the body. By
paying such attention to
particulars it gives greater emphasis to the powers held in
making these shapes.
[4] There is much repetition and opening and closing in the](https://image.slidesharecdn.com/writinganalyticallythispageintentionallyleftb-230105024545-11141dce/85/Writing-AnalyticallyThis-page-intentionally-left-b-docx-167-320.jpg)
![movement. [So what?] Repetition
can represent the large amount of time females spend on such
activities. It can also give a
sense of the time it actually takes for such actions in real life,
such as sewing. The women do
spend much time sewing, and this time is represented. It also
takes consistency and dedication
to complete such tasks multiple times, so these become valued
characteristics.
[5] Rhythm is also an element of the very controlled female
walking consisting of small, even
steps. The feet barely leave the floor and don’t extend into
kicks or jumps, as do some of
the male roles. Even in the Hua dan demonstration in the
“Aspects of Peking Opera” video
when a bounce was in the character’s step and the eyes were
alive, the flow of the walk
remained consistent. The smallness of the steps could represent
the female’s place in so-
ciety. They are petite and not flashy in their maneuvers. They
complete their tasks without
much fanfare. Keeping the feet low also limits the opening of
the legs. Such protection and
withholding represents a value in itself—the absence of overt
sexual suggestion. Although
the male characters may be more likely to overtly demonstrate
their strength and power,
it takes a great amount of control and focus for the women to
execute their walks, so this
convention is demonstrating the value of women keeping their
struggles and work hidden.
[6] Although my viewing of Peking Opera is limited, it caught
my eye to see the Hua dan’s
shoulders finally move in a flirtation demonstration in the](https://image.slidesharecdn.com/writinganalyticallythispageintentionallyleftb-230105024545-11141dce/85/Writing-AnalyticallyThis-page-intentionally-left-b-docx-168-320.jpg)
![“Aspects” video. This isola-
tion and interruption of flow seemed out of character to all
other demonstrated acts. All
other actions were focused on creating lines and full range of
motion. Breaking typically
occurs only at the elbows and wrists. These shoulder shrugs
break not only the lines but
the flowing rhythm. Making flirtation stand out suggests that in
the context of the opera,
such coquettish moments are important for the audience both in
terms of character and
life off the stage. It also reminds the viewers that there are even
more areas of the body
that have not been used but are present within the character and
performer.
54 Chapter 4 Interpretation: What It Is, What It Isn't, and How
to Do It
[7] What are the recurring themes in all these observations?
They lie in control, value of
movement, and repetition. The “beauty” lies not only in the
quality of the movement but
in what it represents. The dainty representation of females, their
modesty and strong
work ethic, and care in their activities are of great importance,
but so too is the slight
pleasure in restricted flirtation. When combined, these qualities
of movement create a
carefully crafted portrayal of a polished female. It serves to
represent not only a clear
character but a beautiful and desirable female figure.
IMPLICATIONS VERSUS HIDDEN MEANINGS](https://image.slidesharecdn.com/writinganalyticallythispageintentionallyleftb-230105024545-11141dce/85/Writing-AnalyticallyThis-page-intentionally-left-b-docx-169-320.jpg)
![and troubled expectation of the future of Japan. [Here the writer
chooses the photogra-
pher’s life as his interpretive context.]
The image is that of a tall fence of stark horizontal and vertical
rough wood lashed together,
looming above the barren rice fields. Straddling the fence, half-
crouched and half-clinging, is
a solitary male figure, gazing in profile to the horizon.
Oblivious to the sky above of dark and
churning thunderclouds, the figure instead focuses his attentions
and concentrations elsewhere.
[The writer selects and describes significant detail.]
It is exactly this elsewhere that makes the image successful, for
in studying the man we are
to turn our attention in the direction of the figure’s gaze and
away from the photograph itself.
He hangs curiously between heaven and earth, suspended on a
makeshift man-made structure,
in a purgatorial limbo awaiting the future. He waits with
anticipation—perhaps dread?—for a
time that has not yet come; he is directed away from the
present, and it is this sensitivity to
time that sets this print apart from the others in the series. One
could argue that in effect this
man, clothed in common garb, has become Japan itself,
indicative of the post-war uncertainty
of a country once-dominant and now destroyed. What will the
future (dark storm clouds) hold
for this newly-humbled nation? [Here the writer notices a
pattern of in-between-ness
and locates it in an historical context in order to make his
interpretive leap.]
Remember that regardless of the subject you select for your](https://image.slidesharecdn.com/writinganalyticallythispageintentionallyleftb-230105024545-11141dce/85/Writing-AnalyticallyThis-page-intentionally-left-b-docx-182-320.jpg)
![By Eric Fassin
[1] A good consensus is hard to find, especially on sexual
politics. But the infamous rules
instituted last year by Antioch College, which require students
to obtain explicit verbal
consent before so much as a kiss is exchanged, have created just
that. They have pro-
voked indignation (this is a serious threat to individual
freedom!) as well as ridicule (can
this be serious?). Sexual correctness thus proves a worthy
successor to political correct-
ness as a target of public debate. [The writer names the issue:
the complaint
that Antioch’s rules threaten individual freedom.]
80 Chapter 5 Analyzing Arguments
[2] Yet this consensus against the rules reveals shared
assumptions among liberals, conserva-
tives and even radicals about the nature of sex in our culture.
[The writer identifies
members of an unlikely consensus and focuses on a surprising
similarity.]
[3] The new definition of consent at Antioch is based on a
“liberal” premise: it assumes that
sexual partners are free agents and that they mean what they
say—yes means yes, and
no means no. But the initiator must now obtain prior consent,
step by step, which in
practice shifts the burden of clarification from the woman to the
man. The question is no
longer “Did she say no?” but “Did she say yes?” Silence does](https://image.slidesharecdn.com/writinganalyticallythispageintentionallyleftb-230105024545-11141dce/85/Writing-AnalyticallyThis-page-intentionally-left-b-docx-231-320.jpg)
![not indicate consent, and it
becomes his responsibility to dispel any ambiguity. [The writer
identifies assump-
tion of freedom underlying the rules.]
[4] The novelty of the rules, however, is not as great as it
seems. Antioch will not exert more
control over its students; there are no sexual police. In practice,
you still do what you
want—as long as your partner does not complain . . . the
morning after. If this is censor-
ship, it intervenes ex post facto, not a priori. [The writer
questions the premise that
rules will actually control individual freedom more than current
norms do.]
[5] In fact, the “threat” to individual freedom for most critics is
not the invasion of privacy
through the imposition of sexual codes, but the very existence
of rules. Hence the suc-
cess of polemicists like Katie Roiphe or Camille Paglia, who
argue that feminism in
recent years has betrayed its origins by embracing old-style
regulations, paradoxically
choosing the rigid 1950s over the liberating 1960s. Their advice
is simply to let women
manage on their own, and individuals devise their own rules.
This individualist critique
of feminism finds resonance with liberals, but also, strangely,
with conservatives,
who belatedly discover the perils of regulating sexuality. [The
writer locates an
antiregulatory (laissez-faire) premise beneath the freedom
premise.]
[6] But sexual laissez-faire, with its own implicit set of rules,](https://image.slidesharecdn.com/writinganalyticallythispageintentionallyleftb-230105024545-11141dce/85/Writing-AnalyticallyThis-page-intentionally-left-b-docx-232-320.jpg)
![does not seem to have worked
very well recently. Since the collapse of established social
codes, people play the same
game with different rules. If more women are complaining of
sexual violence, while more
men are worrying that their words and actions might be
misconstrued, who benefits
from the absence of regulation? [The writer attacks the laissez-
faire premise
for ineffectiveness.]
[7] A laissez-faire philosophy toward relationships assumes
that sexuality is a game that can
(and must) be played without rules, or rather that the invention
of rules should be left
to individual spontaneity and creativity, despite rising evidence
that the rule of one’s
own often leads to misunderstandings. When acted out,
individual fantasy always plays
within preordained social rules. These rules conflict with the
assumption in this culture
that sex is subject to the reign of nature, not artifice, that it is
the province of the
individual, not of society. [The writer uncovers an assumption
beneath the
laissez-faire premise: sex is natural and thus outside social
rules.]
[8] Those who believe that society’s constraints should have
nothing to do with sex also
agree that sex should not be bound by the social conventions of
language. Indeed, this
rebellion against the idea of social constraints probably
accounts for the controversy
over explicit verbal consent—from George Will, deriding “sex
amidst semicolons,”](https://image.slidesharecdn.com/writinganalyticallythispageintentionallyleftb-230105024545-11141dce/85/Writing-AnalyticallyThis-page-intentionally-left-b-docx-233-320.jpg)
![to Camille Paglia railing, “As if sex occurs in the verbal realm.”
As if sexuality were
incompatible with words. As if the only language of sex were
silence. For The New Yorker,
Analyzing an Argument: The Example of "Playing by the
Antioch Rules" 81
“the [Antioch] rules don’t get rid of the problem of unwanted
sex at all; they just shift
the advantage from the muscle-bound frat boy to the honey-
tongued French major.”
[The writer develops the linguistic implications of the natural
premise
and questions the assumption that sex is incompatible with
language.]
[9] This is not very different from the radical feminist position,
which holds that verbal per-
suasion is no better than physical coercion. In this view,
sexuality cannot be entrusted to
rhetoric. The seduction of words is inherently violent, and
seduction itself is an object of
suspicion. (If this is true, Marvell’s invitation “To His Coy
Mistress” is indeed a form of sex-
ual harassment, as some campus feminists have claimed.) [The
writer develops a fur-
ther implication: that the attack on rules masks a fear of
language’s power
to seduce—and questions the equation of seduction with
harassment.]
[10] What the consensus against the Antioch rules betrays is a
common vision of sexuality](https://image.slidesharecdn.com/writinganalyticallythispageintentionallyleftb-230105024545-11141dce/85/Writing-AnalyticallyThis-page-intentionally-left-b-docx-234-320.jpg)
![which crosses the lines dividing conservatives, liberals and
radicals. So many of the ar-
guments start from a conventional situation, perceived and
presented as natural:
a heterosexual encounter with the man as the initiator, and the
woman as gatekeeper—
hence the focus on consent. [The writer redefines consensus as
sharing the
unacknowledged premise that conventional sex roles are
natural.]
[11] The outcry largely results from the fact that the rules
undermine this traditional erotic
model. Not so much by proscribing (legally), but by prescribing
(socially). The new
model, in which language becomes a normal form of erotic
communication, underlines
the conventional nature of the old one. [The writer reformulates
the claim
about the anti-rules consensus: rules undermine attempts to pass
off
traditional sex roles as natural.]
[12] By encouraging women out of their “natural” reserve,
these rules point to a new defini-
tion of sexual roles. “Yes” could be more than a way to make
explicit the absence of
“no”; “yes” can also be a cry of desire. Women may express
demands, and not only grant
favors. If the legal “yes” opened the ground for an erotic “yes,”
if the contract gave way
to desire and if consent led to demand, we would indeed enter a
brave new erotic world.
[The writer extends the implication of the claim: rules could
make sex
more erotic rather than less free.]](https://image.slidesharecdn.com/writinganalyticallythispageintentionallyleftb-230105024545-11141dce/85/Writing-AnalyticallyThis-page-intentionally-left-b-docx-235-320.jpg)
![[13] New rules are like new shoes: they hurt a little at first, but
they may fit tomorrow. The
only question about the Antioch rules is not really whether we
like them, but whether
they improve the situation between men and women. All rules
are artificial, but, in the
absence of generally agreed-upon social conventions, any new
prescription must feel
artificial. And isn’t regulation needed precisely when there is an
absence of cultural
consensus? [The writer questions the standard by which we
evaluate rules;
the writer proposes reformulating the binary from artificial
versus natu-
ral to whether rules will improve gender relations.]
[14] Whether we support or oppose the Antioch rules, at least
they force us to acknowledge
that the choice is not between regulation and freedom, but
between different sets of
rules, implicit or explicit. They help dispel the illusion that
sexuality is a state of nature
individuals must experience outside the social contract, and that
eroticism cannot exist
within the conventions of language. As Antioch reminds us,
there is more in eroticism
and sexuality than is dreamt of in this culture. [The writer
culminates with his
82 Chapter 5 Analyzing Arguments
own idea: rules are good because they force us to acknowledge
as a](https://image.slidesharecdn.com/writinganalyticallythispageintentionallyleftb-230105024545-11141dce/85/Writing-AnalyticallyThis-page-intentionally-left-b-docx-236-320.jpg)
![harmful illusion the idea that sex operates outside social
conventions.]
Despite its brevity, this editorial covers a daunting amount of
ground—an exami-
nation of “shared assumptions among liberals, conservatives and
even radicals about
the nature of sex in our culture” (paragraph 2). The writer,
given his audience (readers
of the Sunday New York Times), allows himself more breadth
in both his topic and his
claims than he would if he were writing an article on the same
subject in an academic
setting, where he would narrow his focus to supply more
analysis of issues and evidence.
The aim of editorials like this one is not only to inform or
persuade but also to provoke
and entertain. Nevertheless, the strategies that direct the
thinking in this piece are, with
some minor exceptions, the same as they would be in a more
extended analytical piece.
They are central strategies that you can apply to many sorts of
writing situations, such
as analyzing arguments and as a means of finding and
developing your own ideas.
STRATEGIES FOR DEVELOPING AN ARGUMENT BY
REASONING
BACK TO PREMISES
1. Set up a claim but delay passing judgment on it. In the
concluding sentence of
paragraph 1, the word “target” suggests that the essay might
attack Antioch’s
policy. In paragraph 2, however, the writer does not go on to
demonstrate what](https://image.slidesharecdn.com/writinganalyticallythispageintentionallyleftb-230105024545-11141dce/85/Writing-AnalyticallyThis-page-intentionally-left-b-docx-237-320.jpg)
![We will refer to the following two examples to illustrate how
(1) qualifying your
claims and (2) checking for the unstated assumptions upon
which your claims depend
can remedy the two primary problems created by categorical
thinking: unqualified
claims and overstated positions.
Example I: I think that there are many things shown on TV that
are damaging for people to see.
But there is no need for censorship. No network is going to
show violence without the approval
of the public, obviously for financial reasons. What must be
remembered is that the public ma-
jority will see what it wants to see in our mass society.
Example II: Some members of our society feel that [the
televised cartoon series] The Simpsons
promotes wrong morals and values for our society. Other
members find it funny and entertaining.
I feel that The Simpsons has a more positive effect than a
negative one. In relation to a real-life
marriage, Marge and Homer’s marriage is pretty accurate. The
problems they deal with are not very
large or intense. As for the family relationships, the Simpsons
are very close and love each other.
The main problem with example I is the writer’s failure to
qualify his ideas, a
problem that causes him to generalize to the point of
oversimplification. Note the
writer’s habit of stating his claims absolutely (we have
italicized the words that make
these claims unqualified):
“there is no need for censorship”](https://image.slidesharecdn.com/writinganalyticallythispageintentionallyleftb-230105024545-11141dce/85/Writing-AnalyticallyThis-page-intentionally-left-b-docx-253-320.jpg)
![ment that appeared in a magazine aimed at young women. The
analysis was written
in a course called Introduction to Communication. The writer’s
aim is not only to tell
Rhetorical Analysis 95
her readers what the advertisement “says” but to locate it in a
social context. The stu-
dent also uses secondary sources to provide an interpretive
context (a lens) through
which to see the rhetoric of the ad—its means of persuasion.
The visual imagery of advertisements offers instructive
opportunities for rhetori-
cal analysis because advertising is a form of persuasion.
Advertisers attend to rhetoric
by carefully targeting their audiences. This means
advertisements are well suited to
the questions that rhetorical analysis typically asks: how is the
audience being invited
to respond and by what means (in what context)? You’ll notice
that in the rhetorical
analysis of the magazine ad, the writer occasionally extends her
analysis to evaluative
conclusions about the aims and possible effects (on American
culture) of the adver-
tisement. We’ve included the first five paragraphs of the essay
along with a piece of
its conclusion.
Marketing the Girl Next Door: A Declaration of Independence?
[1] Found in Seventeen magazine, the advertisement for
“tommy girl,” the perfume manu-](https://image.slidesharecdn.com/writinganalyticallythispageintentionallyleftb-230105024545-11141dce/85/Writing-AnalyticallyThis-page-intentionally-left-b-docx-267-320.jpg)
![factured by Tommy Hilfiger, sells the most basic American
ideal of independence. Various
visual images and text suggest that purchasing tommy girl buys
freedom and liberation
for the mind and body. This image appeals to young women
striving to establish them-
selves as unbound individuals. Ironically, the advertisement
uses traditional American
icons as vehicles for marketing to the modern woman. Overall,
the message is simple:
American individualism can be found in a spray or nonspray
bottle.
[2] Easily, the young woman dominates the advertisement. She
has the look of the all-
American “girl next door.” Her appeal is a natural one, as she
does not rely on makeup
or a runway model’s cheekbones for her beauty. Freckles frame
her eyes that ambitiously
gaze skyward; there are no limits restricting women in capitalist
America. Her flowing
brown hair freely rides a stirring breeze. Unconcerned with the
order of a particular
hairstyle, she smiles and enjoys the looseness of her spirit. The
ad tells us how wearing
this perfume allows women to achieve the look of self-assured
and liberated indifference
without appearing vain.
[3] The second most prevalent image in the advertisement is
the American flag, which
neatly matches the size of the young woman’s head. The
placement and size of the flag
suggest that if anything is on her cloudless mind, it is
fundamental American beliefs](https://image.slidesharecdn.com/writinganalyticallythispageintentionallyleftb-230105024545-11141dce/85/Writing-AnalyticallyThis-page-intentionally-left-b-docx-268-320.jpg)
![that allow for such self-determination. The half-concealed flag
is seemingly continued in
the young woman’s hair. According to the ad, American ideals
reside well within the girl
as well as the perfume.
[4] It is also noticeable that there is a relative absence of land
surrounding the young
woman. We can see glimpses of “fruited plains” flanking the
girl’s shoulders. This young
woman is barely bound to earth, as free as the clouds that float
beneath her head. It is
this liberated image Americans proudly carry that is being sold
in the product.
[5] The final image promoting patriotism can be found in the
young woman’s clothing. The
young woman is draped in the blue jean jacket, a classic symbol
of American ruggedness
and originality. As far as we can see, the jacket is spread open,
supporting the earlier
claim of the young women’s free and independent spirit. These
are the very same
96 Chapter 6 Topics and Modes of Analysis
ideals that embody American pride and patriotism. The ad
clearly employs the
association principle in linking the tommy girl fragrance with
emotionally compelling
yet essentially unrelated images of American nationalism and
patriotism. [. . .]
[10] Yet in reality, this marketing of liberation is paradoxical;](https://image.slidesharecdn.com/writinganalyticallythispageintentionallyleftb-230105024545-11141dce/85/Writing-AnalyticallyThis-page-intentionally-left-b-docx-269-320.jpg)
Writing AnalyticallyThis page intentionally left b.docx
- 1. Writing Analytically This page intentionally left blank iii Writing Analytically FIFTH EDITION David Rosenwasser Muhlenberg College Jill Stephen Muhlenberg College Australia • Brazil • Mexico • Singapore Spain • United Kingdom • United States Publisher: Lyn Uhl Development Editor: Mary Beth Walden
- 2. Assistant Editor: Lindsey Veautour Technology Project Manager: Stephanie Gregoire Marketing Manager: Mandee Eckersley Marketing Assistant: Kathleen Remsberg Marketing Communications Manager: Stacey Purviance Senior Content Project Manager: Michael Lepera Senior Art Director: Cate Barr Print Buyer: Mary Beth Hennebury Text Permissions Editor: Mardell Glinski Schultz Photo Permissions Editor: Sheri Blaney Production Service: Graphic World Publishing Services Text Designer: John Ritland Compositor: Graphic World Inc. Cover Designer: Maxine Ressler Cover Image: © Thinkstock/RF/Ron Chapple/ Jupiter Images Writing Analytically, Fifth Edition David Rosenwasser Jill Stephen © 2009, 2006 Thomson Wadsworth, a part of The Thomson Corporation. Thomson, the Star logo, and Wadsworth are trademarks used herein under license. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED. No part of this work covered by the copyright hereon may be reproduced or used in any form or by any
- 3. means—graphic, electronic, or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, taping, Web distribution, information storage and retrieval systems, or in any other manner—without the written permission of the publisher. Printed in Canada 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 11 10 09 08 07 Library of Congress Control Number: 2007939138 ISBN-13: 978-1-413-03310-6 ISBN-10: 1-413-03310-5 Thomson Higher Education 25 Thomson Place Boston, MA 02210 USA For more information about our products, contact us at: Thomson Learning Academic Resource Center 1-800-423-0563 For permission to use material from this text or product, submit a request online at http://www.thomsonrights.com. Any additional questions about permissions can be submitted by e-mail to [email protected] v
- 4. UNIT I THE ANALYTICAL FRAME OF MIND: INTRODUCTION TO ANALYTICAL METHODS 1 CHAPTER 1 Analysis: What It Is and What It Does 3 CHAPTER 2 Counterproductive Habits of Mind 17 CHAPTER 3 A Toolkit of Analytical Methods 31 CHAPTER 4 Interpretation: What It Is, What It Isn’t, and How to Do It 49 CHAPTER 5 Analyzing Arguments 73 CHAPTER 6 Topics and Modes of Analysis 93 UNIT II WRITING THE ANALYTICAL ESSAY 107 CHAPTER 7 What Evidence Is and How It Works 109 CHAPTER 8 Using Evidence to Build a Paper: 10 on 1 versus 1 on 10 123 CHAPTER 9 Making a Thesis Evolve 139 CHAPTER 10 Structuring the Paper: Forms and Formats 159 CHAPTER 11 Introductions and Conclusions 179 CHAPTER 12 Recognizing and Fixing Weak Thesis Statements 193 BRIEF CONTENTS
- 5. UNIT III WRITING THE RESEARCHED PAPER 203 CHAPTER 13 Reading Analytically 205 CHAPTER 14 Using Sources Analytically: The Conversation Model 215 CHAPTER 15 Organizing and Revising the Research Paper: Two Sample Essays 227 CHAPTER 16 Finding, Citing, and Integrating Sources 241 UNIT IV GRAMMAR AND STYLE 269 CHAPTER 17 Style: Choosing Words for Precision, Accuracy, and Tone 271 CHAPTER 18 Style: Shaping Sentences for Precision and Emphasis 287 CHAPTER 19 Common Grammatical Errors and How to Fix Them 305 vi Brief Contents vii Preface xvii UNIT I THE ANALYTICAL FRAME OF MIND: INTRODUCTION TO ANALYTICAL METHODS 1
- 6. CHAPTER 1 Analysis: What It Is and What It Does 3 First Principles 3 Analysis Defined 3 The Five Analytical Moves 4 Move 1: Suspend Judgment 5 Move 2: Define Significant Parts and How They’re Related 5 Move 3: Make the Implicit Explicit 6 Move 4: Look for Patterns 8 Move 5: Keep Reformulating Questions and Explanations 9 Analysis at Work: A Sample Paper 10 Distinguishing Analysis from Argument, Summary, and Expressive Writing 11 Applying the Five Analytical Moves: The Example of Whistler’s Mother 13 Analysis and Personal Associations 15 CHAPTER 2 Counterproductive Habits of Mind 17 Fear of Uncertainty 17 Prejudging 18
- 7. Blinded by Habit 19 The Judgment Reflex 20 Generalizing 21 Overpersonalizing (Naturalizing Our Assumptions) 23 Opinions (versus Ideas) 25 What It Means to Have an Idea 26 Rules of Thumb for Handling Complexity 28 CONTENTS CHAPTER 3 A Toolkit of Analytical Methods 31 The Toolkit 32 Paraphrase ! 3 33 Notice and Focus (Ranking) 35 Prompts: Interesting and Strange 35 10 on 1 36 The Method: Working with Patterns of Repetition and Contrast 37 Thinking Recursively with Strands and Binaries 39 Generating Ideas with The Method: An Example 40
- 8. Doing The Method on a Poem: Our Analysis 40 A Procedure for Finding and Querying Binaries 43 Freewriting 44 Passage-Based Focused Freewriting 45 Writers’ Notebooks 46 Passage-Based Focused Freewriting: An Example 47 CHAPTER 4 Interpretation: What It Is, What It Isn’t, and How to Do It 49 Pushing Observations to Conclusions: Asking So What? 50 Asking So What?: An Example 51 Implications versus Hidden Meanings 54 The Limits on Interpretation 56 Plausible versus Implausible Interpretations 57 Interpretive Contexts and Multiple Meanings 58 Specifying an Interpretive Context: An Example 58 Intention as an Interpretive Context 59 What Is and Isn’t “Meant” to Be Analyzed 60 The Fortune Cookie School of Interpretation 61
- 9. The Anything Goes School of Interpretation 62 Seems to Be about X but Could Also Be (Is Really) about Y 63 Putting It All Together: Interpretation of a New Yorker Cover 65 Description of a New Yorker Cover, Dated October 9, 2000 65 Using The Method to Identify Patterns of Repetition and Contrast 67 viii Contents Pushing Observations to Conclusions: Selecting an Interpretive Context 68 Making the Interpretation Plausible 69 Arriving at an Interpretive Conclusion: Making Choices 70 CHAPTER 5 Analyzing Arguments 73 The Role of Binaries in Argument 73 A Procedure for Reformulating Binaries in Argument 74 Strategy 1: Locate a Range of Opposing Categories 74 Strategy 2: Analyze and Define the Key Terms 74 Strategy 3: Question the Accuracy of the Binary 75 Strategy 4: Substitute “To What Extent?” for “Either/Or” 75
- 10. Uncovering Assumptions (Reasoning Back to Premises) 76 Uncovering Assumptions: A Brief Example 78 A Procedure for Uncovering Assumptions 78 Analyzing an Argument: The Example of “Playing by the Antioch Rules” 79 Strategies for Developing an Argument by Reasoning Back to Premises 82 The Problems with Debate-Style Argument 84 Seeing the Trees as Well as the Forest: Toulmin and the Rules of Argument 85 Refining Categorical Thinking: Two Examples 88 A Brief Glossary of Common Logical Errors 90 CHAPTER 6 Topics and Modes of Analysis 93 Rhetorical Analysis 93 Rhetorical Analysis of a Place: A Brief Example 94 Rhetorical Analysis of an Advertisement: A Student Paper 94 Summary 96 Strategies for Making Summaries More Analytical 96 Personal Response: The Reaction Paper 98
- 11. Strategies for Making Personal Responses More Analytical 98 Agree/Disagree 100 Comparison/Contrast 100 Strategies for Making Comparison/Contrast More Analytical 100 Contents ix Definition 102 Strategies for Making Definition More Analytical 102 UNIT II WRITING THE ANALYTICAL ESSAY 107 CHAPTER 7 What Evidence Is and How It Works 109 The Function of Evidence 110 The Missing Connection: Linking Evidence and Claims 110 “Because I Say So”: Unsubstantiated Claims 111 Distinguishing Evidence from Claims 111 Giving Evidence a Point: Making Details Speak 112 How to Make Details Speak: A Brief Example 113 What Counts as Evidence? 114 Kinds of Evidence 116
- 12. Statistical Evidence 116 Anecdotal Evidence 117 Authorities as Evidence 117 Empirical Evidence 118 Experimental Evidence 118 Textual Evidence 118 Using What You Have 119 CHAPTER 8 Using Evidence to Build a Paper: 10 on 1 versus 1 on 10 123 Developing a Thesis Is More Than Repeating an Idea (1 on 10) 123 What’s Wrong with Five-Paragraph Form? 124 Analyzing Evidence in Depth: 10 on 1 127 Demonstrating the Representativeness of Your Example 128 10 on 1 and Disciplinary Conventions 128 Pan, Track, and Zoom: Using 10 on 1 to Build a Paper 128 Doing 10 on 1: A Brief Example (Tiananmen Square) 129 Converting 1 on 10 into 10 on 1: A Student Paper (Flood Stories) 131
- 13. Revising the Draft Using 10 on 1 and Difference within Similarity 133 Doing 10 on 1: A Student Paper (Good Bye Lenin!) 136 x Contents Contents xi A Template for Organizing Papers Using 10 on 1: An Alternative to Five- Paragraph Form 138 CHAPTER 9 Making a Thesis Evolve 139 What a Strong Thesis Does 139 Making a Thesis Evolve: A Brief Example (Tax Laws) 140 The Reciprocal Relationship between Thesis and Evidence: The Thesis as Lens 142 What a Good Thesis Statement Looks Like 143 Six Steps for Making a Thesis Evolve 144 Evolving a Thesis in an Exploratory Draft: A Student Draft on Las Meninas 145 Evolving a Thesis in a Later-Stage Draft: The Example of Educating Rita 153 Locating the Evolving Thesis in the Final Draft 156
- 14. CHAPTER 10 Structuring the Paper: Forms and Formats 159 Romantics versus Formalists 159 The Two Functions of Formats: Product and Process 160 Using Formats Heuristically: A Brief Example 161 Classical Forms and Formats 162 Writing Analytically’s Forms and Formats 162 Pan, Track, and Zoom: Using 10 on 1 to Build a Paper 163 Constellating 163 A Template for Organizing Papers Using 10 on 1 163 Six Steps for Making a Thesis Evolve 164 The Toolkit as Template 164 The Shaping Force of Thesis Statements 165 The Shaping Force of Transitions 166 The Shaping Force of Common Thought Patterns: Deduction and Induction 167 Thesis Slots 169 Negotiating Disciplinary Formats 169 Three Common Organizing Strategies 171
- 15. Climactic Order 171 xii Contents Comparison/Contrast 172 Concessions and Refutations 173 Structuring the Paragraph 173 The Topic Sentence Controversy 174 Some Theories on Paragraph Structure 174 Finding the Skeleton of an Essay: An Example (September 11th: A National Tragedy?) 175 CHAPTER 11 Introductions and Conclusions 179 Introductions and Conclusions as Social Sites 179 What Introductions Do: “Why What I’m Saying Matters” 180 Putting an Issue or Question in Context 181 How Much to Introduce Up-Front: Typical Problems 182 Digression 182 Incoherence 183 Prejudgment 183 Using Procedural Openings 184
- 16. Good Ways to Begin 185 What Conclusions Do: The Final So What? 186 Solving Typical Problems in Conclusions 188 Redundancy 188 Raising a Totally New Point 188 Overstatement 189 Anticlimax 189 Introductions in the Sciences 189 Conclusions in the Sciences: The Discussion Section 191 CHAPTER 12 Recognizing and Fixing Weak Thesis Statements 193 Five Kinds of Weak Thesis Statements and How to Fix Them 193 Weak Thesis Type 1: The Thesis Makes No Claim 194 Weak Thesis Type 2: The Thesis Is Obviously True or Is a Statement of Fact 195 Weak Thesis Type 3: The Thesis Restates Conventional Wisdom 195 Weak Thesis Type 4: The Thesis Bases Its Claim on Personal Conviction 196
- 17. Weak Thesis Type 5: The Thesis Makes an Overly Broad Claim 198 Contents xiii How to Rephrase Thesis Statements: Specify and Subordinate 199 Is It Okay to Phrase a Thesis as a Question? 201 UNIT III WRITING THE RESEARCHED PAPER 203 CHAPTER 13 Reading Analytically 205 How to Read: Words Matter 206 Becoming Conversant Instead of Reading for the Gist 207 Three Tools to Improve Your Reading: A Review 207 The Pitch, the Complaint, and the Moment 208 Uncovering the Assumptions in a Reading 209 Reading with and against the Grain 210 Using a Reading as a Model 212 Applying a Reading as a Lens 213 CHAPTER 14 Using Sources Analytically: The Conversation Model 215 Six Strategies for Analyzing Sources 215
- 18. “Source Anxiety” and What to Do about It 216 The Conversation Analogy 216 Ways to Use a Source as a Point of Departure 217 Six Strategies for Analyzing Sources 219 Make Your Sources Speak 219 Attend Carefully to the Language of Your Sources by Quoting or Paraphrasing 220 Supply Ongoing Analysis of Sources (Don’t Wait Until the End) 221 Use Your Sources to Ask Questions, Not Just to Provide Answers 221 Put Your Sources into Conversation with One Another 223 Find Your Own Role in the Conversation 225 CHAPTER 15 Organizing and Revising the Research Paper: Two Sample Essays 227 A Sample Research Paper and How to Revise It: The Flight from Teaching 227 Strategies for Writing and Revising Research Papers 230 Be Sure to Make Clear Who Is Talking 230
- 19. xiv Contents Analyze as You Go Along Rather Than Saving Analysis for the End (Disciplinary Conventions Permitting) 230 Quote in Order to Analyze: Make Your Sources Speak 231 Try Converting Key Assertions in the Source into Questions 231 Get Your Sources to Converse with One Another, and Actively Referee the Conflicts among Them 232 A Good Sample Research Paper: Horizontal and Vertical Mergers within the Healthcare Industry 233 Guidelines for Writing the Researched Paper 238 CHAPTER 16 Finding, Citing, and Integrating Sources 241 Getting Started 242 Three Rules of Thumb for Getting Started 244 Electronic Research: Finding Quality on the Web 244 Understanding Domain Names 245 Print Corollaries 246 Web Classics 246 Wikipedia, Google, and Blogs 246
- 20. Asking the Right Questions 247 Subscriber-Only Databases 248 Indexes of Scholarly Journals 249 Who’s Behind That Website? 250 A Foolproof Recipe for Great Research—Every Time 252 Citation Guides on the Web 254 A Librarian’s Brief Guidelines to Successful Research 254 Plagiarism and the Logic of Citation 254 Why Does Plagiarism Matter? 255 Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs) about Plagiarism 256 How to Cite Sources 257 Single Author, MLA Style 258 Single Author, APA Style 259 How to Integrate Quotations into Your Paper 260 How to Prepare an Abstract 262 Guidelines for Finding, Citing, and Integrating Sources 264 Contents xv
- 21. UNIT IV GRAMMAR AND STYLE 269 CHAPTER 17 Style: Choosing Words for Precision, Accuracy, and Tone 271 Not Just Icing on the Cake: Style Is Meaning 272 How Style Shapes Thought: A Brief Example 273 Making Distinctions: Shades of Meaning 273 Word Histories and the OED 274 What’s Bad about “Good” and “Bad” 275 Concrete and Abstract Diction 276 Latinate Diction 277 Choosing Words: Some Rhetorical Considerations 278 Tone 278 Formal and Colloquial Styles: Who’s Writing to Whom, and Why Does It Matter? 279 The Person Question 281 The First Person Pronoun “I”: Pro and Con 281 The Second Person Pronoun “You”: Pro and Con 282 Using and Avoiding Jargon 283 CHAPTER 18 Style: Shaping Sentences for Precision
- 22. and Emphasis 287 How to Recognize the Four Basic Sentence Types 287 The Simple Sentence 288 The Compound Sentence 288 The Complex Sentence 289 The Compound-Complex Sentence 289 So Why Do the Four Sentence Types Matter? 290 Coordination, Subordination, and Emphasis 290 Coordination 290 Reversing the Order of Coordinate Clauses for Emphasis 291 So Why Does the Order of Coordinate Clauses Matter? 291 Subordination 292 Reversing Main and Subordinate Clauses 292 So Why Does It Matter What Goes in the Subordinate Clause? 293 Parallel Structure 293 So Why Does Parallel Structure Matter? 295 xvi Contents
- 23. Periodic and Cumulative Sentences: Two Effective Sentence Shapes 295 The Periodic Sentence: Delaying Closure for Emphasis 295 The Cumulative Sentence: Starting Fast 297 So Why Do Periodic and Cumulative Sentences Matter? 298 Cutting the Fat 298 Expletive Constructions 299 Static versus Active Verbs: “To Be” or “Not to Be” 299 Active and Passive Voices: Doing and Being Done To 301 About Prescriptive Style Manuals 302 Experiment! 303 CHAPTER 19 Common Grammatical Errors and How to Fix Them 305 Why Correctness Matters 306 The Concept of Basic Writing Errors (BWEs) 306 What Punctuation Marks Say: A Quick-Hit Guide 307 Nine Basic Writing Errors and How to Fix Them 309 BWE 1: Sentence Fragments 309 A Further Note on Dashes and Colons 311
- 24. BWE 2: Comma Splices and Fused (or Run-On) Sentences 311 BWE 3: Errors in Subject–Verb Agreement 314 A Note on Nonstandard English 315 BWE 4: Shifts in Sentence Structure (Faulty Predication) 316 BWE 5: Errors in Pronoun Reference 316 Ambiguous Reference 317 A Note on Sexism and Pronoun Usage 319 BWE 6: Misplaced Modifiers and Dangling Participles 319 BWE 7: Errors in Using Possessive Apostrophes 320 BWE 8: Comma Errors 321 BWE 9: Spelling/Diction Errors That Interfere with Meaning 323 Glossary of Grammatical Terms 325 CHAPTER 19 APPENDIX Answer Key (with Discussion) 330 CREDITS 339 INDEX 341 xvii
- 25. Writing Analytically focuses on ways of using writing to discover and develop ideas. That is, the book treats writing as a tool of thought—a means of undertaking sus- tained acts of inquiry and reflection. For some people, learning to write is associated less with thinking than with ar- ranging words, sentences, and ideas in clear and appropriate form. The achievement of good writing does, of course, require attention to form, but writing is also a mental activity. Through writing we figure out what things mean (which is our definition of analysis). The act of writing allows us to discover and, importantly, to interrogate what we think and believe. All the editions of Writing Analytically have evolved from what we learned while establishing and directing a cross-curricular writing program at a four-year liberal arts college (a program we began in 1989 and continue to direct). The clearest con- sensus we’ve found among faculty is on the kind of writing that they say they want from their students: not issue-based argument, not personal reflection (the “reaction” paper), not passive summary, but analysis, with its patient and methodical inquiry into the meaning of information. Yet most books of writing instruction devote only a chapter, if that, to analysis. The main discovery we made when we first wrote this book was that none of the
- 26. reading we’d done about thesis statements seemed to match either our own practice as writers and teachers or the practice of published writers. Textbooks about writing tend to present thesis statements as the finished products of an act of thinking—as inert statements that writers should march through their papers from beginning to end. In practice, the relationship between thesis and evidence is far more fluid and dynamic. In most good writing, the thesis grows and changes in response to evidence, even in final drafts. In other words, the relationship between thesis and evidence is recip- rocal: the thesis acts as a lens for focusing what we see in the evidence, but the evi- dence, in turn, creates pressure to refocus the lens. The root issue here is the writer’s attitude toward evidence. The ability of writers to discover ideas and improve on them in revision depends largely on their ability to use evidence as a means of testing and developing ideas rather than just supporting them. By the time we came to writing the third edition, we had begun to focus on ob- servation skills. We recognized that students’ lack of these skills is as much a prob- lem as thought-strangling formats like five-paragraph form or a too-rigid notion of thesis. We began to understand that observation doesn’t come naturally; it needs to be taught. The book advocates locating observation as a separate phase of thinking
- 27. before the writer becomes committed to a thesis. Much weak writing is prematurely and too narrowly thesis driven precisely because people try to formulate the thesis before they have done much (or any) analyzing. PREFACE The solution to this problem sounds easy to accomplish, but it isn’t. As writers and thinkers, we all need to slow down—to dwell longer in the open- ended, exploratory, information-gathering stage. This requires specific tasks that will reduce the anxiety for answers, impede the reflex move to judgments, and encourage a more hands-on engagement with materials. Writing Analytically supplies these tasks for each phase of the writing and idea- generating process: making observations, inferring implications, and making the leap to possible conclusions. WHAT’S NEW IN THIS EDITION This edition of Writing Analytically marks the fourth time we’ve had the chance to revisit the book’s initial thinking on writing. The difficult but also exciting thing about repeatedly revising the same book is that the writer must keep learning how to see the logic of the book as a whole, even as new thinking rises from earlier thinking and
- 28. threatens to displace it. We believe that we have now succeeded at what we couldn’t quite manage to do in the fourth edition—to integrate the early versions of the book, oriented largely toward thesis and evidence, with the later editions of the book, oriented toward observation and interpretation. Here in brief (and in boldface) are the suggestions and criticisms to which this extensively rewritten and reorganized version of the book responds: • Put back the definition-of-analysis chapter containing the five analytical moves, which disappeared in the third edition. This edition starts with a revised version of the older chapter, now called Analysis: What It Is and What It Does. • Make things easier to find! Make core ideas stand out more clearly. And so . . . : 1. We have organized the book into four units to make the book’s arguments and advice clearer and more clearly incremental. These units are: I. The Analytical Frame of Mind: Introduction to Analytical Methods II. Writing the Analytical Essay III. Writing the Researched Paper
- 29. IV. Grammar and Style 2. We have created separate chapters on matters that were not adequately pulled together and foregrounded in previous editions. • The book’s observational strategies, such as 10 on 1 and The Method, now appear prominently in a single chapter called A Toolkit of Analytical Methods (Chapter 3). • A revised chapter called Interpretation: What It Is, What It Isn’t, and How to Do It (Chapter 4) reunites materials on interpretation that were split up in the fourth edition. • The book’s advice on analyzing and producing arguments now appears in a single chapter called Analyzing Arguments (Chapter 5). xviii Preface • A new chapter called Topics and Modes of Analysis (Chapter 6) adds explicit discussion of rhetorical analysis, acknowledging it as an ongoing topic of the book, and restores attention to ways of making the traditional rhetorical modes, such as comparison and contrast, more analytical. • The book’s advice on organizing papers is now pulled
- 30. together in a largely new chapter on organization called Structuring the Paper: Forms and Formats (Chapter 10), which also includes a new section on para- graphing. Readers will now know where to look for alternatives to five- paragraph form. The chapter invites readers to think of organization in terms of movement of mind at both the paper and paragraph levels. • Get rid of the overstuffed first chapter and restore the unexpurgated version of counterproductive habits of mind as a separate chapter. Done. We recognize that in the fourth edition we attempted to do what all writers, not just our stu- dents, too often do—pack everything into the opening. The parts of this opening chapter have now been broken up and redistributed more logically. We have also reorganized and rewritten our chapter on counterproductive habits of mind, which now appears as Chapter 2. We continue to believe, as the chapter argues, that it is hard to develop new thinking skills without first becoming aware of what’s wrong with our customary modes of response. • Put the book’s advice on reading with the chapters on researched writing. A pared-down chapter called Reading Analytically (Chapter 13) now opens the book’s unit on research-based writing. In this chapter, we make it clear that all of
- 31. the book’s strategies can be applied to reading, but we now foreground some that are particular to writing about reading—such as using a reading as a lens—in this revised reading chapter. • Make the book shorter and less repetitive. We have tried to prune every sentence—in fact, every clause, phrase, and word—wherein we had succumbed to the temptation to say something twice when once would do. We think we have made the book more readable in both clarity and tone and lighter to carry. We continue to believe that the book’s schematic way of describing the analytical thought process will make students more confident thinkers, better able to contend with complexity and to move beyond the simplistic agree/disagree response and pas- sive assembling of downloaded information. We have faith in the book’s various for- mulae and verbal prompts for their ability to spur more thoughtful writing and also for the role they can play in making the classroom a more genuinely engaging and collaborative space. When students and teachers can share the means of idea produc- tion, class discussion and writing become better connected, and students can more easily learn that good ideas don’t just happen—they’re made. HOW TO USE THIS BOOK Writing Analytically is designed to be used in first-year writing
- 32. courses or seminars, as well as in more advanced writing-intensive courses in a variety of subject areas. Preface xix Though the book’s chapters form a logical sequence, each can also stand alone and be used in different sequences. We assume that most professors will want to supply their own subject matter for students to write about. The book does, however, contain writing exercises through- out that can be applied to a wide range of materials—print and visual, text-based (reading), and experiential (writing from direct observation). In the text itself we suggest using newspapers, magazines, films, primary texts (both fiction and nonfic- tion), academic articles, textbooks, television, historical documents, places, advertis- ing, photographs, political campaigns, and so on. There is, by the way, an edition of this book that contains readings—Writing Analytically with Readings. It includes writing assignments that call on students to apply the skills in the original book to writing about the readings and to using the readings as lenses for analyzing other material. The book’s writing exercises take two forms: end-of-chapter assignments that
- 33. could produce papers and informal writing exercises called “Try This” that are em- bedded inside the chapters near the particular skills they employ. Many of the Try This exercises could generate papers, but usually they are more limited in scope, asking readers to experiment with various kinds of data- gathering and analysis. The book acknowledges that various academic disciplines differ in their expecta- tions of student writing. Interspersed throughout the text are boxes labeled Voices from across the Curriculum. These were written for the book by professors in various disciplines who offer their disciplinary perspective on such matters as reasoning back to premises and determining what counts as evidence. Overall, however, the text concentrates on the many values and expectations that the disciplines share about writing. THEORETICAL ORIENTATIONS We have had the good fortune to interest others enough in our work to stimulate attack, much of it, we think, the result of misunderstanding. In an effort to clarify our own premises and origins, we offer the following disclosure of our influences and orientations. The book is aligned with the thinking of Carl Rogers and others on the goal of making argument less combative, less inflected by a vocabulary
- 34. of military strategiz- ing that discourages negotiation among competing points of view and the evolution of new ideas from the pressure of one idea against another. The book is also heavily influenced by the early proponents of the process move- ment in writing pedagogy. Books such as Peter Elbow’s Writing Without Teachers and Ken Macrorie’s Telling Writing were standard fare in graduate programs when we began to teach. We came of age, so to speak, accepting that writing instruction should focus on writers’ process and not just on ways of shaping finished products. As is now generally recognized, the inherent romanticism and expressivist bias of the process approach to writing limited its usefulness for people who were interested in teaching students how to write for academic audiences. Despite the social scientific approach that researchers such as Janet Emig, James Britton, and Linda Flower (to name a few) brought to the xx Preface understanding of students’ writing process, the process approach to writing instruction suffered a decline in status as trends in college writing programs took up other causes. (See, for example, the arguments of Patricia Bizzell, David Bartholomae, Charles Bazerman, and others, who reoriented compositionists toward discourse analysis and
- 35. ethnographic research on the writing practices of other disciplines.) We continue to believe that attention to process and attention to the stylistic and epistemological norms of writing in the disciplines can and should be brought into accord. We think, further, that a relatively straightforward and teachable set of strate- gies can go a long way toward achieving this goal. The process approach is not neces- sarily expressivist, at least not exclusively so. Analytical strategies with the power to enrich students’ writing process can be taught, and they shed light on the otherwise mysterious-seeming nature of individuals’ creativity as thinkers. The book has drawn some interesting critiques, based on people’s assumptions about our connection to particular theoretical orientations. One such critique comes from people who think the book invites students to think in a “New Critical” vacuum— that it is uncritically aligned with an unreformed, unself- conscious and old-fashioned New Critical mind-set. The midcentury interpretive movement known as the New Criticism has come to be misunderstood as rigidly materialist, deriving meaning only from the physical details that one can see on the page, on the screen, on the sidewalk, and so on. This is not the place to take up a comprehensive assessment of the ideas and impact of the New Criticism, but, as the best of the New Critics clearly knew, things al- ways mean (as our book explicitly argues) in context.
- 36. Interpretive contexts, which we dis- cuss extensively in Chapter 4 and elsewhere, are determined by the thing being observed; but, in turn, they also determine what the observer sees. Ideas are always the products of assumptions about how best to situate observations in a frame of reference. Only when these interpretive frames, these ways of seeing and their ideological underpinnings, are made clear do the details begin to meaningfully and plausibly “speak.” We are aware that the language of binary oppositions, patterns of repetition, and organizing contrasts suggests not just the methods of the New Critics but those of their immediate successors, structuralists. Without embarking here on an extended foray into the evolution of theory in the latter half of the twentieth century, we will just say that the value assumptions of both the New Criticism (with its faith in irony, tension, and ambiguity) and structuralism (with its search for universal structures of mind and culture) do not automatically accompany their methods. Any approach to thinking and writing that values complexity will subscribe to some extent to the necessity of recognizing tension and irony and paradox and ambiguity. As for finding universal structures of mind and culture, we haven’t so grand a goal, but we do think that there is value in trying to state simply and clearly in nontechnical language some of the characteristic moves of mind that make some people better thinkers than others
- 37. and better able to arrive at ideas. Here are some other ways in which Writing Analytically might lend itself to mis- understandings. Its employment of verbal prompts like So what? and its recom- mendation of step-by-step procedures, such as the procedure for making a thesis evolve, should not be confused with prescriptive slot-filler formulae for writing. Our book does not prescribe a fill-in-the-blank grid for analyzing data, but it does try to Preface xxi describe systematically what good thinkers do—as acts of mind—when they are confronted with data. Our focus on words has also attracted critique. The theoretical orientation that has come to be called performance theory has emphasized the idea that words alone don’t adequately account for the meanings we make of them. Words exist—their in- terpretations exist—in how and why they are spoken in particular circumstances, genres, and traditions. Our view is that this essential emphasis on the significance of context does not diminish the importance of attending to words. The situation is rather like the one we addressed earlier in reference to the New Criticism. Words mean in particular contexts. It is reductive to assume that attention to
- 38. language means that only words matter or that words matter in some context-less vacuum. The methods we define in Writing Analytically can be applied to nonverbal and verbal data. Interestingly, we were aware of, but had not actually studied, the work of John Dewey as we evolved our thinking for this book. Looking more closely at his writing now, we are struck by the number of key terms and assumptions our thinking shares with his. In his book How We Think, Dewey speaks, for example, of “systematic reflection” as a goal. He was interested, as are we, in what goes on in the production of actual thinking, rather than “setting forth the results of thinking” after the fact, in the manner of formal logic. On this subject Dewey writes, “When you are only seeking the truth and of neces- sity seeking somewhat blindly, you are in a radically different position from the one you are in when you are already in possession of the truth” (revised edition 1933, 74–75). Dewey thought, as do we, that habits of mind can be trained, but first people have to be made more conscious of them. This is what Writing Analytically tries to accom- plish. It begins with some of the same premises that Dewey and others have offered: • The importance of being able to dwell in and tolerate uncertainty • The importance of curiosity and knowing how to cultivate it • The importance of being conscious of language
- 39. • The importance of observation Dewey also said that people cannot make themselves have ideas. This we believe is not true. People can make themselves have ideas, and it is possible to describe the processes through which individuals enable themselves to make interpretive leaps. It is also possible (and necessary) for people to learn how to differentiate ideas from other things that are often mistaken for ideas, such as clichés and opinions—products of the deadening effect of habit (about which we have much to say in the book’s opening unit). Although the interpretive leaps from observation to idea can probably never be fully explained, we are not thus required to relegate the meaning-making process to the category of imponderable mystery. ABOUT THE AUTHORS David Rosenwasser and Jill Stephen are Professors of English at Muhlenberg College in Allentown, Pennsylvania, where they have co- directed a Writing Across the Curriculum (WAC) program since 1987. They began teaching writing to college xxii Preface students in the 1970s—David at the University of Virginia and then at the College of William and Mary, and Jill at New York University and then at
- 40. Hunter College (CUNY). Writing Analytically has grown out of their undergraduate teaching and the seminars on writing and writing instruction that they have offered to faculty at Muhlenberg and at other colleges and universities across the country. ACKNOWLEDGMENTS Our greatest debt in this edition of the book is to Kenny Marotta, who helped us rethink the book. Like all great teachers, he let us see more clearly the shape and im- plications of our own thinking. Those of you unaware of his gifts as a fiction writer are missing a rare pleasure. Major thanks also go to developmental editor extraordinaire Mary Beth Walden for her tireless efforts on our behalf—her understanding of how we work; her ability to help us hide from distractions; her sound advice, patience, and good cheer. We are also very grateful to departing acquisitions editor Aron Keesbury for his frank talk and occasional flights of poetry. We have over the years been fortunate to work with a range of talented and dedi- cated editors: Dickson Musslewhite, who saw us through the third and fourth edi- tions; Julie McBurney and John Meyers, who nurtured the book in its early days; and Michell Phifer and Karen R. Smith, who looked over our shoulders with acuity and wit. And we remain grateful to Karl Yambert, our original developmental editor, whose insight and patience first brought this book into being.
- 41. Christine Farris at Indiana University has been a great friend of the book since its early days; we heard her voice often in our heads as we revised this edition. She and her colleagues John Schilb and Ted Leahey gave us what every writer needs— a discerning audience. Similar thanks are due to Wendy Hesford and Eddie Singleton of Ohio State University, as well as their graduate students, whom we have had the pleasure of working with over the past few years. The book has enabled us to make many new friends just starting their college teaching careers in rhetoric and composition—Matthew Johnson and Matt Hollrah, to name two. Our friend Dean Ward at Calvin College has been a source of inspiration and good conversation on writing for many years. So have two old friends, Richard Louth and Lin Spence, who offer the benefit of their long experience with the National Writing Project. And we always learn something about writing whenever we run into Mary Ann Cain and George Kalamaras, inspiring teachers and writers both. We have also benefited from stimulating conversations about writing with Chidsey Dickson. Among our colleagues at Muhlenberg College, we are especially grateful to reference librarian Kelly Cannon for his section on library and Internet research in Chapter 16. For writing the Voices from across the Curriculum boxes that appear throughout the book, thanks to Karen Dearborn, Laura Edelman,
- 42. Jack Gambino, James Marshall, Rich Niesenbaum, Fred Norling, Mark Sciutto, Alan Tjeltveit, and Bruce Wightman. For their good counsel and their teaching materials, thanks to Anna Adams, Jim Bloom, Chris Borick, Ted Conner, Joseph Elliot, Barri Gold, Mary Lawlor, Jim Peck, Jeremy Teissere, and Alec Marsh, with whom we argue endlessly about writing. Carol Proctor in the English Department looks out for us. We also thank Muhlenberg Preface xxiii College, especially its provost, Marjorie Hass, for continuing to support our participa- tion at national conferences. We are indebted to our students at Muhlenberg College, who have shared their writing and their thinking about writing with us. Chief among these (of late) are Sarah Kersh, Robbie Saenz di Viteri, Laura Sutherland, Andrew Brown, Meghan Sweeney, Jen Epting, Jessica Skrocki, and Jake McNamara. Thanks also go to the following students who have allowed us to use their writing in our book (most recently): Jen Axe, Wendy Eichler, Theresa Leinker, and Kim Schmidt. Finally, thanks to our spouses (Deborah and Mark) and our children (Lizzie, Lesley, and Sarah) for their love and support during the many
- 43. hours that we sit immobile at our computers. We would also like to thank the many colleagues who reviewed the book; we are grate- ful for their insight: Diann Ainsworth, Weatherford College Jeanette Adkins, Tarrant County College Joan Anderson, California State University–San Marcos Candace Barrington, Central Connecticut State University Maria Bates, Pierce College Karin Becker, Fort Lewis College Laura Behling, Gustavus Adolphus College Stephanie Bennett, Monmouth University Tom Bowie, Regis University Roland Eric Boys, Oxnard College David Brantley, College of Southern Maryland Jessica Brown, City College of San Francisco Christine Bryant Cohen, University of Illinois–Urbana- Champaign Alexandria Casey, Graceland University Anthony Cavaluzzi, Adirondack Community College Johnson Cheu, Michigan State University Jeff Cofer, Bellevue Community College Helen Connell, Barry University Cara Crandall, Emerson College Rose Day, Central New Mexico Community College Susan de Ghize, University of Denver Virginia Dumont-Poston, Lander University David Eggebrecht, Concordia University Karen Feldman, University of California Dan Ferguson, Amarillo College Gina Franco, Knox College Sue Frankson, College of DuPage Anne Friedman, Borough of Manhattan Community College Tessa Garcia, University of Texas–Pan American
- 44. xxiv Preface Susan Garrett, Goucher College Edward Geisweidt, University of Alabama Nate Gordon, Kishwaukee College Glenn Hutchinson, University of North Carolina–Charlotte Habiba Ibrahim, University of Washington Charlene Keeler, California State University–Fullerton Douglas King, Gannon University Constance Koepfinger, Duquesne University Anne Langendorfer, The Ohio State University Kim Long, Shippensburg University Laine Lubar, Broome Community College Phoenix Lundstrom, Kapi`olani Community College Cynthia Martin, James Madison University Andrea Mason, Pacific Lutheran University Darin Merrill, Brigham Young University–Idaho Sarah Newlands, Portland State University Emmanuel Ngwang, Mississippi Valley State University Leslie Norris, Rappahannock Community College Ludwig Otto, Tarrant County College Adrienne Peek, Modesto Junior College Adrienne Redding, Andrews University Julie Rivera, California State University–Long Beach John Robinson, Diablo Valley College Pam Rooney, Western Michigan University Linda Rosekrans, The State University of New York–Cortland Becky Rudd, Citrus College Arthur Saltzman, Missouri Southern State University Vicki Schwab, Manatee Community College John Sullivan, Muhlenberg College Eleanor Swanson, Regis University Kimberly Thompson, Wittenberg University
- 45. Kathleen Walton, Southwestern Oregon Community College James Ray Watkins, The Art Institute of Pittsburgh, Online; Colorado Technical University, Online; and The Center for Talented Youth, Johns Hopkins University Lisa Weihman, West Virginia University Robert Williams, Radford University Nancy Wright, Syracuse University Robbin Zeff, George Washington University Preface xxv This page intentionally left blank UNIT I The Analytical Frame of Mind: Introduction to Analytical Methods CHAPTER 1 Analysis: What It Is and What It Does CHAPTER 2 Counterproductive Habits of Mind CHAPTER 3 A Toolkit of Analytical Methods CHAPTER 4 Interpretation: What It Is, What It Isn’t, and How to Do It CHAPTER 5
- 46. Analyzing Arguments CHAPTER 6 Topics and Modes of Analysis This page intentionally left blank CHAPTER 1 Analysis: What It Is and What It Does FIRST PRINCIPLES Writing takes place now in more forms than ever before. Words flash by on our computer and cell phone screens and speak to us from iPods. PowerPoint bulleted lists are replacing the classroom blackboard, and downloadable entries from Wikipe- dia and Google offer instant reading on almost any subject. Despite the often-heard claim that we now inhabit a visual age—that the age of print is passing—we are, in fact, surrounded by a virtual sea of electronically accessible print. What does all this mean for writers and writing? If what is meant by writing is the form in which written text appears on page or screen, then presumably the study of writing would focus on the new forms of orga- nization that characterize writing on the web. But what if we
- 47. define writing as the act of recording our thoughts in search of understanding? In that case, the writing practices and mental habits that help us to think more clearly would be, as they have long been, at the center of what it means to learn to write. This book is primarily about ways of using writing to discover and develop ideas. Its governing premise is that learning to write well means learning to use writing to think well. This does not mean that the book ignores such matters as sentence style, paragraphing, and organization, but that it treats these matters in the context of writing as a way of generating and shaping thinking. Although it is true that authors of web pages and PowerPoint demonstrations display their finished products in forms unlike the traditional essay, people rarely arrive at their ideas in the form of PowerPoint lists and hypertext. Whatever form the thinking will finally take, first comes the stage of writing to understand—writing as a sustained act of reflection. Implicit throughout this book is an argument for the value of reflection in an age that seems increasingly to confuse sustained acts of thinking with information downloading and formatting. ANALYSIS DEFINED We have seized upon analysis as the book’s focus because it is the skill most commonly called for in college courses and beyond. The faculty with
- 48. whom we work encour- age analytical writing because it offers alternatives both to oversimplified thinking of 3 4 Chapter 1 Analysis: What It Is and What It Does the like/dislike, agree/disagree variety and to the cut-and-paste compilation of sheer information. It is the kind of writing that helps people not only to retain and assimi- late information, but to use information in the service of their own thinking about the world. More than just a set of skills, analysis is a frame of mind, an attitude toward experience. It is a form of detective work that typically pursues something puzzling, something you are seeking to understand rather than something you are already sure you have the answers to. Analysis finds questions where there seemed not to be any, and it makes connections that might not have been evident at first. Analyzing, however, is often the subject of attack. It is sometimes thought of as destructive—breaking things down into their component parts, or, to paraphrase a famous poet, murdering to dissect. Other detractors attack it as the rarefied province of intellectuals and scholars, beyond the reach of normal
- 49. people. In fact, we all analyze all of the time, and we do so not simply to break things down but to construct our understandings of the world we inhabit. If, for example, you find yourself being followed by a large dog, your first response, other than breaking into a cold sweat, will be to analyze the situation. What does being followed by a large dog mean for me, here, now? Does it mean the dog is vicious and about to attack? Does it mean the dog is curious and wants to play? Similarly, if you are losing a game of tennis, or you’ve just left a job interview, or you are looking at a painting of a woman with three noses, you will begin to analyze. How can I play differently to increase my chances of winning? Am I likely to get the job, and why (or why not)? Why did the artist give the woman three noses? If we break things down as we analyze, we do so to search for meaningful patterns, or to uncover what we had not seen at first glance—or just to understand more closely how and why the separate parts work as they do. As this book tries to show, analyzing is surprisingly formulaic. It consists of a fairly limited set of basic moves. People who think well have these moves at their disposal, whether they are aware of using them or not. Having good ideas is less a matter of luck than of practice, of learning how to make best use of the writing process. Sudden flashes of inspiration do, of course, occur; but those who write
- 50. regularly know that inspirational moments can, in fact, be courted. The rest of this book offers you ways of courting and then realizing the full potential of your ideas. Next we offer five basic “moves”—reliable ways of proceeding—for courting ideas analytically. THE FIVE ANALYTICAL MOVES Each of the five moves is developed in more detail in subsequent chapters; this is an overview. As we have suggested, most people already analyze all the time, but they often don’t realize that this is what they’re doing. A first step toward becoming a better analytical thinker and writer is to become more aware of your own thinking processes, building on skills that you already possess, and eliminating habits that get in the way. Each of the following moves serves the primary purpose of analysis: to figure out what something means, why it is as it is and does what it does. The Five Analytical Moves 5 Move 1: Suspend Judgment Suspending judgment is a necessary precursor to thinking analytically because our tendency to judge everything shuts down our ability to see and to think. It takes considerable effort to break the habit of responding to
- 51. everything with likes and dislikes, with agreeing and disagreeing. Just listen in on a few conversations to be reminded of how pervasive this phenomenon really is. Even when you try to suppress them, judgments tend to come. Judgments usually say more about the person doing the judging than they do about the subject being judged. The determination that something is boring is espe- cially revealing in this regard. Yet people typically roll their eyes and call things boring as if this assertion clearly said something about the thing they are reacting to but not about the mind of the beholder. Consciously leading with the word interesting (as in, “What I find most interest- ing about this is. . . ”) tends to deflect the judgment response into a more exploratory state of mind, one that is motivated by curiosity and thus better able to steer clear of approval and disapproval. As a general rule, you should seek to understand the subject you are analyzing before deciding how you feel about it. (See the Judgment Reflex in Chapter 2, Counterproductive Habits of Mind, for more.) Move 2: Define Significant Parts and How They’re Related Whether you are analyzing an awkward social situation, an economic problem, a painting, a substance in a chemistry lab, or your chances of succeeding in a job inter-
- 52. view, the process of analysis is the same: • Divide the subject into its defining parts, its main elements or ingredients. • Consider how these parts are related, both to each other and to the subject as a whole. In the case of analyzing the large dog encountered earlier, you might notice that he’s dragging a leash, has a ball in his mouth, and is wearing a bright red scarf. Having broken your larger subject into these defining parts, you would try to see the connec- tions among them and determine what they mean, what they allow you to decide about the nature of the dog: apparently somebody’s lost pet, playful, probably not hostile, unlikely to bite me. Analysis of the painting of the woman with three noses, a subject more like the kind you might be asked to write about in a college course, would proceed in the same way. Your result—ideas about the nature of the painting— would be determined, as with the dog, not only by your noticing its various parts, but also by your familiarity with the subject. If you knew little about art history, scrutiny of the painting’s parts would not tell you, for instance, that it is an example of the movement known as Cubism. Even without this context, however, you would still be able to draw some analytical conclusions—ideas about the meaning and nature of
- 53. the subject. You might conclude, for example, that the artist is interested in perspective or in the way we see, as opposed to realistic depictions of the world. 6 Chapter 1 Analysis: What It Is and What It Does One common denominator of all effective analytical writing is that it pays close attention to detail. We analyze because our global responses, to a play, for example, or to a speech or a social problem, are too general. If you comment on an entire football game, you’ll find yourself saying things like “great game,” which is a generic response, something you could say about almost anything. This “one-size- fits-all” kind of com- ment doesn’t tell us very much except that you probably liked the game. To say more, you would necessarily become more analytical—shifting your attention to the signifi- cance of some important aspect of the game, such as “they won because the offensive line was giving the quarterback all day to find his receivers” or “they lost because they couldn’t defend against the safety blitz.” This move from generalization to analysis, from the larger subject to its key com- ponents, is characteristic of good thinking. To understand a subject, we need to get past our first, generic, evaluative response to discover what the subject is “made of,” the particulars that contribute most strongly to the character of
- 54. the whole. If all that analysis did, however, was to take subjects apart, leaving them broken and scattered, the activity would not be worth very much. The student who presents a draft of a paper to his or her professor with the words, “Go ahead, rip it apart,” reveals a dis- abling misconception about analysis—that, like dissecting a frog in a biology lab, analy- sis takes the life out of its subjects. Clearly, analysis means more than breaking a subject into its parts. When you analyze a subject you ask not just “What is it made of?” but also “How do these parts help me to understand the meaning of the subject as a whole?” Move 3: Make the Implicit Explicit One definition of what analytical writing does is that it makes explicit (overtly stated) what is implicit (suggested but not overtly stated), converting suggestions into direct statements. Some people fear that, like the emperor’s new clothes, implications aren’t really there, but are instead the phantasms of an overactive imagination. “Reading between the lines” is the common and telling phrase that expresses this anxiety. We will have more to say in Chapter 4 against the charge that analysis makes something out of nothing—the spaces between the lines—rather than out of what is there in black and white. Another version of this anxiety is implied by the term hidden meanings.
- 55. Implications are not hidden, but neither are they completely spelled out so that they can be simply extracted. The word implication comes from the Latin implicare, which means “to fold in.” The word explicit is in opposition to the idea of implication. It means “folded out.” This etymology of the two words, implicit and explicit, suggests that meanings aren’t actually hidden, but neither are they opened to full view. An act of mind is required to take what is folded in and fold it out for all to see. The process of drawing out implications is also known as making inferences. Inference and implication are related but not synonymous terms, and the difference is essential to know. The term implication describes something suggested by the material itself; implications reside in the matter you are studying. The term inference describes your thinking process. In short, you infer what the subject implies. Now, let’s move on to an example that suggests not only how the process of making the implicit explicit works, but also how often we do it in our every- day lives. Imagine that you are driving down the highway and find yourself The Five Analytical Moves 7 analyzing a billboard advertisement for a brand of beer. Such an
- 56. analysis might begin with your noticing what the billboard photo contains, its various parts—six young, athletic, and scantily clad men and women drinking beer while pushing kayaks into a fast-running river. At this point, you have produced not an analysis but a summary—a description of what the photo contains. If, however, you go on to consider what the particulars of the photo imply, your summary would become analytical. You might infer, for example, that the photo implies that beer is the beverage of fash- ionable, healthy, active people. Thus, the advertisement’s meaning goes beyond its explicit contents. Your analysis would lead you to convert to direct statement meanings that are suggested but not overtly stated, such as the advertisement’s goal of attacking common stereotypes about its product (that only lazy, overweight men drink beer). By making the implicit explicit (inferring what the ad implies) you can better understand the nature of your subject. (See Chapter 4 for more on implications versus hidden meanings.) Try this 1.1: Making Inferences Locate any magazine ad that you find interesting. Ask yourself, “What is this a picture of?” Use our hypothetical beer ad as a model for rendering the implicit explicit. Don’t settle for just one answer. Keep answering the question in different ways, letting your answers grow in length as they identify and
- 57. begin to interpret the significance of telling details. If you find yourself getting stuck, add to the question: “and why did the advertiser choose this particular image or set of images?” Science as a Process of Argument I find it ironic that the discipline of science, which is so inherently analytical, is so difficult for students to think about analytically. Much of this comes from the prevailing view of society that science is somehow factual. Science students come to college to learn the facts. I think many find it comforting to think that everything they learn will be objective. None of the wishy-washy subjectivity that many perceive in other disciplines. There is no need to argue, synthesize, or even have a good idea. But this view is dead wrong. Anyone who has ever done science knows that nothing could be further from the truth. Just like other academics, scientists spend endless hours pa- tiently arguing over evidence that seems obscure or irrelevant to laypeople. There is rarely an absolute consensus. In reality, science is an endless pro- cess of argument, obtaining evidence, analyzing evidence, and reformulating arguments. To be sure, we all accept gravity as a “fact.” To not do so would be intellectually bankrupt, because all reasonable people agree to the truth of
- 58. gravity. But to Newton, gravity was an argument for which evidence needed to be produced, analyzed, and discussed. It’s important to remember that a significant fraction of his intellectual contemporaries were not swayed by his argument. Equally important is that many good scientific ideas of today will eventually be significantly modified or shown to be wrong. —Bruce Wightman, Professor of Biology VOICES FROM ACROSS THE CURRICULUM 8 Chapter 1 Analysis: What It Is and What It Does Move 4: Look for Patterns We have been defining analysis as the understanding of parts in relation to each other and to a whole, as well as the understanding of the whole in terms of the relationships among its parts. But how do you know which parts to attend to? What makes some details in the material you are studying more worthy of your attention than others? Here are three principles for selecting significant parts of the whole: 1. Look for a pattern of repetition or resemblance. In virtually all subjects, repetition is a sign of emphasis. In a symphony, for example, certain patterns of notes repeat throughout, announcing themselves as major
- 59. themes. In a legal document, such as a warranty, a reader quickly becomes aware of words that are part of a particular idea or pattern of thinking: for instance, disclaimers of accountability. The repetition may not be exact. In Shakespeare’s play King Lear, for exam- ple, references to seeing and eyes call attention to themselves through repetition. Let’s say you notice that these references often occur along with another strand of language having to do with the concept of proof. How might noticing this pattern lead to an idea? You might make a start by inferring from the pattern that the play is concerned with ways of knowing (proving) things—with seeing as opposed to other ways of knowing, such as faith or intuition. 2. Look for binary oppositions. Sometimes patterns of repetition that you begin to notice in a particular subject matter are significant because they are part of a contrast—a basic opposition—around which the subject matter is structured. A binary opposition is a pair of elements in which the two members of the pair are opposites; the word binary means “consisting of two.” Some examples of binary oppositions that we encounter frequently are nature/civilization, city/country, public/private, organic/inorganic, voluntary/involuntary. One advantage of detecting repetition is that it will lead you to discover binaries,
- 60. which are central to locating issues and concerns. (For more on working with binary oppositions, see Chapters 3 and 5.) 3. Look for anomalies—things that seem unusual, seem not to fit. An anomaly (a ! not, nom ! name) is literally something that cannot be named, what the dictionary defines as deviation from the normal order. Along with looking for pattern, it is also fruitful to attend to anomalous details—those that seem not to fit the pattern. Anomalies help us to revise our stereotypical assumptions. A TV commercial, for example, advertises a baseball team by featuring its star reading a novel by Dostoyevsky in the dugout during a game. In this case, the anomaly, a baseball player who reads serious literature, is being used to subvert (question, unsettle) the stereotypical assumption that sports and intellectualism don’t belong together. Just as people tend to leap to evaluative judgments, they also tend to avoid information that challenges (by not conforming to) opinions they already hold. Screening out anything that would ruffle the pattern they’ve begun to The Five Analytical Moves 9
- 61. see, they ignore the evidence that might lead them to a better theory. (For more on this process of using anomalous evidence to evolve an essay’s main idea, see Chapter 9, Making a Thesis Evolve.) Anomalies are important because noticing them often leads to new and better ideas. Most advances in scientific thought, for example, have arisen when a scientist observes some phenomenon that does not fit with a prevailing theory. Move 5: Keep Reformulating Questions and Explanations Analysis, like all forms of writing, requires a lot of experimenting. Because the purpose of analytical writing is to figure something out, you shouldn’t expect to know at the start of your writing process exactly where you are going, how all of your subject’s parts fit together, and to what end. The key is to be patient and to know that there are procedures—in this case, questions—you can rely on to take you from uncertainty to understanding. The following three groups of questions (organized according to the analytical moves they’re derived from) are typical of what goes on in an analytical writer’s head as he or she attempts to understand a subject. These questions work with almost anything that you want to think about. As you will see, the questions are geared toward helping you locate and try on explanations for the meaning of various patterns of details.
- 62. Which details seem significant? Why? What does the detail mean? What else might it mean? (Moves: Define Significant Parts; Make the Implicit Explicit) How do the details fit together? What do they have in common? What does this pattern of details mean? What else might this same pattern of details mean? How else could it be explained? (Move: Look for Patterns) What details don’t seem to fit? How might they be connected with other details to form a different pattern? What does this new pattern mean? How might it cause me to read the meaning of individual details differently? (Moves: Look for Anomalies and Keep Asking Questions) The process of posing and answering such questions—the analytical process—is one of trial and error. Learning to write well is largely a matter of learning how to frame questions. One of the main things you acquire in the study of an academic discipline is knowledge of the kinds of questions that the
- 63. discipline typically asks. For example, an economics professor and a sociology professor might observe the same phenomenon, such as a sharp decline in health benefits for the elderly, and analyze its causes and significance in different ways. The economist might consider how such 10 Chapter 1 Analysis: What It Is and What It Does benefits are financed and how changes in government policy and the country’s popu- lation patterns might explain the declining supply of funds for the elderly. The soci- ologist might ask about attitudes toward the elderly and about the social structures that the elderly rely on for support. ANALYSIS AT WORK: A SAMPLE PAPER Examine the following excerpt from a draft of a paper about Ovid’s Metamorphoses, a collection of short mythological tales dating from ancient Rome. We have included annotations in blue to suggest how a writer’s ideas evolve as he or she looks for pattern, contrast, and anomaly, constantly remaining open to reformulation. The draft actually begins with two loosely connected observations: that males dominate females, and that many characters in the stories lose the ability to speak and thus become submissive and dominated. In the excerpt, the
- 64. writer begins to connect these two observations and speculate about what this connection means. There are many other examples in Ovid’s Metamorphoses that show the dominance of man over woman through speech control. In the Daphne and Apollo story, Daphne becomes a tree to escape Apollo, but her ability to speak is destroyed. Likewise, in the Syrinx and Pan story, Syrinx becomes a marsh reed, also a life form that cannot talk, although Pan can make it talk by playing it. [The writer establishes a pattern of similar detail.] Pygmalion and Galatea is a story in which the male creates his rendition of the perfect female. The female does not speak once; she is completely silent. Also, Galatea is referred to as “she” and never given a real name. This lack of a name renders her identity more silent. [Here the writer begins to link the contrasts of speech/silence with the absence/presence of identity.] Ocyrhoe is a female character who could tell the future but who was transformed into a mare so that she could not speak. One may explain this transformation by saying it was an attempt by the gods to keep the future unknown. [Notice how the writer’s thinking expands as she sustains her investigation of the overall pattern of men silencing women: here she tests her theory by adding another variable—prophecy.] However, there is a male character, Tiresias, who is also a seer of the future and is allowed to speak of his foreknowledge, thereby becoming a famous figure. (Interestingly, Tiresias
- 65. during his lifetime has experienced being both a male and a female.) [Notice how the Ocyrhoe example has spawned a contrast based on gender in the Tiresias example. The pairing of the two examples demonstrates that the ability to tell the future is not the sole cause of silencing because male characters who can do it are not silenced—though the writer pauses to note that Tiresias is not entirely male.] Finally, in the story of Mercury and Herse, Herse’s sister, Aglauros, tries to prevent Mercury from marrying Herse. Mercury turns her into a statue; the male directly silences the female’s speech. The woman silences the man in only two stories studied. [Here the writer searches out an anomaly— women silencing men—that grows in the rest of the paragraph into an organizing contrast.] In the first, “The Death of Orpheus,” the women make use of “clamorous shouting, Phrygian flutes with curving horns, tambourines, the beating of breasts, and Bacchic howlings” (246) to drown out the male’s songs, dominating his speech in terms of volume. In this way, the quality of power within speech is demonstrated: “for the first time, his words had no effect, and he failed to move them [the women] in any way by his voice” (247). Distinguishing Analysis from Argument, Summary, and Expressive Writing 11
- 66. Next the women kill him, thereby rendering him silent. However, the male soon regains his temporar- ily destroyed power of expression: “the lyre uttered a plaintive melody and the lifeless tongue made a piteous murmur” (247). Even after death Orpheus is able to communicate. The women were not able to destroy his power completely, yet they were able to severely reduce his power of speech and expression. [The writer learns, among other things, that men are harder to silence; Orpheus’s lyre continues to sing after his death.] The second story in which a woman silences a man is the story of Actaeon, in which the male sees Diana naked, and she transforms him into a stag so that he cannot speak of it: “he tried to say ‘Alas!’ but no words came” (79). This loss of speech leads to Actaeon’s inability to inform his own hunting team of his true identity; his loss of speech leads ultimately to his death. [This example reinforces the pattern that the writer had begun to notice in the Orpheus example.] In some ways these four paragraphs of draft exemplify a writer in the process of discovering a workable idea. They begin with a list of similar examples, briefly noted. As the examples accumulate, the writer begins to make connections and formulate trial explanations. We have not included enough of this excerpt to get to the tentative thesis the draft is working toward, although that thesis is already beginning to emerge. What we want to emphasize here is the writer’s willingness to accumulate data and to
- 67. locate it in various patterns of similarity and contrast. Try this 1.2: Applying the Five Analytical Moves to a Speech Speeches provide rich examples for analysis, and they are easily accessible on the Inter- net. We especially recommend a site called American Rhetoric (You can Google it for the URL). Locate any speech and then locate its patterns of repetition and contrast. On the basis of your results, formulate a few conclusions about the speech’s point of view and its way of presenting it. Try to get beyond the obvious and the general—what does applying the moves cause you to notice that you might not have noticed before? DISTINGUISHING ANALYSIS FROM ARGUMENT, SUMMARY, AND EXPRESSIVE WRITING How does analysis differ from other kinds of thinking and writing? A common way of answering this question is to think of communication as having three possible centers of emphasis—the writer, the subject, and the audience. Communication, of course, involves all three of these components, but some kinds of writing concentrate more on one than on the others. Autobiographical writing, for example, such as diaries or memoirs or stories about personal experience, centers on the writer and his or her desire for self-expression. Argument, in which the writer takes a stand on an issue, ad- vocating or arguing against a policy or attitude, is reader-
- 68. centered; its goal is to bring about a change in its readers’ actions and beliefs. Analytical writing is more concerned with arriving at an understanding of a subject than it is with either self-expression or changing readers’ views. (See Figure 1.1.) These three categories of writing are not mutually exclusive. So, for example, expressive (writer-centered) writing is also analytical in its attempts to define and explain a writer’s feelings, reactions, and experiences. And analysis is a form 12 Chapter 1 Analysis: What It Is and What It Does of self-expression since it inevitably reflects the ways a writer’s experiences have taught him or her to think about the world. But even though expressive writing and analysis necessarily overlap, they also differ significantly in both method and aim. In expressive writing, your primary subject is your self, with other subjects serving as a means of evoking greater self-understanding. In analytical writing, your reasoning may derive from your personal experience, but it is your reasoning and not you or your experiences that matter. Analysis asks not just “What do I think?” but “How good is my thinking? How well does it fit the subject I am trying to explain?” In its emphasis on logic and the dispassionate scrutiny of ideas
- 69. (“What do I think about what I think?”), analysis is a close cousin of argument. But analysis and argu- ment are not the same. Analytical writers are frequently more concerned with per- suading themselves, with discovering what they believe about a subject, than they are with persuading others. And, while the writer of an argument often goes into the writing process with some certainty about the position he or she wishes to support, the writer of an analysis is more likely to begin with the details of a subject he or she wishes to better understand. Accordingly, argument and analysis often differ in the kind of thesis statements they formulate. The thesis of an argument is usually some kind of should statement: readers should or shouldn’t vote for bans on smoking in public buildings, or they should or shouldn’t believe that gays can function effectively in the military. The thesis of an analysis is usually a tentative answer to a what, how, or why question; it seeks to explain why people watch professional wrestling, or what a rising number of sexual harassment cases might mean, or how certain features of government health care policy are designed to allay the fears of the middle class. The writer of an analysis is less concerned with convincing readers to approve or disapprove of professional wres- tling, or legal intervention into the sexual politics of the workplace, or government control of health care than with discovering how each of these
- 70. complex subjects might be defined and explained. As should be obvious, though, the best arguments are built upon careful analysis: the better you understand a subject, the more likely you will be to find valid positions to argue about it. writer-centered (expressive writing) communication reader-centered (argument) subject-centered (summary and analysis) FIGURE 1.1 Diagram of Communication Triangle Distinguishing Analysis from Argument, Summary, and Expressive Writing 13 Applying the Five Analytical Moves: The Example of Whistler’s Mother Summary differs from analysis because the aim of summary is to recount, in effect, to reproduce someone else’s ideas. But summary and analysis are also clearly related and usually operate together. Summary is important to analysis because you can’t analyze a subject without laying out its significant parts for
- 71. your reader. Similarly, analysis is important to summary because summarizing is more than just copying someone else’s words. To write an accurate summary you have to ask analytical ques- tions, such as: • Which of the ideas in the reading are most significant? Why? • How do these ideas fit together? What do the key passages in the reading mean? Like an analysis, an effective summary doesn’t assume that the subject matter can speak for itself: the writer needs to play an active role. A good summary provides perspective on the subject as a whole by explaining, as an analysis does, the mean- ing and function of each of that subject’s parts. Moreover, like an analysis, a good summary does not aim to approve or disapprove of its subject: the goal, in both kinds of writing, is to understand rather than to evaluate. (For more on summary, see Chapters 6 and 13.) So summary, like analysis, is a tool of understanding and not just a mechanical task. But a summary stops short of analysis because summary typically makes much smaller interpretive leaps. A summary of the painting popularly known as Whistler’s Mother, for example, would tell readers what the painting includes, which details are the most prominent, and even what the overall effect of the
- 72. painting seems to be. A summary might say that the painting possesses a certain serenity and that it is some- what spare, almost austere. This kind of language still falls into the category of focused description, which is what a summary is. An analysis would include more of the writer’s interpretive thinking. It might tell us, for instance, that the painter’s choice to portray his subject in profile contributes to our sense of her separateness from us and of her nonconfrontational passivity. We look at her, but she does not look back at us. Her black dress and the fitted lace cap that obscures her hair are not only emblems of her self- effacement, shrouds disguis- ing her identity like her expressionless face, but also the tools of her self-containment and thus of her power to remain aloof from prying eyes. What is the attraction of this painting (this being one of the questions that an analysis might ask)? What might draw a viewer to the sight of this austere, drably attired woman, sitting alone in the center of a mostly blank space? Perhaps it is the very starkness of the painting, and the mystery of self-sufficiency at its center, that attracts us. (See Figure 1.2.) Observations of the sort just offered go beyond describing what the painting con- tains and enter into the writer’s ideas about what its details imply, what the painting invites us to make of it and by what means. Notice in our analysis of the painting how
- 73. intertwined the description (summary) is with the analysis. Laying out the data is key to any kind of analysis, not simply because it keeps the analysis accurate but also 14 Chapter 1 Analysis: What It Is and What It Does because, crucially, it is in the act of carefully describing a subject that analytical writers often have their best ideas. You may not agree with the terms by which we have summarized the painting, and thus you may not agree with such conclusions as “the mystery of self-sufficiency.” Nor is it necessary that you agree because there is no single, right answer to what the painting means. The absence of a single right answer does not, however, mean that all possible interpretations are equal and equally convincing to readers. The writer who can offer a careful description of a subject’s key features is likely to arrive at conclusions about possible meanings that others would share. Here are two general rules to be drawn from this discussion of analysis and summary: 1. Describe with care. The words you choose to summarize your data will contain the germs of your ideas about what the subject means. 2. In moving from summary to analysis, scrutinize the language
- 74. you have chosen, asking, “Why did I choose this word?” and “What ideas are implicit in the language I have used?” FIGURE 1.2 Arrangement in Grey and Black: The Artist’s Mother by James Abbott McNeill Whistler, 1871. RE UN IO N DE S M US EE S NA TI ON AU X, A RT R
- 75. ES OU RC E, N Y. J am es A bb ot t M cN ei l W hi st le r. Analysis and Personal Associations 15 ANALYSIS AND PERSONAL ASSOCIATIONS
- 76. Although observations like those offered in the Interpretive Leaps column in Figure 1.3 go beyond simple description, they stay with the task of explaining the painting, rather than moving to private associations that the painting might prompt, such as effusions about old age, or rocking chairs, or the character and situation of the writer’s own mother. Such associations could well be valuable unto themselves as a means of prompting a searching piece of expressive writing. They might also help a writer to interpret some feature of the painting that he or she was working to under- stand. But the writer would not be free to use pieces of his or her personal history as conclusions about what the painting communicates, unless these conclusions could also be reasonably inferred from the painting itself. Analysis is a creative activity, a fairly open form of inquiry, but its imaginative scope is governed by logic. The hypothetical analysis we have offered is not the only reading of the painting that a viewer might make because the same pattern of de- tails might lead to different conclusions. But a viewer would not be free to conclude anything he or she wished, such as that the woman is mourning the death of a son Data Method of Analysis Interpretive Leaps these details destabilize the serenity of the figure, adding some tension to the
- 77. picture in the form of slightly uneasy posture and figure's need for support: she looks too long, drooped in on her own spine austerity and containment of the figure made more pronounced by slight contrast with busier, more lively, and more ornate elements and with little picture showing world outside subject in profile, not looking at us folded hands, fitted lace cap, contained hair, expressionless face patterned curtain and picture versus still figure and blank wall; slightly frilled lace cuffs and ties on cap versus plain black dress slightly slouched body position and presence of support for feet anomalies; make what is implicit in the anomalies
- 78. explicit locate organizing contrast; make what is implicit in the contrast explicit locate pattern of same or similar detail; make what is implicit in pattern of details explicit make implicit explicit (speculate about what the detail might suggest) figure strikes us as separate, nonconfrontational, passive figure strikes us as self- contained, powerful in her separateness and self-enclosure— self-sufficient? FIGURE 1.3 Summary and Analysis of Whistler’s Mother Diagram 16 Chapter 1 Analysis: What It Is and What It Does or is patiently waiting to die. Such conclusions would be unfounded speculations be-
- 79. cause the black dress is not sufficient to support them. Analysis often operates in areas in which there is no one right answer, but like summary and argument, it requires the writer to reason from evidence. A few rules are worth highlighting here: 1. The range of associations for explaining a given detail or word must be governed by context. 2. It’s fine to use your personal reactions as a way into exploring what a subject means, but take care not to make an interpretive leap stretch farther than the actual details will support. 3. Because the tendency to transfer meanings from your own life onto a subject can lead you to ignore the details of the subject itself, you need always to be ask- ing yourself: “What other explanations might plausibly account for this same pattern of detail?” As we began this chapter by saying, analysis is a form of detective work. It can surprise us with ideas that our experiences produce once we take the time to listen to ourselves thinking. But analysis is also a discipline; it has rules that govern how we proceed and that enable others to judge the validity of our ideas. A good analytical thinker needs to be the attentive Dr. Watson to his or her own Sherlock Holmes. That
- 80. is what the remainder of this book teaches you to do. ASSIGNMENT: Analyze a Portrait or Other Visual Image Locate any portrait, preferably a good reproduction from an art book or magazine, one that shows detail clearly. Then do a version of what we’ve done with Whistler’s Mother in the preceding columns. Your goal is to produce an analysis of the portrait with the steps we included in analyzing Whistler’s Mother. First, summarize the portrait, describing accurately its significant details. Do not go beyond a recounting of what the portrait includes; avoid interpreting what these details suggest. Then use the various methods offered in this chapter to analyze the data. What repetitions (patterns of same or similar detail) do you see? What organizing contrasts suggest themselves? In light of these patterns of similarity and difference, what anom- alies do you then begin to detect? Move from the data to interpretive conclusions. This process will produce a set of interpretive leaps, which you may then try to assemble into a more coherent claim of some sort—about what the portrait “says.” CHAPTER 2
- 81. Counterproductive Habits of Mind Analysis, we have been suggesting, is a frame of mind, a set of habits for observ- ing and making sense of the world. There is also, it is fair to say, an anti-analytical frame of mind with its own set of habits. These shut down perception and arrest potential ideas at the cliché stage. This chapter attempts to unearth these anti- analytical habits. Then the next chapter offers some systematic ways of improving your observational skills. The meaning of observation is not self-evident. If you had five friends over and asked them to write down one observation about the room you were all sitting in, it’s a sure bet that many of the responses would be generalized judgments—“it’s comfort- able”; “it’s a pigsty.” And why? Because the habits of mind that come readily to most of us tend to shut down the observation stage so that we literally notice and remember less. We go for the quick impression and dismiss the rest. Having ideas is dependent on allowing ourselves to notice things in a subject that we wish to better understand rather than glossing things over with a quick and too easy understanding. The problem with convincing ourselves that we have the answers is that we are thus prevented from seeing the questions, which are usu- ally much more interesting than the temporary stopping points we have elected
- 82. as answers. The nineteenth-century poet, Emily Dickinson, writes that “Perception of an object/Costs precise the object’s loss.” When we leap prematurely to our perceptions about a thing, we place a filter between ourselves and the object, shrinking the amount and kinds of information that can get through to our minds and our senses. The point of the Dickinson poem is a paradox—that the ideas we arrive at actually deprive us of material with which to have more ideas. So we have to be careful about leaping to conclusions, about the ease with which we move to generalization, because if we are not careful, such moves will lead to a form of mental blindness—loss of the object. FEAR OF UNCERTAINTY Most of us learn early in life to pretend that we understand things even when we don’t. Rather than ask questions and risk looking foolish, we nod our heads. Soon, we even come to believe that we understand things when really we don’t, or not nearly as well as we think we do. This understandable but problematic human trait means that to 17 18 Chapter 2 Counterproductive Habits of Mind
- 83. become better thinkers, most of us have to cultivate a more positive attitude toward not knowing. Prepare to be surprised at how difficult this can be. Start by trying to accept that uncertainty—even its more extreme version, confusion—is a productive state of mind, a precondition to having ideas. The poet John Keats coined a memorable phrase for this willed tolerance of uncertainty. He called it negative capability. I had not had a dispute but a disquisition with Dilke, on various subjects; several things dovetailed in my mind, & at once it struck me, what qual- ity went to form a Man of Achievement especially in Literature & which Shakespeare possessed so enormously—I mean Negative Capability, that is when man is capable of being in uncertainties, Mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact & reason. —Letter to George and Thomas Keats, December 1817 The key phrases here are “capable of being in uncertainties” and “without any irritable reaching.” Keats is not saying that facts and reason are unnecessary and therefore can be safely ignored. But he does praise the kind of person who can remain calm (rather than becoming irritable) in a state of uncertainty. He is en- dorsing a way of being that can stay open to possibilities longer
- 84. than most of us are comfortable with. Negative capability is an essential habit of mind for productive analytical thinking. PREJUDGING Too often inexperienced writers are pressured by well-meaning teachers and text- books to arrive at a thesis statement—a single sentence formulation of the governing claim that a paper will support—before they have observed enough and reflected enough to find one worth using. These writers end up clinging to the first idea that they think might serve as a thesis, with the result that they stop looking at anything in their evidence except what they want and expect to see. Writers who leap prematurely to thesis statements typically find themselves proving the obvious—some too-general and superficial idea—and worse, they miss opportunities for the better paper that is lurking in the more complicated evidence being screened out by the desire to make the thesis “work.” Unit II of this book, Writing the Analytical Essay, will have much to say about finding and using thesis statements. But this unit (especially Chapter 3, A Toolkit of Analytical Methods) first focuses attention on the kinds of thinking and writing you’ll need to engage in before you can successfully make the move to thesis-driven writing. In this discovery phase, you will need to slow down the drive to
- 85. conclusions to see more in your evidence. Tell yourself that you don’t understand, even if you think that you do. You’ll know that you are surmounting the fear of uncertainty when the meaning of your evidence starts to seem less rather than more clear to you, and perhaps even strange. You will begin to see details that you hadn’t seen before and a range of competing meanings where you had thought there was only one. Blinded by Habit 19 BLINDED BY HABIT Some people, especially the very young, are good at noticing things. They see things that the rest of us don’t see or have ceased to notice. But why is this? Is it just that people become duller as they get older? The poet William Wordsworth thought the problem was not age but habit. That is, as we organize our lives so that we can func- tion more efficiently, we condition ourselves to see in more predictable ways and to tune out things that are not immediately relevant to our daily needs. You can test this theory by considering what you did and did not notice this morn- ing on the way to work or class or wherever you regularly go. Following a routine for
- 86. moving through the day can be done with minimal engagement of either the brain or the senses. Our minds are often, as we say, “somewhere else.” As we walk along, our eyes wander a few feet in front of our shoes or blankly in the direction of our destina- tion. Moving along the roadway in cars, we periodically realize that miles have gone by while we were driving on automatic pilot, attending barely at all to the road or the car or the landscape. Arguably, even when we try to focus on something that we want to consider, the habit of not really attending to things stays with us. The deadening effect of habit on seeing and thinking has long been a preoccu- pation of artists as well as philosophers and psychologists. Some people have even defined the aim of art as “defamiliarization.” “The essential purpose of art,” writes the novelist David Lodge, “is to overcome the deadening effects of habit by representing familiar things in unfamiliar ways.” The man who coined the term defamiliarization, Victor Shklovsky, wrote, “Habitualization devours works, clothes, furniture, one’s wife, and the fear of war. . . . And art exists that one may recover the sensation of life” (David Lodge, The Art of Fiction. New York: Penguin, 1992, p. 53). Growing up we all become increasingly desensitized to the world around us; we tend to forget the specific things that get us to feel and think in particular ways. In-
- 87. stead we respond to our experience with a limited range of generalizations, and more often than not, these are shared generalizations—that is, clichés. A lot of what passes for thinking is merely reacting: right/wrong, good/bad, loved it/hated it, couldn’t relate to it, boring. Responses like these are habits, reflexes of the mind. And they are surprisingly tough habits to break. As an experiment, ask some- one for a description of a place, a movie, a new CD, and see what you get. Too often it will be a diatribe. Offer a counterargument and be told, huffily, “I’m entitled to my opinion.” Why is this so? We live in a culture of inattention and cliché. It is a world in which we are perpetu- ally assaulted with mind-numbing claims (Arby’s offers “a baked potato so good you’ll never want anyone else’s”), flip opinions (“The Republicans/Democrats are idiots”) and easy answers (“Be yourself”; “Provide job training for the unemployed, and we can do away with homelessness”). We’re awash in such stuff. That’s one reason for the prominence of the buzz phrase “thinking outside the box”—which appears to mean getting beyond outworn ways of thinking about things. But more than that, the phrase assumes that most of the time most of us are trapped inside the box—inside a set of prefabricated answers (clichés) and like/dislike responses. This is not a new phenomenon, of course—250 years ago
- 88. 20 Chapter 2 Counterproductive Habits of Mind the philosopher David Hume, writing about perception, asserted that our lives are spent in “dogmatic slumbers,” so ensnared in conventional notions of just about everything that we don’t really see. We turn now to three of the most stubbornly counterproductive habits of mind: the judgment reflex, generalizing, and overpersonalizing. THE JUDGMENT REFLEX It would be impossible to overstate the mind-numbing effect that the judgment reflex has on thinking. Why? Consider what we do when we judge something and what we ask others to do when we offer them our judgments. Ugly, realistic, pretty, wonderful, unfair, crazy: notice how the problem with such words is a version of the problem with all generalizations—lack of information. What have you actually told someone else if you say that something is ugly, or boring, or realistic? In its most primitive form—most automatic and least thoughtful—judging is like an on/off switch. When the switch is thrown in one direction or the other—good/bad, right/wrong, positive/negative—the resulting judgment predetermines and overrides any subsequent thinking we might do. Rather than thinking
- 89. about what X is or how X operates, we lock ourselves prematurely into proving that we were right to think that X should be banned or supported. The psychologist Carl Rogers has written at length on the problem of the judgment reflex. He claims that our habitual tendency as humans— virtually a programmed response—is to evaluate everything and to do so very quickly. Walking out of a movie, for example, most people will immediately voice their approval or disapproval, usually in either/or terms: I liked it or didn’t like it; it was right/wrong, good/bad, interesting/ boring. The other people in the conversation will then offer their own evaluation and their judgments of the others’ judgments: “I think that it was a good movie and that you are wrong to think it was bad,” and so on. Like the knee jerking in response to the physician’s hammer, such reflex judgments are made without conscious thought (the source of the pejorative term “knee-jerk thinking”). They close off thinking with likes and dislikes and instant categories. This is not to say that all judging should be avoided. Obviously our thinking on many occasions must be applied to decision-making: whether we should or shouldn’t vote for a particular candidate, should or shouldn’t eat French fries, should or shouldn’t support a ban on cigarette advertising. Ultimately, in other words, analyti- cal thinking does need to arrive at a point of view—which is a
- 90. form of judgment—but analytical conclusions are usually not phrased in terms of like/dislike or good/bad. They disclose what a person has come to understand about X rather than how he or she rules on the worth of X. In some ways, the rest of this book consists of a set of methods for blocking the judgment reflex in favor of more thoughtful responses. For now, here are two moves to make in order to short circuit the judgment reflex and begin replacing it with a more thoughtful, patient, and curious habit of mind. First, try the cure that Carl Rogers recommended to negotiators in industry and government. Do not assert an agreement Generalizing 21 or disagreement with another person’s position until you can repeat that position in a way the other person would accept as fair and accurate. This is surprisingly hard to do because we are usually so busy calling up judgments of our own that we barely hear what the other person is saying. Second, try eliminating the word “should” from your vocabulary for a while. Judg- ments take the form of should statements. We should pass the law. We should not consider putting such foolish restrictions into law. The analytical habit of mind is
- 91. characterized by the words why, how, and what. Analysis asks: What is the aim of the new law? Why do laws of this sort tend to get passed in some parts of the country rather than others? How does this law compare with its predecessor? You might also try eliminating evaluative adjectives—those that offer judgments with no data. “Green” is a descriptive, concrete adjective. It offers something we can experi- ence. “Beautiful” is an evaluative adjective. It offers only judgment. (See Figure 2.1.) Try this 2.1: Distinguishing Evaluative from Nonevaluative Words The dividing line between judgmental and nonjudgmental words is often more dif- ficult to discern in practice than you might assume. Categorize each of the terms in the following list as judgmental or nonjudgmental, and be prepared to explain your reasoning: monstrous, delicate, authoritative, strong, muscular, automatic, vibrant, tedious, pungent, unrealistic, flexible, tart, pleasing, clever, slow. Try this 2.2: Experiment with Adjectives and Adverbs Write a paragraph of description—on anything that comes to mind—without using any evaluative adjectives or adverbs. Alternatively, analyze and categorize the adjectives and adverbs in a piece of your own recent writing.
- 92. GENERALIZING What it all boils down to is… What this adds up to is. . . The gist of her speech was. . . Generalizing is not always a bad habit. Reducing complex events, theories, books, or speeches to a reasonably accurate summarizing statement requires practice and skill. We generalize from our experience because this is one way of arriving at ideas. THE PROBLEM data (words, images, other detail) > broad generalization leaps to data > evaluative claims (like/dislike; agree/disagree) leaps to FIGURE 2.1 The Problems with Generalizing and Judging 22 Chapter 2 Counterproductive Habits of Mind The problem with generalizing is that it removes the mind— usually much too quickly—from the data that produced the generalization in the first place. People tend to remember their reactions and impressions. The dinner was dull.
- 93. The house was beautiful. The music was exciting. But they forget the specific, con- crete causes of these impressions (if they ever fully noticed them). As a result, people deprive themselves of material to think with—the data that might allow them to reconsider their initial impressions or share them with others. Generalizations are just as much a problem for readers and listeners as they are for writers. Consider for a moment what you are actually asking others to do when you offer them a generalization such as “His stories are very depressing.” Unless the recipient of this observation asks a question—such as “Why do you think so?”—he or she is being required to take your word for it: the stories are depressing because you say so. What happens instead if you offer a few details that caused you to think as you do? Clearly, you are on riskier ground. Your listener might think that the details you cite are actually not depressing or that this is not the most interesting or useful way to think about the stories. He or she might offer a different generalization, a different reading of the data, but at least conversation has become possible. Vagueness and generality are major blocks to learning because, as habits of mind, they allow you to dismiss virtually everything you’ve read and heard except the general idea you’ve arrived at. Often the generalizations that come to mind are so broad that
- 94. they tell us nothing. To say, for example, that a poem is about love or death or rebirth, or that the economy of a particular emerging nation is inefficient, accomplishes very little, since the generalizations could fit almost any poem or economy. In other words, your generalizations are often sites where you stopped thinking prematurely, not the “answers” you’ve thought they were. The simplest antidote to the problem of generalizing is to train yourself to be more self-conscious about where your generalizations come from. Remember to trace your general impressions back to the details that caused them. This tracing of attitudes back to their concrete causes is the most basic—and most necessary—move in the analytical habit of mind. Here’s another strategy for bringing your thinking down from high levels of gen- erality. Think of the words you use as steps on an abstraction ladder. The more general and vague the word, the higher its level of abstraction. Mammal, for example, is higher on the abstraction ladder than cow. You’ll find that it takes some practice to learn to distinguish between abstract words and concrete ones. A concrete word appeals to the senses. Abstract words are not available to our senses of touch, sight, hearing, taste, and smell. Submarine is a concrete word. It conjures up a mental image, something we can physically experi-
- 95. ence. Peace-keeping force is an abstract phrase. It conjures up a concept, but in an abstract and general way. We know what people are talking about when they say there is a plan to send submarines to a troubled area. We can’t be so sure what is up when people start talking about peace-keeping forces. You might try using “Level 3 Generality” as a convenient tag phrase reminding you to steer clear of the higher reaches of abstract generalization, some so high up the ladder from the concrete stuff that produced them that there is barely enough air to sustain the thought. Why Level 3 instead of Level 2? There aren’t just two categories, abstract and concrete; the categories are the ends of a continuum, a sliding scale. And too often when writers try to concretize their generalizations, the results are still too general: they change animal to mammal, but they need cow or, better, black angus. Try this 2.3: Locating Words on the Abstraction Ladder Find a word above (more abstract) and a word below (more concrete) for each of the following words: society, food, train, taxes, school, government, cooking oil, organism, story, magazine. Try this 2.4: Distinguishing Abstract from Concrete Words
- 96. Make a list of the first ten words that come to mind and then arrange them from most concrete to most abstract. Then repeat the exercise by choosing key words from a page of something you have written recently. OVERPERSONALIZING (NATURALIZING OUR ASSUMPTIONS) In one sense all writing is personal: you are the one putting words on the page, and inevitably you see things from your point of view. Even if you were to summarize what someone else had written, aiming for maximum impersonality, you would be making the decisions about what to include and exclude. Most effective analytical prose has a strong personal element—the writer’s stake in the subject matter. As readers, we want the sense that a writer is engaged with the material and cares about sharing it. But in another sense, no writing is strictly personal. As contemporary cultural theorists are fond of pointing out, the “I” is not a wholly autonomous free agent who Habits of Mind Readers should not conclude that the “Counterproductive Habits of Mind” presented in this chapter are confined to writing. Psychologists who study the way we process information have established important links between the way we think and the way we feel. Some psychologists, such
- 97. as Aaron Beck, have identified common “errors in thinking” that parallel the habits of mind discussed in this chapter. Beck and others have shown that falling prey to habits of mind is associated with a variety of negative outcomes. For instance, a tendency to engage in either/or thinking, overgeneralization, and personalization has been linked to higher levels of anger, anxiety, and depression. Failure to attend to these errors in thinking chokes off reflection and analysis. As a result, the person becomes more likely to “react” rather than think, which may prolong and exacerbate the negative emotions. —Mark Sciutto, Professor of Psychology VOICES FROM ACROSS THE CURRICULUM Overpersonalizing (Naturalizing Our Assumptions) 23 24 Chapter 2 Counterproductive Habits of Mind writes from a unique point of view. Rather, the “I” is always shaped by forces out- side the self—social, cultural, educational, historical, etc. The extreme version of this position allots little space for what we like to think of as “individuality”: the self is a site through which dominant cultural ways of understanding the world (ideologies)
- 98. circulate. From this perspective we are like actors who don’t know that we’re actors, reciting various cultural scripts that we don’t realize are scripts. This is, of course, an overstated position. A person who believes that civil rights for all is an essential human right is not necessarily a victim of cultural brainwashing. The grounds of his or her belief, shaped by participation in a larger community of belief (ethnic, religious, family tradition, etc.) is, however, not merely personal. But it’s a mistake for a person to assume that because he or she experienced or believes X, everyone else does too. Rather than open-mindedly exploring what a sub- ject might mean, the overpersonalizer tends to use a limited range of culturally con- ditioned likes and dislikes to close the subject down. Overpersonalizing substitutes merely reacting for thinking. It is surprisingly difficult to break the habit of treating our points of view as self- evidently true—not just for us but for everyone. What is “common sense” for one person, and so not even in need of explaining, can be quite uncommon and not so obviously sensible to someone else. More often than not, common sense is a phrase that really means “what seems obvious to me and therefore should be obvious to you.” This is a habit of mind called “naturalizing your assumptions.” The word naturalize in this context means you are representing—and seeing—your
- 99. own assumptions as natural, as simply the way things are (and ought to be). Overpersonalizers tend to make personal experiences and prejudices an unques- tioned standard of value. Your own disastrous experience with a health maintenance organization (HMO) may predispose you to dismiss a plan for nationalized health care, but your writing needs to examine in detail the holes in the plan, not simply evoke the three hours you lingered in some doctor’s waiting room. Paying too much attention to how a subject makes you feel or fits your previous experience of life can seduce you away from analyzing how the subject itself operates. This is not to say that there is no learning or thinking value in telling our ex- periences: narratives can be used analytically. Storytelling has the virtue of offering concrete experience—not just the conclusions the experience may have led to. Personal narratives can take us back to the source of our convictions. The problem comes when “relating” to someone’s story becomes a habitual substitute for thinking through the ideas and attitudes that the story suggests. The problem with the personal is perhaps most clear when viewed as half of a particularly vicious set of binary oppositions that might be schematized thus: subjective vs. objective
- 100. personal expression vs. impersonal analysis passionately engaged vs. detached, impassively neutral genuinely felt vs. heartless Like most vicious binaries, the personal/impersonal, heart/head binary overstates the case and obscures the considerable overlap of the two sides. The antidote to the overpersonalizing habit of mind is, as with most habits you want to break, to become more self-conscious about it. Ask yourself, “Is this what I really believe?” Of course, some personal responses can provide valuable beginnings for constructive thinking, provided that, as with generalizing, you get in the habit of tracing your own responses back to their causes. If you find an aspect of your subject irritating or funny or disappointing, locate exact details that evoked your emotional response, and begin to analyze those details. Try this 2.5: Tracing Impressions Back to Causes One of Ernest Hemingway’s principal rules for writing was to trace impressions back to causes. He once wrote to an apprentice writer, “Find what gave you the emotion; what the action was that gave you the excitement. Then write it down, making it clear so the reader will see it too and have the same feeling you had.” You can try this
- 101. exercise anywhere. Wait for an impression to hit, and then record the stimuli—the concrete details that produced your response—as accurately as you can. Try this 2.6: Looking for Naturalized Assumptions Start listening to the things people say in everyday conversation. Read some newspaper editorials with your morning coffee (a pretty disturbing way to start the day in most cases). Watch for examples of people naturalizing their assumptions. You will find examples of this everywhere. Also, try paraphrasing the common complaint “I couldn’t relate to it.” What does being able to “relate” to something consist of? What problems would follow from accepting this idea as a standard of value? OPINIONS (VERSUS IDEAS) Perhaps no single word causes more problems in the relation between students and teachers, and for people in general, than the word opinion. Consider for a moment the often-heard claim “I’m entitled to my opinion.” This claim is worth exploring. What is an opinion? How is it (or isn’t it) different from a belief or an idea? If I say that I am entitled to my opinion, what am I asking you to do or not do? Many of the opinions people fight about are actually clichés, pieces of much- repeated conventional wisdom. For example, “People are
- 102. entitled to say what they want. That’s just my opinion.” But, of course, this assertion isn’t a private and personal revelation. It is an exaggerated and overstated version of one of the items in the U.S. Bill of Rights, guaranteeing freedom of speech. Much public thinking has gone on about this private conviction, and it has thus been carefully qualified. A person can’t, for example, say publicly whatever he or she pleases about other people if what he or she says is false and damages the reputation of another person— at least not without threat of legal action. Our opinions are learned. They are products of our culture and our upbringing— not personal possessions. It is okay to have opinions, but dangerous to give too many of them protected-species status, walling them off into a reserve, not to be touched by reasoning or evidence. Opinions (versus Ideas) 25 26 Chapter 2 Counterproductive Habits of Mind Some things, of course, we have to take on faith. Religious convictions, for example, are more than opinions, though they operate in a similar way: we believe where we can’t always prove. But even our most sacred convictions are not really harmed by thinking. The world’s religions are constantly
- 103. engaged in interpreting and reinterpreting what religious texts mean, what various traditional practices mean, and how they may or may not be adapted to the attitudes and practices of the world as it is today. WHAT IT MEANS TO HAVE AN IDEA Thinking, as opposed to reporting or reacting, should lead you to ideas. But what does it mean to have an idea? This question lies at the heart of this book. It’s one thing to acquire knowledge, but you also need to learn how to produce knowledge, to think for yourself. The problem is that people are daunted when asked to arrive at ideas. They dream up ingenious ways to avoid the task, or they get paralyzed with anxiety. What is an idea? Must an idea be something that is entirely “original”? Must it revamp the way you understand yourself or your stance toward the world? Such expectations are unreasonably grand. Clearly, a writer in the early stages of learning about a subject can’t be expected to arrive at an idea so original that, like a Ph.D. thesis, it revises complex concepts in a discipline. Nor should you count as ideas Ideas versus Opinions Writers need to be aware of the distinction between an argument that seeks support from evidence and mere opinions and assertions. Many
- 104. students taking political science courses often come with the assumption that in politics one opinion is as good as another. (Tocqueville thought this to be a peculiarly democratic disease.) From this perspective any position a po- litical science professor may take on controversial issues is simply his or her opinion to be accepted or rejected by students according to their own beliefs/prejudices. The key task, therefore, is not so much substituting knowledge for opinions, but rather substituting well-constructed arguments for unexamined opinions. What is an argument, and how might it be distinguished from opinions? Several things need to be stressed: (1) The thesis should be linked to evi- dence drawn from relevant sources: polling data, interviews, historical ma- terial, and so forth. (2) The thesis should make as explicit as possible its own ideological assumptions. (3) A thesis, in contrast to mere statement of opinion, is committed to making an argument, which means that it presup- poses a willingness to engage with others. To the extent that writers operate on the assumption that everything is an opinion, they have no reason to construct arguments; they are locked into an opinion. —Jack Gambino, Professor of Political Science
- 105. VOICES FROM ACROSS THE CURRICULUM What It Means to Have an Idea 27 only those that lead to some kind of life-altering discovery. Ideas are usually much smaller in scope, much less grand, than people seem to expect them to be. It is easiest to understand what ideas are by considering what ideas do and where they can be found. Here is a partial list: • An idea answers a question; it explains something that needs to be explained or provides a way out of a difficulty that other people have had in understanding something. • An idea usually starts with an observation that is puzzling, with something you want to figure out rather than something you think you already understand. • An idea may be the discovery of a question where there seemed not to be one. • An idea may make explicit and explore the meaning of something implicit—an unstated assumption upon which an argument rests or a logical consequence of a given position.
- 106. • An idea may connect elements of a subject and explain the significance of that connection. • An idea often accounts for some dissonance—that is, something that seems to not fit together. • An idea provides direction; it helps you see what to do next. Most strong analytical ideas launch you in a process of resolving problems and bringing competing positions into some kind of alignment. They locate you where there is something to negotiate, where you are required not just to list answers but also to ask questions, make choices, and engage in reasoning about the significance of your evidence. Some would argue that ideas are discipline-specific, that what counts as an idea in Psychology differs from what counts as an idea in History or Philosophy or Busi- ness. And surely the context does affect the way that ideas are shaped and expressed. This book operates on the premise, however, that ideas across the curriculum share common elements. All of the items in the list just given, for example, seem to us to be common to ideas and to idea-making in virtually any context. (See Figure 2.2.) HAVING IDEAS RELATING REPORTING
- 107. versus (doing something with the material) (personal experience matters, but . . .) (information matters, but . . .) FIGURE 2.2 Having Ideas Ideas occupy a middle ground between the extremes of sheer personal response and faceless reportage of information. 28 Chapter 2 Counterproductive Habits of Mind RULES OF THUMB FOR HANDLING COMPLEXITY This chapter has been about blocking habits of mind that allow you to evade a more complex way of approaching your writing. Almost all writers feel uncomfortable when encountering complexity. But discomfort need not lead to avoidance or to verbal pa- ralysis. The following rules of thumb can help you to respond to the complexities of the subjects that you write about rather than oversimplifying or evading them. 1. Reduce scope. Whenever possible, reduce drastically the range of your inquiry. Resist the temptation to try to include too much information. Even when an as-
- 108. signment calls for broader coverage of a subject, you will usually do best by cov- ering the ground up front and then analyzing one or two key points in greater depth. For example, if you were asked to write on Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal, you would obviously have to open with some general observations, such as what it was and why it arose. But if you tried to stay on this general level throughout, your paper would have little direction or focus. You could achieve a focus, though, by moving quickly from the general to some much smaller and more specific part of the subject, such as attacks on the New Deal. You would then be able to limit the enormous range of possible evidence to a few representative figures, such as Huey Long, Father Coughlin, and Alf Landon. Once you began to compare the terms and legitimacy of their opposition to the New Deal, you would be much more likely to manage a complex analysis of the subject than if you had remained at the level of broad generalization. 2. Study the wording of topics for unstated questions. Nearly all formulations of a topic contain a number of questions that emerge when you ponder the word- ing. Framing these questions overtly is often the first step to having an idea.
- 109. Take a topic question such as “Is feminism good for Judaism?” It seems to invite you simply to argue yes or no, but it actually requires you to set up and answer a number of implied questions. For example, what does “good for Judaism” mean—that which allows the religion to evolve? That which conserves its tradi- tion? The same kinds of questions might be asked of the term feminism. And what of the possibility that feminism has no significant effect whatsoever? As this example illustrates, even an apparently limited and straightfor- ward question presses writers to make choices about how to engage it. So don’t leap from the topic question to your plan of attack too quickly. One of the best tricks of the trade lies in smoking out the unstated assumptions implied by the wording of the topic, and addressing them. (See Chapter 5, Analyzing Arguments, for more on uncovering assumptions.) 3. Suspect your first responses. If you settle for these, the result is likely to be superficial and overly general. A better strategy is to examine your first responses for ways in which they might be inaccurate, and then develop the implications of these overstatements (or errors) into a new formulation. In many cases, writers go through this process of proposing and rejecting ideas ten times or more before they arrive at an angle or approach that will sustain
- 110. an essay. Rules of Thumb for Handling Complexity 29 A first response is okay for a start, as long as you don’t stop there. So, for example, most of us would agree, at first glance, that no one should be denied health care, or that a given film or novel that concludes with a marriage is a happy ending, or that the American government should not pass trade laws that might cause Americans to lose their jobs. On closer inspection, however, each of these responses begins to reveal its limitations. Given that there is a limited amount of money available, should everyone, regardless of age or physical con- dition, be accorded every medical treatment that might prolong life? And might not a novel or film that concludes in marriage signal that the society depicted offers too few options, or more cynically, that the author is feeding the audience an implausible fantasy to blanket over problems raised earlier in the work? And couldn’t trade laws resulting in short-term loss of jobs ultimately produce more jobs and a healthier economy? As these examples suggest, first responses—usually pieces of conventional wisdom—can blind you to rival explanations. Try not to decide on an answer to
- 111. questions you’re given—or those of your own making—too quickly. 4. Begin with questions, not answers. Whether you are focusing on an assigned topic or devising one of your own, you are usually better off to begin with something that you don’t understand very well and want to understand better. Begin by asking what kinds of questions the material poses. So, for example, if you are convinced that Robinson Crusoe changes throughout Defoe’s novel and you write a paper cataloging those changes, you essentially are composing a selec- tive plot summary. If, by contrast, you wonder why Crusoe walls himself within a fortress after he discovers a footprint in the sand, you will be more likely to interpret the significance of events than just to report them. 5. Write all of the time about what you are studying. Doing so is probably the single best preparation for developing your own interest in a subject and for finding interesting approaches to it. Don’t wait to start writing until you think you have an idea you can organize a paper around. By writing informally—as a matter of routine—about what you are studying, you can acquire the habits of mind necessary to having and developing ideas. Similarly, by reading as often and as attentively as you can, and writing spontaneously about what you read, you will accustom yourself to being a less passive consumer of ideas and
- 112. information, and will have more ideas and information available to think actively with and about. (See Freewriting in Chapter 3, A Toolkit of Analytical Methods, for more.) 6. Accept that interest is a product of writing—not a prerequisite. The best way to get interested is to expect to become interested. Writing gives you the opportunity to cultivate your curiosity by thinking exploratively. Rather than approaching topics in a mechanical way, or putting them off to the last possible moment and doing the assignment grudgingly, try giving yourself and the topic the benefit of the doubt. If you can suspend judgment and start writing, you will often find yourself uncovering interests where you had not seen them before. 7. Use the “backburner.” In restaurants, the backburner is the place that chefs leave their sauces and soup stocks to simmer while they are actively engaged in other, more immediately pressing and faster operations on the frontburners. 30 Chapter 2 Counterproductive Habits of Mind Think of your brain as having a backburner—a place where you can set and temporarily forget (though not entirely) some piece of thinking that you are
- 113. working on. A good way to use the backburner is to read through and take some notes on something you are writing about—or perhaps a recent draft of something you are having trouble finishing—just before you go to sleep at night. Writers who do this often wake up to find whole outlines, whole strings of useful words already formed in their heads. Keep a notebook by your bed and record these early-morning thoughts. If you do this over a period of days (which as- sumes, of course, that you will need to start your writing projects well in advance of deadlines), you will be surprised at how much thinking you can do when you didn’t know you were doing it. The backburner keeps working during the day as well—periodically insisting that the frontburner, your more conscious self, listen to what it has to say. Pretty soon, ideas start popping up all over the place. In the context of this discussion, we’ll end these rules of thumb with the following anecdote. The wife of the writer and cartoonist, James Thurber, reportedly was asked about her husband’s behavior at dinner parties wherein he occasionally went blank and seemed to be staring off into space. “Oh, don’t worry about that,” she said. “He’s all right. He’s just writing.” ASSIGNMENT: Observation Practice Among the habits of mind that this chapter recommends, one of
- 114. the most useful (and potentially entertaining) is to trace impressions, reactions, sudden thoughts, moods, etc., back to their probable causes. Practice this skill for a week, recording at least one impression a day in some detail (that is, what you both thought and felt). Then deter- mine at least three concrete causes of your response. That is, go after specific sensory details. For class purposes, pick one or two of your journal writings and revise them to a form that could be shared with other members of the class. Interesting subjects for such writing might include your response to first-year student orientation, some other feature of the beginning of the school year, or your response to selected places on campus. What impact do certain places have on you? Why? CHAPTER 3 A Toolkit of Analytical Methods Once I begin the act of writing, it all falls away—the view from the window, the tools, the talismans, even the snoring cat—and I am unconscious of myself and my surroundings while I fuse language with idea, make a spe- cific image visible or audible through the discovery of the right words . . . One’s carping inner critics are silenced for a time, and, as a result, what
- 115. is produced is a little bit different from anything I had planned. There is always a surprise, a revelation. During the act of writing I have told myself something that I didn’t know I knew. —Gail Godwin, “How I Write” (Boston: The Writer, October 1987) In a recent (and fascinating) bestseller entitled Blink, Malcolm Gladwell offers an exploration into intuitive knowing. Gladwell ultimately argues that there is a big difference between experts who make decisions in the blink of an eye and rela- tive novices (people outside their area of expertise) who do so. He finds that although both novices and experts can make intuitive decisions based on rapid assessment of key details (a process he calls thin slicing), the accuracy and quality of these decisions is incomparably better in thinkers who have trained their habits of perception. This chapter offers a set of procedures—tools—for training your habits of per- ception, especially those habits that allow you to see significant detail. The tools are presented as formulae that you can apply to anything you wish to better understand. We have deliberately given each of the tools a name and nameable steps so that they are easy to invoke consciously in place of the semi-conscious glide into such habits as overgeneralizing and the judgment reflex. (See Chapter 2, Counterproductive Habits
- 116. of Mind, for more.) Most of the items in the Toolkit share the trait of encouraging defamiliarization. In the last chapter we spoke of the necessity of defamiliarizing—of finding ways to see things that the veneer of familiarity would otherwise render invisible. This involves recognizing that the apparently self-evident meanings of things seem “natural” and “given” only because we have been conditioned to see them this way. Most of us assume, for example, that the media is a site of public knowledge and awareness. But look what happens to that idea when defamiliarized by Jonathan Franzen in a recent essay (“Imperial Bedroom”): 31 32 Chapter 3 A Toolkit of Analytical Methods Since really serious exposure in public today is assumed to be synonymous with being seen on television, it would seem to follow that televised space is the premier public space. Many things that people say to me on television, however, would never be tolerated in a genuine public space— in a jury box, for example, or even on a city sidewalk. TV is an enormous, ramified exten- sion of the billion living rooms and bedrooms in which it’s
- 117. consumed. You rarely hear a person on the subway talking loudly about, say, incontinence, but on television it’s been happening for years. TV is devoid of shame, and without shame there can be no distinction between public and private. Franzen here enables us to see freshly by offering us details that challenge our conventional notions of public and private. Seeing in this way requires that we attend carefully to the concrete aspect of things. We admit that in some cases it is the fear of the unfamiliar rather than the blind- ness bred of habit that keeps people from looking closely at things. Such is the situ- ation of college students confronted with difficult and unfamiliar reading. And so, there is clearly some value in using habit to domesticate the unfamiliar in particular (and daunting) circumstances. Nevertheless, it’s probably easier to overcome the fear of grappling with new material than it is to turn off the notion that meanings are obvious. (On strategies for tackling difficult reading, see the discussions of Paraphrase " 3 and Passage-Based Focused Freewriting later in this chapter. See also Chapter 13, Reading Analytically.) Before introducing the Toolkit, we should say that what we are proposing is (in a sense) nothing new. There is a long history dating back to the ancient Greek and
- 118. Roman rhetoricians of using formulae to discover and develop ideas. In classical rhetoric, the pursuit and presentation of ideas—of workable claims for arguments— was divided into five stages: inventio, dispositio, elocutio, memoria, and pronuntiatio. For present purposes we need to concentrate on only two— inventio (invention) and dispositio (disposition). Disposition includes the various means of effectively organizing a speech or piece of writing, given that rhetoric is concerned with the means of persuasion. Invention includes various ways of finding things to say, of discovering arguable claims to develop and dispose (arrange). The early rhetoricians thought of invention in terms of what they called “topics,” from the Greek word topoi, meaning place or region. The topics were “places” that an orator (speech-maker) could visit, mentally, to discover possible ways of developing a subject. The topics are what we might now think of as strategies—a word which, inter- estingly, has its roots in the Greek word for army, and, thus, with the idea of winning over an audience to your point of view and defeating enemies. Because the quality and plausibility of a writer’s ideas constitute, arguably, the best means of persuading an audi- ence, we here emphasize ways of discovering as much as possible about your evidence. THE TOOLKIT What follows are a set of fundamental analytical activities—
- 119. tools that effective think- ers use constantly, whether they are aware of using them or not. Some people do indeed have ideas as sudden flashes of inspiration (in the blink of an eye), but there is method even in such seemingly intuitive leaps. And when the sudden flashes of inspiration don’t come, method is even more essential. One trick to becoming a better observer and thus a better thinker is to slow down, to stop trying to draw conclusions before you’ve spent time openly attending to the data, letting yourself notice more. Better ideas grow out of a richer acquaintance with whatever it is you are looking at. Observation and interpretation go hand in hand, but it helps greatly to allow yourself a distinct observation stage and to prolong this beyond what most people find comfortable. All of the activities in the Toolkit seek to create such a stage. The Toolkit will also help you to stave off anxiety about assimi- lating difficult material by giving you something concrete to do with it, rather than expecting yourself to leap instantly to understanding. The activities in the Toolkit can be conducted either orally or in writing and should be practiced again and again, until they become habitual. The activities them- selves do not produce ready-made papers, and may in fact produce an abundance of
- 120. writing that never makes it through to the final draft. But the thinking these activities inspire ultimately produces much better final results. There are, of course, more observational and idea-generating methods than we have offered here. In classical rhetoric, for example, the topics of invention include such things as the traditional rhetorical modes (comparison and contrast, classifica- tion, definition, etc.) and ways of inventorying an audience to discover things that need to be said. Our purpose in this chapter is narrower. We are concentrating on ways of looking at data—whether in print, visual, or the world—that will allow you to become more fully aware of the features that define your subject, that make it what it is. (Later chapters offer tools for other, mostly later-stage tasks such as making in- terpretive leaps, conversing with sources, and finding and evolving a thesis.) PARAPHRASE " 3 The activity we call Paraphrase " 3 offers the quickest means of seeing how a little writ- ing about something you’re reading can lead to having ideas about it. Paraphrasing moves toward interpretation because it tends to uncover areas of uncertainty and find questions. It instantly defamiliarizes. It also keeps your focus small so that you can practice thinking in depth rather than going for an overly broad “big picture.” Paraphrasing is commonly misunderstood as summary (a way of
- 121. shrinking material you’ve read) or perhaps as simply a way to avoid plagiarism by putting it in your own words. Too often when people wish to understand or retain information, they summarize—that is, they produce a general overview of what the words say. Paraphras- ing stays much closer to the actual words than summarizing. The word paraphrase means to put one phrase next to (para) another phrase. When you paraphrase a pas- sage, you cast and recast its key terms into near synonyms, translating it into a parallel statement. The goal of paraphrasing is to open up the possible meanings of the words; it’s a mode of inquiry. Why is paraphrasing useful? The answer has to do with words— what they are and what we do with them. When we read, it is easy to skip quickly over the words, assum- ing we know what they mean. Yet when people start talking about what they mean by Paraphrase ! 3 33 34 Chapter 3 A Toolkit of Analytical Methods particular words—the difference, for example, between assertive and aggressive or the meaning of ordinary words such as polite, realistic, or gentlemanly—they usually find less agreement than they expected. Most words mean more than one thing, and mean
- 122. different things to different people. What you say is inescapably a product of how you say it. Language doesn’t merely reflect reality; what we see as reality is shaped by the words we use. This idea is known as the constitutive theory of language. It is opposed to the so- called “transparent” theory of language, wherein it is implied that we can see through words to some meaning that exists beyond and is independent of them. When you paraphrase language, whether your own or language you encounter in your reading, you are not just defining terms but opening out the wide range of implications those words inevitably possess. We call this activity Paraphrase " 3 because usually one paraphrase is not enough. Take a sentence you want to understand better and recast it into other language three times. This will banish the problematic notion that the meaning of words is self- evident, and it will stimulate your thinking. If you paraphrase a key passage from a reading several times, you will discover that it gets you working with the language. But you need to paraphrase slavishly. You can’t let yourself just go for the gist; replace all of the key words. The new words you are forced to come up with represent first stabs at interpretation, at having (small) ideas about what you are reading by unearthing a range of possible meanings embedded in the passage.
- 123. In practice, Paraphrase " 3 has three steps: 1. Select a single sentence or phrase from whatever it is you are studying that you think is interesting, perhaps puzzling, and especially useful for understanding the material. 2. Do Paraphrase " 3. Find synonyms for all of the key terms— and do this three times. 3. Reflect. What have you come to recognize about the original passage on the basis of repeated restatement? Try this 3.1: Experimenting with Paraphrase " 3 Recast the substantive language of the following statements using Paraphrase " 3: • I am entitled to my opinion. • We hold these truths to be self-evident. • That’s just common sense. What do you come to understand about these remarks as a result of paraphrasing? Which words, for example, are most slippery (that is, difficult to define)? It is interesting to note, by the way, that Thomas Jefferson originally wrote the words “sacred and undeniable” in his draft of the Declaration of Independence, instead of “self-evident.” So what?
- 124. Notice and Focus (Ranking) 35 Try this 3.2: Doing Paraphrase " 3 with a Reading Recast the substantive language of a key sentence or short passage in something you are reading—say, a passage you find central or difficult in any of your assigned reading, the kind of passage most likely to attract yellow highlighter. Try not to make the language of your paraphrase more general than the original. This method is an excellent way to prepare for class discussion or to generate thinking about the read- ing that you might use in a paper. It is also, as we discuss in Unit III, a key method of analyzing the secondary sources that you draw on in your papers. NOTICE AND FOCUS (RANKING) The activity called Notice and Focus guides you to dwell longer with the data before feeling compelled to decide what the data mean. Repeatedly returning to the question, “What do you notice?” is one of the best ways to counteract the tendency to generalize too rapidly. “What do you notice?” redirects attention to the subject matter itself and delays the pressure to come up with answers. So the first step is to repeatedly answer the question, “What do you notice?” being
- 125. sure to cite actual details of the thing being observed rather than moving to more general observations about it. This phase of the exercise should produce an extended and unordered list of details—features of the thing being observed—that call atten- tion to themselves for one reason or another. The second step is the focusing part in which you rank (create an order of impor- tance for) the various features of the subject that you have noticed. Answer the question “Which three details (specific features of the subject matter) are most interesting (or significant or revealing or strange)?” The purpose of relying on “interesting” or one of the other suggested words is that these will help to deactivate the like/dislike switch, which is so much a reflex in all of us, and replace it with a more analytical perspective. The third step in this process is to say why the three things you selected struck you as the most interesting. Your attempts to answer this “why” question will trigger leaps from observation to interpretive conclusions. Doing Notice and Focus is more difficult than it sounds. Remember to allow your- self to notice as much as you can about what you are looking at before you try to explain it. Dwell with the data (in that attitude of uncertainty we’ve recommended in Chapter 2). Record what you see. Resist moving to generalization or, worse, to judg- ment. The longer you allow yourself to dwell on the data, the
- 126. more you will notice, and the richer your interpretation of the evidence will ultimately be. Prompts: Interesting and Strange What does it mean to find something “interesting”? Often we are interested by things that have captured our attention without our clearly knowing why. Interest and curiosity are near cousins. The word strange is a useful prompt because it gives us permission to notice oddities. Strange invites us to defamiliarize things within our range of notice. Strange, 36 Chapter 3 A Toolkit of Analytical Methods in this context, is not a judgmental term but one denoting features of a subject or situation that aren’t readily explainable. Where you locate something strange, you have something to interpret—to figure out what makes it strange and why. Along similar lines, the words revealing and significant work by requiring you to make choices that can lead to interpretive leaps. If something strikes you as revealing or significant, even if you’re not yet sure why, you will eventually have to produce some explanation.
- 127. Try this 3.3: Doing Notice and Focus with a Room Practice this activity with the room you’re in. List a number of details about it, then rank the three most important ones. Use as a focusing question any of the four words suggested above—interesting, significant, revealing or strange. Or come up with your own focus for the ranking, such as the three aspects of the room that seem most to affect the way you feel and behave in the space. Try this 3.4: Notice and Focus Fieldwork Try this exercise with a range of subjects: a photograph, a cartoon, an editorial, conversations overheard around campus, looking at people’s shoes, political speeches, and so forth. Remember to include all three steps: notice, rank and say why. 10 ON 1 The exercise we call 10 on 1 is a cousin of Notice and Focus—it too depends on extended observation but with more focus and usually occurring at a later stage of analysis. Notice and Focus is useful because it frees you to look at the object with no constraints or prejudgments. Notice and Focus treats your subject matter as a broad canvas to move around in. 10 on 1 promotes a more intensive and elaborate explora- tion of a single representative piece of evidence. 10 on 1 is built on the idea that one sure way to notice more is to narrow your scope.
- 128. The term 10 on 1 is shorthand for the principle that it is better to make ten ob- servations or points about a single representative issue or example (10 on 1) than to make the same basic point about ten related issues or examples (1 on 10). A paper that has evolved from detailed analysis of what the writer takes to be his or her single most telling example is far more likely to arrive at a good idea than a paper that settles prematurely for one idea and applies it mechanically to each piece of evidence it encounters (i.e., the same general idea attached to 10 similar examples). The shift from making one observation about ten examples to making ten pos- sible observations about your single best example is the aim of the exercise. Ten, in this case, is an arbitrary number. The ten are the observations you make about your representative example along with any ideas these observations start to give you. If you can keep the number 10 in mind, it will prod you to keep asking yourself ques- tions rather than stopping the observation process too soon. What do I notice? What else do I notice? What might this imply? What else might it imply? For extended discussion of doing 10 on 1 as an organizational principle for papers, see Chapter 8 (Using Evidence to Build a Paper) in Unit II, Writing the Analytical
- 129. The Method: Working with Patterns of Repetition and Contrast 37 Essay. We have included this brief discussion to better integrate 10 on 1 with our other observational strategies. THE METHOD: WORKING WITH PATTERNS OF REPETITION AND CONTRAST The Method is our shorthand for a systematic procedure for analyzing evidence by looking for patterns of repetition and contrast. It differs from other tools we have been offering in being more comprehensive. Whereas Notice and Focus and 10 on 1 cut through a wealth of data to focus on individual details, The Method goes for the whole picture, involving methodical application of a matrix or grid of observational moves upon a subject. Although these are separate moves, they also work together and build cumulatively to the discovery of an infrastructure, a blueprint of the whole. Here is the procedure in its most pared-down form: • What repeats? • What goes with what? • What is opposed to what? • What doesn’t fit? • And for any of these, so what?
- 130. As you can see, these are the steps that we first presented as Move 4, Look for Patterns, in the Five Analytical Moves of Chapter 1. Now we are returning to this move in more elaborate form. Before laying out these steps more precisely, we want first to mention that The Method can be applied to virtually anything you wish to analyze—an essay, a political campaign, a work of visual or verbal art, a dense passage from some secondary source that you feel to be important but can’t quite figure out, and, last but not least, your own writing. It may be helpful to think of this method of analysis as a form of mental doo- dling, one that encourages the attitude of negative capability we spoke of in Chapter 2. Rather than worrying about what you are going to say, or about whether you under- stand, you instead get out a pencil and start tallying up what you see. Engaged in this process, you’ll soon find yourself gaining entry to the logic of your subject matter. The method of looking for patterns works through a series of steps. Hold yourself initially to doing the steps one at a time and in order. Later, you will be able to record your answers under each of the three steps simultaneously. Although the steps of The Method are discrete and modular, they are also consecutive. They proceed by a kind of narrative logic. Each step leads logically to the next, and then to various kinds of regrouping, which is actually rethinking. (Note: we have
- 131. divided into two kinds of repetition, exact and similar, what was one step in the Five Analytical Moves.) Step 1. Locate exact repetitions—identical or nearly identical words or details—and note the number of times each repeats. For example, if the word seems repeats three times, write “seems " 3.” Consider different forms of the same word—seemed, seem—as exact repetitions. Similarly, if 38 Chapter 3 A Toolkit of Analytical Methods you are working with images rather than words, the repeated appearance of high foreheads would constitute an exact repetition. Concentrate on substantive (meaning-carrying) words. Only in rare cases do words like “and” or “the” merit attention as a significant repetition. If you are working with a longer text, such as an essay or book chapter or short story, limit yourself to recording the half-dozen or so words that call attention to themselves through repetition. Step 2. Locate repetitions of the same or similar kind of detail or word—which we call strands—and name the connecting logic. (For example, polite, courteous, mannerly and accuse, defense, justice, witness are strands.)
- 132. Simply listing the various strands that you find in your evidence goes a long way toward helping you discover what is most interesting and important for you to ad- dress. But to use the discovery of strands as an analytical tool, you have to do more than list. You have to name the common denominators that make the words or details in your list identifiable as a strand. Naming and renaming your strands will trigger ideas; it is itself an analytical move. And again, when working with longer pieces, try to locate the half-dozen strands that seem to you most important. Step 3. Locate details or words that form or suggest binary oppositions, and select from these the most important ones, which function as organizing contrasts. Sometimes patterns of repetition that you begin to notice in a particular subject matter are significant because they are part of a contrast—a basic opposition—around which the subject matter is structured. To find these oppositions, ask yourself, What is opposed to what? When looking for binary oppositions, start with what’s on the page. List words or details that are opposed to other words or details. Note that often these opposi- tions are not obvious; you need to become aware of what is repeatedly there and then ask yourself, is something opposed to this? And often the oppositions that you discover are not actual words in a text but implied
- 133. meanings. For example, images of rocks and water might suggest the binary permanence/impermanence or unchanging/changing. This process of constructing binary oppositions from the data usually leads you to discover what we call organizing contrasts. An organizing contrast is a central bi- nary, one that reveals the central issues and concerns in the material you are studying and also provides—like the structural beam in a building—its unifying shape. Some examples that we encounter frequently are nature/civilization, city/country, public/ private, organic/ inorganic, and voluntary/involuntary. Step 4. Rank the data within your lists to isolate what you take to be the most important repetitions, strands, and binaries. Then write a paragraph—half a page or so—in which you explain your choice of one repetition or one strand or one binary as central to understanding whatever you have been observing. Ranking your data in terms of its importance is a means of moving toward interpretive leaps. Your most impor- tant binaries might be a pair of opposed terms and/or ideas, but each might also be a strand that is opposed to another strand. The Method: Working with Patterns of Repetition and Contrast 39
- 134. Step 5. Search for anomalies—data that do not seem to fit any of the dominant patterns. We have made this the last step because anomalies often become evident only after you have begun to discern a pattern, so it is best to locate repetitions, strands, and organizing contrasts—things that fit together in some way— before looking for things that seem not to fit. Once you see an anomaly, you will often find that it is part of a strand you had not detected (and perhaps one side of a previously unseen binary). In this respect, looking for anomalies encourages defamiliarizing—it’s great for shaking yourself out of potentially limited ways of looking at your evi- dence and getting you to consider other possible interpretations. Thinking Recursively with Strands and Binaries Applying The Method has the effect of inducing you to get physical with the data— literally, for you will probably find yourself circling, underlining, and listing. Although you will thus descend from the heights of abstraction to the realm of concrete detail, the point of tallying repetitions and strands and binaries and then selecting the most important and interesting ones is to trigger ideas. The discipline required to notice patterns in the language produces more specific, more carefully grounded conclusions than you otherwise might produce. You should expect ideas to suggest themselves to you as you move through the
- 135. mechanical steps of The Method. The active thinking often takes place as you are grouping and regrouping. As you start listing, you will find that strands begin to sug- gest other strands that are in opposition to them. And you may find that words you first took to be parts of a single strand are actually parts of different strands and are, perhaps, in opposition. This process of noticing and then relocating words and details into different patterns is one aspect of using The Method that can push your analysis to interpretation. To some extent using The Method is archaeological. It digs into the language or the material details of whatever you are analyzing in order to unearth its thinking. This is most evident in the discovery of organizing contrasts. Binary oppositions often indicate places where there is struggle among various points of view. And there is usually no single “right” answer about which of a number of binaries is the primary organizing contrast. One of the best ways to develop your analyses is to reformulate binaries, trying on different possible oppositions as the primary one. (For more on using binaries analytically, see Chapter 5, Analyzing Arguments.) Thus far we have been talking about The Method as a grid for viewing other peo- ple’s finished work. The Method also describes the processes by which writers, artists, scientists, and all manner of thinkers create those works in the
- 136. first place. Much of the thinking that we do as we write and read happens through a process of associa- tion, which is, by its very nature, repetitive. In associative thinking, thoughts develop as words and details, which suggest other words and details that are like them. Thinking moves not just forward in a straight line, but sideways and in circles. We repeatedly make connections; we figure out what goes with what and what is opposed to what. In this sense, writing (making something out of words) and reading (arriving at an understanding of someone else’s words) operate in much the same way. 40 Chapter 3 A Toolkit of Analytical Methods Generating Ideas with The Method: An Example See how the thinking in the following paragraph moves because the writer is noting strands and binaries. First he notes the differences in two kinds of fashion ads aimed at men. There are the high-fashion ads and the Dockers ads. In the first of these, the word beautiful repeats twice as part of a strand (including gorgeous, interesting, supermodel, demure). The writer then poses traits of the Dockers ads as an opposing strand. Instead of a beautiful face there is no face, instead of “gorgeous outfit,” the author says “it’s tough to concentrate on
- 137. the clothes.” These oppositions cause the writer to make his interpretive leap, that the Dockers ads “weren’t primarily concerned with clothes at all” and that this was intentional. The most striking aspect of the spots is how different they are from typical fashion advertising. If you look at men’s fashion magazines, for example, at the advertisements for the suits of Ralph Lauren or Valentino or Hugo Boss, they almost always consist of a beautiful man, with something in- teresting done to his hair, wearing a gorgeous outfit. At the most, the man may be gesturing discreetly, or smiling in the demure way that a man like that might smile after, say, telling the supermodel at the next table no thanks he has to catch an early-morning flight to Milan. But that’s all. The beautiful face and the clothes tell the whole story. The Dockers ads, though, are almost exactly the opposite. There’s no face. The camera is jumping around so much that it’s tough to concentrate on the clothes. And instead of stark simplicity, the fashion image is overlaid with a constant, confusing patter. It’s almost as if the Dockers ads weren’t primarily con- cerned with clothes at all—and in fact that’s exactly what Levi’s intended. What the company had discovered, in its research, was that baby-boomer
- 138. men felt that the chief thing missing from their lives was male friend- ship. Caught between the demands of the families that many of them had started in the eighties and career considerations that had grown more onerous, they felt they had lost touch with other men. The purpose of the ads—the chatter, the lounging around, the quick cuts—was simply to conjure up a place where men could put on one-hundred- percent-cotton khakis and reconnect with one another. In the original advertising brief, that imaginary place was dubbed Dockers World. —Malcolm Gladwell, “Listening to Khakis” Doing The Method on a Poem: Our Analysis Here is an example of how one might do The Method on a piece of text—in this case, a student poem. You might try it yourself first, using our version to check against your own. The Method: Working with Patterns of Repetition and Contrast 41 Brooklyn Heights, 4:00 A.M. Dana Ferrelli sipping a warm forty oz.
- 139. Coors Light on a stoop in Brooklyn Heights. I look across the street, in the open window; Blonde bobbing heads, the smack of a jump rope, laughter of my friends breaking beer bottles. Putting out their burning filters on the #5 of a hopscotch court. We reminisce of days when we were Fat, pimple faced— look how far we’ve come. But tomorrow a little blonde girl will pick up a Marlboro Light filter, just to play. And I’ll buy another forty, because that’s how I play now. Reminiscing about how far I’ve come 1. Words that repeat exactly: forty " 2, blonde " 2, how far
- 140. we’ve (I’ve) come " 2, light " 2, reminisce, reminiscing " 2, filter, filters " 2, Brooklyn Heights " 2 2. Strands: jump rope, laughter, play, hopscotch (connecting logic: childhood games representing the carefree worldview of childhood); Coors Light, Marlboro Light filters, beer bottles (connecting logic: drugs, adult “games,” escapism?); smack, burning, breaking (violent actions and powerful emotion: burning) 3. Binary oppositions: how far we’ve come/how far I’ve come (a move from plural to singular, from a sense of group identity to isolation, from group values to a more individual consideration) 42 Chapter 3 A Toolkit of Analytical Methods Blonde bobbing heads/little blonde girl Burning/putting out Coors Light, Marlboro Lights/jump rope, hopscotch How far I’ve come (two meanings of far?, one positive, one not) Heights/stoop Present/past
- 141. 4. Ranked repetitions, strands and binaries plus paragraph explaining the choice of one of these as central to understanding. Most important repetitions: forty, how far we’ve/I’ve come Most important strands: jump rope, laughter, play, hopscotch; Coors Light, Marlboro Light filters, beer bottles Most important binaries: jump rope, laugher, play, hopscotch versus Coors Light, Marlboro Light filters, beer bottles; burning/putting out Paragraph(s): This is a poem about growing up—or failing to grow up, both being subjects about which the poem expresses mixed emotions. The repetition of forty (forty-ounce beer) is interesting in this context. It signals a certain weariness—perhaps with a kind of pun on forty to suggest middle age and thus the speaker’s concern about moving toward being older in a way that seems stale and flat. The beer, after all, is warm— which is not the best state for a beer to be in, once opened, if it is to retain its taste and character. Forty ounces of beer—“supersizing”—suggest excess. This reading of forty as excess along with the possible allusion to middle age takes us to what is, in our reading of the poem, the most important (or at least most interesting) binary opposition: burning versus putting out. We are
- 142. attracted to this binary because it seems to be part of a more intense strand in the poem, one that runs counter to the weary prospect of moving on toward a perhaps lonely (“how far I’ve come”) middle-aged feeling. Burning goes with breaking and the smack of the jump rope, and even putting out, if we visualize putting out not just as fire extinguished but in terms of putting a cigarette out by pushing the burning end of it into something (the number 5 on the hopscotch court). The poem’s language has a violent and passionate edge to it, even though the violent words are not always in a violent context (for example, the smack of the jump rope). This is a rather melancholy poem in which, perhaps, the poetic voice is mourning the passing, the “putting out” of the passion of youth (“burning”). In the poem’s more obvious binary—the opposition of childhood games to more “adult” ones—the same melancholy plays itself out, making the poem’s refrain-like repetition of “how far I’ve come” ring with unhappy irony. The little blonde girl is an image of the speaker’s own past self (because the poem talks about reminiscing), and the speaker mourns that little girl’s (her own) passing into a more uncertain and less carefree state. It is 4:00 a.m. in Brooklyn Heights—just about the end of night, the darkest point perhaps before the beginning of morning, and windows in the poem are open, so things are
- 143. The Method: Working with Patterns of Repetition and Contrast 43 not all bad. The friends make noise together, break bottles together, revisit hopscotch square 5 together, and contemplate moving on. We couldn’t, by the way, find any significant anomalies (step 5) in the poem. That in itself suggests how highly patterned the poem is around its basic strands and binaries. Try this 3.5: Apply The Method to Something You Are Reading Try The Method on a piece of reading that you wish to understand better, perhaps a series of editorials on the same subject, an essay, one or more poems by the same author (because The Method is useful for reading across texts for common denomina- tors), a collection of stories, a political speech, and so on. You can work with as little as a few paragraphs or as much as an entire article or chapter or book. A Procedure for Finding and Querying Binaries As should be evident, working with binaries is central to using The Method. But bi- naries are so pervasive a part of analysis that we’ve given them their own place in the Toolkit, and we take them up again in an upcoming chapter (Chapter 5, Analyzing
- 144. Arguments). In Chapter 5 we argue that writing and analyzing arguments is largely a mat- ter of unearthing, rephrasing, and reevaluating the binary oppositions (this against that, on/off, dark/light, wild/domestic) that undergird them. Working with binaries is not the same thing as either/or thinking (right/wrong, good/bad, black/white, wel- fare state/free society). Either/or thinking is a problem because it reduces things to oversimplified extremes and reduces complex situations to only two choices. Work- ing with binaries, however, is not about creating stark oppositions and weighing in heavily on one side or the other. It is about finding these oppositions and querying their accuracy. In Chapter 5 there is a fuller discussion of a four-step procedure for working with binaries. This procedure should enhance your ability to understand and confront other people’s arguments and your own. Here, in brief, are the four steps: 1. Locate a Range of Opposing Categories (Binaries) 2. Analyze and Define the Opposing Terms 3. Question the Accuracy of the Binary and Rephrase the Terms 4. Substitute “To What Extent?” for “Either/Or” Step four is the move that we are recommending now. It is a
- 145. tool for rephrasing either/or choices—either free enterprise or government control—into qualified claims, making things a matter of degree. The operative phrase is “to what extent” or “the extent to which.” To what extent is the Supreme Court decision on allowing manufac- turers to set minimum prices for retailers an evasion of government responsibility in favor of unregulated free enterprise? Try this 3.6: Working with Binaries Write a few paragraphs in which you work with the binaries suggested by the follow- ing familiar expression: “School gets in the way of one’s education.” Keep the focus on 44 Chapter 3 A Toolkit of Analytical Methods working through the binaries implicit in the quotation. What other terms would you substitute for “school” and “education”? Coming up with a range of synonyms for each term will clarify what is at stake in the binary. Remember to consider the accuracy of the claim. To what extent, and in what ways, is the expression both true and false? Try this 3.7: Fieldwork in Either/Or Thinking Locate some organizing contrasts in anything—something you are studying, some- thing you’ve just written, something you saw on television last
- 146. night, something on the front page of the newspaper, something going on at your campus or workplace, and so forth. Binaries pervade the way we think; therefore, you can expect to find them everywhere. Consider, for example, the binaries suggested by current trends in contemporary music or by the representation of women in birthday cards. Having selected the binaries you want to work with, pick one and transform the either/or thinking into more qualified thinking using the extent-to-which formula. FREEWRITING We have placed freewriting last in the Toolkit because it draws on the other writing strategies discussed in this chapter, notably paraphrasing and 10 on 1. Freewriting is a method of arriving at ideas by writing continuously about a subject for a limited period of time without pausing to edit, correct, bite your pen, or stare into space. The rationale behind this activity can be understood through a well- known remark by the novelist E.M. Forster (in regard to the “tyranny” of prearranging everything): “How do I know what I think until I see what I say?” Freewriting gives you the chance to see what you’ll say. The writer Anne Lamott writes eloquently (in Bird by Bird) about the censor we all hear as a nasty voice—actually a collection of nasty voices—in our
- 147. heads that keep us from writing. These are the internalized voices of past cr itics whose comments have become magnified to suggest that we will never get it right. Freewriting allows us to tune out these voices long enough to discover what we might think. This activity is sometimes known by the term prewriting. We prefer the terms freewriting or exploratory writing because prewriting implies something that happens before writing and that has no place in the final form. Good analytical writing, at whatever stage, has an exploratory feel. It shares its discovery process with the reader. And to a significant extent, the final draft re-creates for the reader the writer’s experi- ence of arriving at his or her key ideas. This is not to say that writers should care only about the process of discovery and not about the final product, nor are we suggesting that writers should substitute freewriting and inconclusive thinking for carefully organized finished drafts. We are claiming, however, that writers have a much easier and more productive experience revising the final or penultimate draft if they spend more time doing various kinds of exploratory writing before moving to the final draft stage. Freewriting 45
- 148. In freewriting, you write without stopping for a predetermined period of time, usually ten to twenty minutes. There aren’t many rules to freewriting, just that it is important to keep your pen (or fingers on the keyboard) moving. Don’t reread as you go. Don’t pause to correct things. Don’t cross things out. Just keep writing. To get to good writing, you first have to tolerate some chaos. In freewriting, especially if you engage in it frequently, you often surprise yourself with the quality of your own thinking, with the ideas you didn’t really know you had and the many details you hadn’t really noticed until you started writing. Try this 3.8: Descriptions from Everyday Life Spend a week describing things that you can observe in your everyday environment— whatever interests you on a particular day, or the same kind of thing over a period of days. Get the details of what you are describing on the page. If judgments and general- izations emerge, let them come, but don’t stay on them long. Get back to the narration of detail as quickly as you can. At the end of the week, write a piece called either “What I learned in a week of looking at . . . ” or come up with your own shaping title. Passage-Based Focused Freewriting Passage-based focused freewriting is a version of freewriting particularly suited for increasing your ability to learn from what you read. It prompts
- 149. in-depth analysis of a representative example, on the assumption that you’ll attain a better appreciation of the whole after you’ve explored how a piece of it works. Passage-based focused freewriting resembles freewriting in encouraging you to leap associatively from idea to idea as they arise, and it differs from a finished essay, in which the sentences follow logically as you unfold your central idea. The passage- based version differs from regular freewriting, however, in adding the limitation of focus on a piece of text within which this associative thinking may occur. Narrow the scope to a single passage, a brief piece of the reading (at least a sen- tence, at most a paragraph) to anchor your analysis. You might choose the passage in answer to one of the following questions: • What one passage in the reading most needs to be discussed— is most useful for understanding the material—and why? • What one passage seems puzzling, difficult to pin down, anomalous, or even just unclear—and how might this be explained? One advantage of focused freewriting is that its impromptu nature encourages you to take chances, to think out loud on the page. It invites you to notice what you notice in the moment and take some stabs at what it might mean without having to
- 150. worry about formulating a weighty thesis statement or maintaining consistency. It allows you to worry less about what you don’t understand and instead start to work things out as you write. There is no set procedure for such writing, but here are some guidelines: 46 Chapter 3 A Toolkit of Analytical Methods 1. Seek to understand before you judge. Focus on what the text is saying and doing and what it is inviting readers to think, not on your own agreement/ disagreement or like/dislike. Attend to the point of view it advances on the subject at hand, not to your point of view on that subject. Eventually you should arrive at your point of view about its point of view, but that generally comes later. 2. Choose a limited piece of concrete evidence to focus on. Select a passage that you find interesting, that you have questions about, perhaps one that you don’t quite understand. That way your writing will have some work to do. 3. Contextualize the evidence. Where does the passage come from in the text? Of what larger discussion is it a part? Briefly answering these questions prevents
- 151. you from taking things out of context. 4. Make observations about the evidence. Stay close to the data you’ve quoted. Paraphrase key phrases in the passage, teasing out the possible meanings of these words. Then reflect on what you’ve come to better understand through para- phrasing. Note: to encourage attention to the words and discourage overly gen- eral leaps, it is useful to write out the passage before you begin your freewriting (especially if you are being asked to do the freewriting in class, as is often the case in college writing). The act of copying often induces you to notice more about the particular features of your chosen passage. 5. Share your reasoning about what the evidence means. As you move from ob- servation to implication, remember that you need to explain how you know the data mean what you claim they mean. 6. Address how the passage is representative. Consider how the passage you’ve selected connects to broader issues in the reading. At various points in your freewriting feel free to move from your analysis of local details to address what, given what you now understand, the work as a whole may plausibly be “saying” about this or that issue or question. It’s okay to work with the details for almost the entire time and then press yourself to an interpretive leap with the formula,
- 152. “I’m almost out of time but my big point is . . .” Try this 3.9: Doing a Passage-Based Focused Freewrite Select a passage from any of the material that you are reading and copy it at the top of the page. Then do a twenty-minute focused freewrite on it, using the guide- lines already stated. It is often productive to take the focused freewrite and type it, revising and further freewriting until you have filled the inevitable gaps in your thinking that the time limit has created. (One colleague of ours has students do this in a different font, so both can see how the thinking is evolving.) Eventually, you can build up, through a process of accretion, the thinking for an entire paper in this way. Writers’ Notebooks Writers’ notebooks (journals) are unlike a personal diary, in which you keep track of your days’ activities and recount the feelings these occasioned; journals are for gen- erating and collecting ideas and for keeping track of your ongoing interactions with Freewriting 47 course materials. A journal can be, in effect, a collection of focused freewrites that you develop in response to the reading and lectures in a course.
- 153. The best way to get a journal to work for you is to experiment. You might try, for example, copying and commenting on statements from your reading or class meetings that you found potentially illuminating. Use the journal to write down the ideas, reac- tions, and germs of ideas you had during a class discussion or that you found running around in your head after a late night’s reading. Use the journal to retain your first impressions of books or films or music or performances or whatever so that you can then look back at them and trace the development of your thinking. If possible, write in your journal every day. As with freewriting, the best way to get started is just to start, see what happens, and take it from there. Also as with freewrit- ing, the more you write, the more you’ll find yourself noticing, and, thus, the more you’ll have to say. Passage-Based Focused Freewriting: An Example Following is an example of a student’s exploratory writing on an essay by the twentieth-century, African-American writer Langston Hughes. The piece is a twenty- minute reflection on two excerpts. Most notable about this piece, perhaps, is the sheer number of interesting ideas. That may be because the writer continually returns to the language of the original quotes for inspiration. She is not restricted by main- taining a single and consistent thread. It is interesting, though,
- 154. that as the freewrite progresses, a primary focus (on the second of her two quotes) seems to emerge. Passages from “The Negro Artist and the Racial Mountain” by Langston Hughes “But jazz to me is one of the inherent expressions of Negro life in America; the eternal tom-tom beating in the Negro soul—the tom-tom of revolt against weariness in a white world, a world of subway trains, and work, work, work; the tom-tom of joy and laughter, and pain swallowed in a smile. Yet the Philadelphia clubwoman is ashamed to say that her race created it and she does not like me to write about it. The old subconscious ‘white is best’ runs through her mind. . . . And now she turns up her nose at jazz and all its manifestations— likewise almost everything else distinctly racial.” “We build our temples for tomorrow, strong as we know how, and we stand on top of the mountain, free within ourselves.” Langston Hughes’s 1926 essay on the situation of the Negro artist in America sets up some interesting issues that are as relevant today as they were in Hughes’s time. Interestingly, the final sentence of the essay (“We build our temples . . .”) will be echoed some four decades later by the Civil Rights leader, Martin Luther King, but with a different spin on the idea of freedom. Hughes writes “we stand on top of the mountain, free within ourselves.” King says, “Free at last, free at last, my God almighty, we’re free at last.” King asserts an opening out into the world—a freeing
- 155. of black people, finally, from slavery and then another century of oppression. Hughes speaks of blacks in a more isolated position— “on top of the mountain” and “within ourselves.” Although the mountain may stand for a height from which the artist can speak, it is hard to be heard from the top of mountains. It is one thing to be free. It is another to be free within oneself. What does this phrase mean? If I am free within myself I am at least less vulnerable to those who would restrict me from without. I can live with 48 Chapter 3 A Toolkit of Analytical Methods their restrictions. Mine is an inner freedom. Does inner freedom empower artists? Perhaps it does. It may allow them to say what they want and not worry about what others say or think. This is one thing that Hughes seems to be calling for. But he is also worried about lack of recognition of Negro artists, not only by whites but by blacks. His use of the repeated phrase, tom-tom, is interesting in this respect. It, like the word “mountain,” becomes a kind of refrain in the essay—announcing both a desire to rise above the world and its difficulties (mountain) and a desire to be heard (tom-tom and mountain as pulpit). The idea of revolt, outright rebellion, is present but subdued in the essay. The tom-tom is a “revolt against weariness” and also an instrument for expressing
- 156. “joy and laughter.” The tom-tom also suggests a link with a past African and probably Native American culture—communicating by drum and music and dance. White culture in the essay stands for a joyless world of “work, work, work.” This is something I would like to think about more, as the essay seems to link the loss of soul with the middle and upper classes, both black and white. And so the essay seeks to claim another space among those he calls “the low down folks, the so-called common element.” Of these he says “ . . . they do not particularly care whether they are like white folks or anybody else. Their joy runs, bang! into ecstasy. Their religion soars to a shout. Work maybe a little today, rest a little tomorrow. Play awhile. Sing awhile. O, let’s dance!” In these lines Hughes the poet clearly appears. Does he say then that the Negro artist needs to draw from those of his own people who are the most removed from middle class American life? If I had more time, I would start thinking here about Hughes’s use of the words “race” and “racial.” . . . ASSIGNMENTS: Using the Toolkit 1. Pick a single scene from a film, a single photograph from a collection of a pho- tographer’s photographs, or some other single example that is interestingly rep- resentative of a larger subject. Do 10 on 1 with your scene or other representative example. Notice as much as you can about it. Then organize your observations using The Method: What details repeat? What is opposed to what? Use the
- 157. results to generate a piece of writing. 2. Work with binaries to develop a short essay. You might consider, for example, some of the either/or categories that students tend to put each other in, or their teachers. Or look to current events in the world or in some more local arena, and find the binaries that seem to divide people or groups. 3. Find a subject to analyze using Notice and Focus and then The Method. Your aim here initially is not to write a formal paper but to do data- gathering on the page. After you have written the paragraph that is the final part of The Method, revise and expand your work into a short essay. Don’t worry too much at this point about form (introductory paragraph, for example) or thesis. Just write at greater length about what you noticed and what you selected as most revealing or interesting or strange or significant, and why. You might use a story, essay, or poem by a writer you like, perhaps a painting or an artistic photograph. The Method could yield interesting results applied to the architecture on your campus, the student newspaper, campus clothing styles, or the latest news about the economy. CHAPTER 4
- 158. Interpretation: What It Is, What It Isn’t, and How to Do It While Chapter 3, A Toolkit of Analytical Methods, provides a number of analytical methods (Paraphrase " 3, Notice and Focus, The Method, Working with Binaries, and Freewriting), this chapter offers only one—the interpretation-triggering question “So what?” This question, along with a variant we call Seems to Be about X . . . , takes you from observations to theories about the meaning of your data. Interpretation is the meaning-making phase of analysis. Think of the analytical tools in this book as prompts or triggers. As you saw in Chapter 3, the words interesting, strange, significant, and revealing prompt different kinds of noticing. Each causes a particular spin or orientation on the way you look at your data. Similarly, when you employ the strategy we call ranking (naming one observation as more important than others), you have already pushed yourself toward interpretation. Habitually prompting your thinking with these words and phrases can train your attention, helping you to see features of your evidence that open up its meaning. We begin this chapter with an example that demonstrates how the So what? ques- tion functions, along with revisiting the prompts interesting and strange. Then we step back from practice to theory and address the issues that
- 159. interpretation typically raises. The chapter ends with an example that brings all the steps together, from observations to implications to conclusions. To preview the theoretical discussion: just as the analytical frame of mind has to make way against its opposite, the anti-analytical mind-set, so too does interpretation. Here is a quick take on the premises underlying the pro- interpretation mind-set followed by examples of anti-interpretation claims. Pro-Interpretation Premises • Everything means, which is to say that everything in life calls on us to interpret, even when we are unaware of doing so. • Meaning is contextual, which is to say that meaning-making always occurs inside of some social or cultural or other frame of reference. 49 50 Chapter 4 Interpretation: What It Is, What It Isn't, and How to Do It Anti-Interpretation Thinking • “Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar,” which is a joke that psychoanalyst Sigmund Freud made about his own interpretive practice; that is, sometimes a thing simply is what
- 160. it is and no more. (We’ll demonstrate that a cigar is almost never just a cigar.) • “You’re just making that up,” that is, “reading into” things and finding stuff that “isn’t there.” (This is a tenacious anti-interpretation attitude. We show that it is partially justified, but mostly not.) • “I’m entitled to my opinion.” (We spoke of this reflex in Chapter 2 in the context of overpersonalizing. Its anti-interpretive and anti-analytical power comes from the mistaken idea that meanings are entirely personal and thus that all inter- pretations are subjective and not susceptible to the rules of logic. This mind-set sounds attractively democratic—all meanings are created equal—but the fact is that some interpretations are better than others. We’ll explain why this is so.) And now, onto the chapter’s primary formula for interpretation, So what? PUSHING OBSERVATIONS TO CONCLUSIONS: ASKING SO WHAT? The prompt for making the move from observation to implication and, ultimately, interpretation is So what?, which is shorthand for such questions as: What does the observation imply? Why does this observation matter?
- 161. Where does this observation get us? How can we begin to generalize about the subject? Asking So what?—or its milder cousin, And so?—is a calling to account, which is why, in conversation, its force is potentially rude. That is, the question intervenes rather peremptorily with a “Why does this matter?” It is thus a challenge to make meaning through a creative leap—to move beyond the patterns and emphases you’ve been ob- serving in the data to tentative conclusions on what these observations suggest. The peremptoriness of the So what? question can, we think, be liberating. Okay, take the plunge, it says. Start laying out possible interpretations. And, when you are tempted to stop thinking too soon, asking So what? will press you onward. For example, let’s say you make a number of observations about the nature of e-mail communication—it’s cheap, informal, often grammatically incorrect, full of abbreviations (“IMHO”), and ephemeral (impermanent). You rank these and decide that its ephemerality is most interesting. So what? Well, that’s why so many people use it, you speculate, because it doesn’t last. So what that its popularity follows from its ephemerality? Well, apparently we like being released from the hard-and-fast rules of formal communication; e-mail frees us. So what? Well.
- 162. The repeated asking of this question causes people to push on from and pursue the implications of their first responses; it prompts people to reason in a chain, rather than settling prematurely for a single link. Asking So What?: An Example 51 In step 1 of this process, you describe your evidence, paraphrasing key language and looking for interesting patterns of repetition and contrast. In step 2 you begin querying your own observations by making what is implicit explicit. In the final step you push your observations and statements of implications to interpretive conclusions by again asking, So what? See Figure 4.1. ASKING SO WHAT?: AN EXAMPLE The following is the opening paragraph of a talk given by a professor of Political Sci- ence at our college, Dr. Jack Gambino, on the occasion of a gallery opening featuring the work of two contemporary photographers of urban and industrial landscapes. We have located in brackets our annotations of his turns of thought, as these pivot on “strange” and “So what?”
- 163. If you look closely at Camilo Vergara’s photo of Fern Street, Camden, 1988, you’ll notice a sign on the side of a dilapidated building: Danger: Men Working W. Hargrove Demolition Perhaps that warning captures the ominous atmosphere of these very different kinds of photographic documents by Camilo Vergara and Edward Burtynsky: “Danger: Men Working.” Watch out— human beings are at work! But the work that is presented is not so much a building-up as it is a tearing-down—the work of demolition. [Strange: tearing down is unexpected; writer asks So what? and answers.] Of course, demolition is often necessary in order to construct anew: old buildings are leveled for new projects, whether you are building a highway or bridge in an American city or a dam in the Chinese countryside. You might call modernity itself, as so many have, a process of creative destruction, a term used variously to describe modern art, capitalism, and technological innovation. The photographs in this exhibit, however, force us to pay attention to the “destructive” side of this modern At some point the So what? question will begin to trigger a move from implications to possible conclusions.
- 164. Observation So what? Implication(s) Implications So what? Conclusions(s) FIGURE 4.1 So What? 52 Chapter 4 Interpretation: What It Is, What It Isn't, and How to Do It equation. [Strange: photos emphasize destruction and not creation; writer asks So what? and answers.] What both Burtynsky and Vergara do in their respective ways is to put up a warning sign—they ques- tion whether the reworking of our natural and social environment leads to a sustainable human future. And they wonder whether the process of creative destruction may not have spun recklessly out of control, producing places that are neither habitable nor sustainable. In fact, a common element connecting the two photographic versions is the near absence of people in the landscape. [Writer points to supporting feature of evidence, which he will further theorize.] While we see the evidence of the transforming power of human production on the physical and social environment, neither Vergara’s urban ruins nor Burtynsky’s indus-
- 165. trial sites actually show us “men working.” [Writer continues to move by noticing strange absence of people in photographs of sites where men work.] Isolated figures peer suspiciously out back doors or pick through the rubble, but they appear out of place. [Writer asks a final So what? and arrives at a conclusion.] It is this sense of displacement—of human beings alienated from the environments they themselves have created—that provides the most haunting aspect of the work of these two photographers. The Gambino paragraph is a good example of how interpretive paragraphs are generated. Notice the pattern by which the paragraph moves: the observation of something strange, about which the writer asks and answers So what? several times until arriving at a final So what?—the point at which he decides what his observations ultimately mean. We call the final So what? in this chain of think- ing “the ultimate So what” because it moves from implications to the writer’s culminating point. The Gambino paragraph is also a good example of the way paragraphs operate as smaller units or stages on the way to a longer paper. We’ll say more in Chapter 10 about paragraph structure. For now, think of paragraphs as the
- 166. building blocks of a piece of thinking in which movement of mind creates the structure (not the too-simple notion of topic sentence + evidence). Ideas evolve one paragraph at a time; there is no rule that says you can’t write a paper in paragraph-length chunks and later line these up in a way that best reveals the big picture. Try this 4.1: Tracking the Interpretive Process in a Student Paper The following paper offers you an opportunity to further observe how a writer moves from observation to interpretation. We’ve inserted the phrase So what? at the places in the first four paragraphs where that prompt seems to be allowing the writer to draw out the implication of an observation. We have left the last three paragraphs unmarked so that you can supply the interpretive prompts wherever you see the writer moving from observations to implications and conclusions. Also watch for—and mark—places where the writer moves forward by seeking to explain some feature of the dance that she found strange. Asking So What?: An Example 53 Hua dan: The Dance of Values in the Beijing Opera [1] Lanfang says in his autobiography that ′′The beautiful dance movements created by
- 167. past artists are all based on gestures in real life, synthesized and accentuated to become art′′ . . . (36). In this quote Lanfang emphasizes a representation of life through ′′beautiful′′ movement. As he is a product of his culture, he is describing what his culture deems ′′beautiful.′′ The female roles in the Beijing Opera, particularly the Hua dan, convey their own set of cultural values about femininity in Chinese culture. [2] There is much posing and holding of shapes within the Hua dan role. [So what?] There is a gentle, poised focus in these moments. This allows the viewers time to take in the elegance of the shape, costumes, makeup, music, and artistry of the performer. The fruit of these efforts becomes evident and framed by the pausing. [So what?] The work the performers put in is valued in the pause. [3] All the movements are very clear in their choices between making angles and using the full extension of the limbs, particularly the arms. The angular shapes give a sharp contrast to the extension of the arms and legs. Circular formations of the arms are seamlessly round and often repeated to emphasize their distinctness. [So what?] This exactness and clarity emphasizes the importance and power of the body. By paying such attention to particulars it gives greater emphasis to the powers held in making these shapes. [4] There is much repetition and opening and closing in the
- 168. movement. [So what?] Repetition can represent the large amount of time females spend on such activities. It can also give a sense of the time it actually takes for such actions in real life, such as sewing. The women do spend much time sewing, and this time is represented. It also takes consistency and dedication to complete such tasks multiple times, so these become valued characteristics. [5] Rhythm is also an element of the very controlled female walking consisting of small, even steps. The feet barely leave the floor and don’t extend into kicks or jumps, as do some of the male roles. Even in the Hua dan demonstration in the “Aspects of Peking Opera” video when a bounce was in the character’s step and the eyes were alive, the flow of the walk remained consistent. The smallness of the steps could represent the female’s place in so- ciety. They are petite and not flashy in their maneuvers. They complete their tasks without much fanfare. Keeping the feet low also limits the opening of the legs. Such protection and withholding represents a value in itself—the absence of overt sexual suggestion. Although the male characters may be more likely to overtly demonstrate their strength and power, it takes a great amount of control and focus for the women to execute their walks, so this convention is demonstrating the value of women keeping their struggles and work hidden. [6] Although my viewing of Peking Opera is limited, it caught my eye to see the Hua dan’s shoulders finally move in a flirtation demonstration in the
- 169. “Aspects” video. This isola- tion and interruption of flow seemed out of character to all other demonstrated acts. All other actions were focused on creating lines and full range of motion. Breaking typically occurs only at the elbows and wrists. These shoulder shrugs break not only the lines but the flowing rhythm. Making flirtation stand out suggests that in the context of the opera, such coquettish moments are important for the audience both in terms of character and life off the stage. It also reminds the viewers that there are even more areas of the body that have not been used but are present within the character and performer. 54 Chapter 4 Interpretation: What It Is, What It Isn't, and How to Do It [7] What are the recurring themes in all these observations? They lie in control, value of movement, and repetition. The “beauty” lies not only in the quality of the movement but in what it represents. The dainty representation of females, their modesty and strong work ethic, and care in their activities are of great importance, but so too is the slight pleasure in restricted flirtation. When combined, these qualities of movement create a carefully crafted portrayal of a polished female. It serves to represent not only a clear character but a beautiful and desirable female figure. IMPLICATIONS VERSUS HIDDEN MEANINGS
- 170. Because implications (implicit meanings) are suggested by the language or details of a subject rather than explicitly stated, some people mistakenly believe that interpre- tation is a mysterious process. “Where do you get that?” they say, often suspiciously. Some people go further in their suspicion or outright rejection of interpretive think- ing. They say things like “Why can’t you just enjoy the movie?” or “Does everything have to mean something?” Two familiar phrases reveal anxiety and even hostility toward what we named in the first chapter as one of the five analytical moves: Make the Implicit Explicit. The phrases are hidden meanings and reading between the lines. We say more about these later, but first we offer an exercise demonstrating that implicit meanings are really “there,” which is to say that they are readily suggested by explicit language in the text even though they are not stated directly. Although it is true that people might not always agree on what is being implied by particular language or details, differences are usually small and can be negotiated because drawing out implications is a logical process. Taking the Pressure Off When writing about dance, the primary evidence is the dance itself and the theatrical accompaniments enhancing the work (sets, costumes, music, nar- rative, lights, etc.). Seeing and understanding how and what
- 171. dance commu- nicates is the main task of the dance writer. Because dance is often abstract and purposely open to multiple interpretations, students are usually terrified at the prospect of finding and interpreting evidence in support of a thesis. Typical first responses to analysis include “I enjoy watching dance, but I have never looked for meaning or message.” “I don’t know enough about dance to understand it.” My responses include, “Sit back, relax, and enjoy the dance— save analy- sis for later. Start your analysis by pretending you are discussing the per- formance with a friend who did not see it. As you tell him or her about the performance, you will naturally begin to gather evidence and analyze.” —Karen Dearborn, Professor of Dance VOICES FROM ACROSS THE CURRICULUM Implications versus Hidden Meanings 55 Try this 4.2: Inferring Implications from Observations Each of the following statements is rich in implication. Some are quite general ob- servations; others are scientific facts, and others come to us as hypotheses from the
- 172. social sciences. Write a list of as many plausible implications as you can think of for each of the statements. You might find it useful to do this exercise along with other people because part of its aim is to reveal the extent to which different people infer the same implications. 1. The sidewalk is disappearing as a feature of the American residential landscape. New housing developments have them only if a township requires them of the developer. (Here are a couple of implications to prime the pump: people don’t walk anywhere anymore; builders lack much sense of social responsibility; cur- rent development practices are eliminating ways of life that involve anything except the car—and there are more.) 2. New house designs are tending increasingly toward open plans in which the kitchen is not separated from the rest of the house. New house designs continue to have a room called the living room, usually a space at the front of the house near the front door, but many (not all) also have a separate space called the fam- ily room, which is usually in some part of the house farther removed from the front door and closer to the kitchen. 3. “Good fences make good neighbors.”—Robert Frost 4. In the female brain, there are more connections between the right hemisphere
- 173. (emotions, spatial reasoning) and the left hemisphere (verbal facility). In the male brain, these two hemispheres remain more separate. 5. An increasing number of juveniles—people younger than eighteen—are being tried and convicted as adults, rather than as minors, in America, with the result that more minors are serving adult sentences for crimes they committed while still in their teens. 6. Neuroscientists tell us that the frontal cortex of the brain, the part that is respon- sible for judgment and especially for impulse control, is not fully developed in humans until roughly the age of twenty-one. What are the implications of this observation relative to observation 5? 7. Linguists have long commented on the tendency of women’s speech to use rising inflection at the end of statements as if the statements were questions. An actual command form—Be home by midnight!—thus becomes a question instead. What are we to make of the fact that in recent years younger men (under thirty) have begun to end declarative statements and command forms with rising inflections? 8. Shopping malls and grocery stores rarely have clocks. 9. All data are neutral; they’re neither good nor bad. After you have made your list of implications for each item,
- 174. consider how you arrived at them. On the basis of this experience, how would you answer the following questions? What is the difference between an idea being “hidden” and an idea being 56 Chapter 4 Interpretation: What It Is, What It Isn't, and How to Do It implied? What, in other words, is an implication? To what extent do you think most people would arrive at the same implications that you did? As Try this 4.2 illustrates, the inferring of implications does require an act of mind. But the implications are neither hidden nor fancifully invented. The charge that the meaning is hidden implies an act of conspiracy on the part of either an author, who chooses to deliberately obscure his or her meaning, or on the part of readers, who con- spire to “find” things lurking below the surface that other readers don’t know about and are unable to see. A further assumption is that people probably know what they mean most of the time but, for some perverse reason, are unwilling to come out and say so. “Reading between the lines” is a version of the hidden meaning theory in suggest- ing that we have to look for meanings elsewhere than in the lines of text themselves. At its most skeptical, reading between the lines means that an interpretation has come
- 175. from nothing at all, from the white space between the lines, and therefore has been imposed on the material by the interpreter. Proponents of these views of analysis are, in effect, committing themselves to the position that everything in life means what it says and says what it means. This posi- tion posits another related one: that meanings are always obvious and understood in the same way by everyone, and thus don’t require interpretation (which is an example of “naturalizing our own assumptions” as discussed in Chapter 2). People who use the expressions hidden meanings and reading between the lines generally don’t recognize that these phrases imply theories of interpretation, but they do. It is probably safe to assume that most writers try to write what they mean and mean what they say. That is, they try to control the range of possible interpretations that their words could give rise to, but there is always more going on in a piece of writing (as in our everyday conversation) than can easily be pinned down and controlled. It is, in fact, an in- herent property of language that it always means more than and thus other than it says. Though we may not pause to take notice, we are continually processing what goes on around us for the indirect or suggested meanings it contains. If you observe yourself for a day, you’ll find yourself interpreting even the most direct-seeming state- ments. There’s an old cartoon about the anxiety bred by the
- 176. continual demands of interpretation: a person saying “Good morning” causes the one addressed to respond, “What did she mean by that?” The truth to which this cartoon points is that a statement can have various mean- ings, depending on various circumstances and how it is said. The relationship between words and meaning is always complex. As Marshall McLuhan, one of the fathers of modern communication theory, noted, communication always involves determining not just what is being said, but also “what kind of message a message is.” Depending on tone and context, “Good morning” can mean a number of things. THE LIMITS ON INTERPRETATION As we said in the chapter opening, everything means, which is to say that everything in life calls on us to interpret, even when we are unaware of doing so. It is not the case, however, that things can mean whatever we want them to. There are powerful limits The Limits on Interpretation 57 on interpretation because (1) meanings are bound by rules of logic and evidence, and (2) meanings always occur within one or more particular interpretive contexts.
- 177. To approach these claims, we need first to consider the elemental question of where meanings come from. The first thing to understand about meanings is that they are made, not ready-made in the subject matter. They are the product of a transaction between a mind and the world, between a reader and his or her materials. That is, the making of meaning is a process to which the observer and the thing observed both contribute. It is not a product of either alone. If meanings aren’t ready-made, there to be found in the subject matter, what’s to prevent people from imposing meaning with wild abandon? To pursue this question, we ask that you revisit the photograph and discussion of the painting Whistler’s Mother located at the end of Chapter 1. There we distinguished a summary—a focused description—of the painting from an interpretation that grew out of the summary. We interpreted such evidence as the figure of the mother being in profile and austerely dressed as signs that the painting is ultimately about her separateness from us, inviting us to contemplate her as an emblem of the mystery of self-sufficiency. Plausible versus Implausible Interpretations What if instead of our interpretation a person claimed that the painting is about death, with the black-clad mother mourning the death of a loved one, perhaps a per- son who lived in the house represented in the painting on the
- 178. wall? It is true that black clothes often indicate mourning. This is a culturally accepted, recognized sign. But with only the black dress, and perhaps the sad facial expression (if it is sad) to go on, the mourning theory gets sidetracked from what is actually in the painting into story- telling. This points out one of the primary limits on the meaning-making process. • Meanings must be reasoned from sufficient evidence if they are to be judged plausible. Meanings can always be refuted by people who find fault with your reasoning or can cite conflicting evidence. Now what if another person asserted that Whistler’s mother is an alien astronaut, for example, her long black dress concealing a third leg? Obviously, this interpretation would not win wide support, and for a reason that points out another of the primary limits on the meaning-making process. • Meanings, to have value outside one’s own private realm of experience, have to make sense to other people. The assertion that Whistler’s mother is an alien as- tronaut is unlikely to be deemed acceptable by enough people to give it currency. This is to say that the relative value of interpretive meanings is socially (culturally) determined. Although people are free to say that things mean whatever they want them to mean, saying doesn’t make it so. The mourning theory has more evidence
- 179. than the alien astronaut theory, but it still relies too heavily on what is not there, on a narrative for which there is insufficient evidence in the painting itself. 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 that you have selected and the language you have used in characterizing those 58 Chapter 4 Interpretation: What It Is, What It Isn't, and How to Do It details. The writer who can offer a plausible (not necessarily or obviously true, but believable) description of a subject’s key features is likely to arrive at conclusions about possible meanings that others would share. Often the best that you can hope for with analytical conclusions is not that others will say, “Yes, that is obviously right,” but “Yes, I can see where it might be possible and reasonable to think as you do.” Interpretive Contexts and Multiple Meanings There are, however, other possible interpretations that would satisfy the two criteria of sufficient evidence and broad cultural acceptance. And it is valuable to recognize that evidence usually supports more than one plausible interpretation.
- 180. Consider, for example, a reading of Whistler’s Mother that a person might produce if he or she began with noticing the actual title, Arrangement in Grey and Black: The Artist’s Mother. From this starting point, a person might focus observation on the disposition of color exclusively and arrive at an interpretation that the painting is about painting (which might then explain why there is also a painting on the wall). The figure of the mother then would have meaning only insofar as it contained the two colors mentioned in the painting’s title, black and gray, and the painting’s representational content (the aspects of life that it shows us) would be assigned less importance. This is a promising and plausible idea for an interpretation. It makes use of different details from previous interpretations that we’ve suggested, but it would also address some of the details already targeted (the dress, the curtain) from an entirely different context, focusing on the use and arrangement of color. To generalize: two equally plausible interpretations can be made of the same thing. It is not the case that our first reading, focusing on the profile view of the mother and suggesting the painting’s concern with mysterious separateness, is right, whereas the painting-about-painting (or aesthetic) view, building from the clue in the title, is wrong. They operate within different contexts. An interpretive context is a lens. Depending on the context you
- 181. choose—preferably a context suggested by the evidence itself—you will see different things. Regardless of how the context is arrived at, an important part of getting an interpretation accepted as plausible is to argue for the appropriateness of the interpretive context you use, not just the interpretation it takes you to. Specifying an Interpretive Context: An Example Notice how in the following analysis the student writer’s interpretation relies on his choice of a particular interpretive context, post–World War II Japan. Had he selected another context, he might have arrived at some different conclusions about the same details. Notice also how the writer perceives a pattern in the details and how he queries his own observations (So what?) to arrive at an interpretation. The series entitled “Kamaitachi” is a journal of the photographer Hosoe’s desolate childhood and wartime evacuation in the Tokyo countryside. He returns years later to the areas where he grew up, a stranger to his native land, perhaps likening himself to the legendary Kamaitachi, an invisible sickle-toothed weasel, intertwined with the soil and its unrealized fertility. “Kamaitachi #8” (1956), a platinum palladium print, stands alone to best capture Hosoe’s alienation from Intention as an Interpretive Context 59
- 182. and troubled expectation of the future of Japan. [Here the writer chooses the photogra- pher’s life as his interpretive context.] The image is that of a tall fence of stark horizontal and vertical rough wood lashed together, looming above the barren rice fields. Straddling the fence, half- crouched and half-clinging, is a solitary male figure, gazing in profile to the horizon. Oblivious to the sky above of dark and churning thunderclouds, the figure instead focuses his attentions and concentrations elsewhere. [The writer selects and describes significant detail.] It is exactly this elsewhere that makes the image successful, for in studying the man we are to turn our attention in the direction of the figure’s gaze and away from the photograph itself. He hangs curiously between heaven and earth, suspended on a makeshift man-made structure, in a purgatorial limbo awaiting the future. He waits with anticipation—perhaps dread?—for a time that has not yet come; he is directed away from the present, and it is this sensitivity to time that sets this print apart from the others in the series. One could argue that in effect this man, clothed in common garb, has become Japan itself, indicative of the post-war uncertainty of a country once-dominant and now destroyed. What will the future (dark storm clouds) hold for this newly-humbled nation? [Here the writer notices a pattern of in-between-ness and locates it in an historical context in order to make his interpretive leap.] Remember that regardless of the subject you select for your
- 183. analysis, you should directly address not just “What does this say?” but also, as this writer has done, “What are we invited to make of it, and in what context?” INTENTION AS AN INTERPRETIVE CONTEXT An interpretive context that frequently creates problems in analysis is intention. People relying on authorial intention as their interpretive context typically assert that the author—not the work itself—is the ultimate and correct source of interpreta- tions. This is true of what a senator says about a bill he wishes passed. It is also true of what an artist says about her work. FIGURE 4.2 The Dancers by Sarah Kersh. Pen-and-Ink Drawing, 6′′ " 13.75′′. © Th e Da nc er s, by S ar
- 185. y P er m iss io n of S ar ah K er sh . 60 Chapter 4 Interpretation: What It Is, What It Isn't, and How to Do It Look at the drawing titled The Dancers in Figure 4.2. What follows is the artist’s statement about how the drawing came about and what it came to mean to her. This piece was created completely unintentionally. I poured some ink onto paper and blew on it through a straw. The ink took the form of what looked like little people in movement. I recopied the figures I liked,
- 186. touched up the rough edges, and ended with this gathering of fairy-like creatures. I love how in art something abstract can so suddenly become recognizable. In this case, interestingly, the artist initially had no intentions beyond ex perimenting with materials. As the work evolved, she began to arrive at her own interpretation of what the drawing might suggest. Most viewers would probably find the artist’s inter- pretation plausible, but this is not to say that the artist must have the last word and that it is somehow an infraction for others to produce alternative interpretations. Suppose the artist had stopped with her first two sentences. Even this explicit state- ment of her lack of intention would not prohibit people from interpreting the draw- ing in some of the ways that she later goes on to suggest. The artist’s initial absence of a plan doesn’t require viewers to interpret The Dancers as only ink on paper. In any case, whenever an intention is ascribed to a person, an act, or a product, this intention contributes significantly to meaning; but the intention, whatever its source, does not outrank or exclude other interpretations. It is simply another context for understanding. Why is this so? In our earlier discussion of personalizing, we suggested that people
- 187. are not entirely free agents, immune to the effects of the culture they inhabit. It fol- lows that when people produce things, they are inevitably affected by that culture in ways of which they are both aware and unaware. The culture, in other words, speaks through them. In the early 1960s, for example, a popular domestic sitcom entitled Leave It to Beaver portrayed the mother, June Cleaver, usually impeccably dressed in heels, dress, and pearls, doing little other than dusting the mantlepiece and making tuna fish sandwiches for her sons. Is the show then intentionally oppressing June by implying that the proper role for women is that of domestic helper? Well, in the con- text of post–women’s movement thinking, the show’s representation of Mrs. Cleaver might plausibly be read this way, but not as a matter of intention. But to conclude that Leave It to Beaver promoted a particular stereotype about women does not mean that the writers got together every week and asked, “How should we oppress June this week?” It is cultural norms asserting themselves here, not authorial intent. It is interesting and useful to try to determine from something you are analyzing what its makers might have intended. But, by and large, you are best off concentrat- ing on what the thing itself communicates as opposed to what someone might have wanted it to communicate. What Is and Isn’t “Meant” to Be Analyzed
- 188. What about analyzing things that were not intended to “mean” anything, like enter- tainment films and everyday things like blue jeans and shopping malls? Some peo- ple believe that it is wrong to bring out unintended implications. Let’s take another The Fortune Cookie School of Interpretation 61 example: Barbie dolls. These are just toys intended for young girls, people might say. Clearly, the intention of the makers of Barbie is to make money by entertaining chil- dren. Does that mean Barbie must remain outside of interpretive scrutiny for such things as her built-in earrings, high-heeled feet, and heavily marketed lifestyle? What the makers of a particular product or idea intend is only a part of what that product or idea communicates. The urge to cordon off certain subjects from analy- sis on the grounds that they weren’t meant to be analyzed unnecessarily excludes a wealth of information—and meaning—from your range of vision. It is right to be careful about the interpretive contexts we bring to our experience. It is less right—less useful—to confine our choice of context in a too literal-minded way to a single category. To some people, baseball is only a game and clothing is only there to protect us from the elements.
- 189. What such people don’t want to admit is that things communicate meaning to oth- ers whether we wish them to or not, which is to say that the meanings of most things are socially determined. What, for example, does the choice of wearing a baseball cap to a staff meeting or to a class “say”? Note, by the way, that a communicative gesture such as the wearing of a hat need not be premeditated to communicate something to other people. The hat is still “there” and available to be “read” by others as a sign of certain attitudes and a culturally defined sense of identity—with or without intention. Baseball caps, for example, carry different associations from berets or wool caps because they come from different social contexts. Baseball caps convey a set of at- titudes associated with the piece of American culture they come from. They suggest, for example, popular rather than high culture, casual rather than formal, young— perhaps defiantly so, especially if worn backward—rather than old, and so on. The social contexts that make gestures like our choice of hats carry particular meanings are always shifting, but some such context is always present. As we asserted at the beginning of this chapter, everything means, and meaning is always contextual. We can, of course, protest that the “real” reason for turning our baseball cap back- ward is to allow more light in, making it easier to see than when
- 190. the bill of the cap shields our faces. This practical rationale makes sense, but it does not explain away the social statement that the hat and a particular way of wearing it might make. Because meaning is, to a significant extent, socially determined, we can’t entirely control what our clothing, our manners, our language, or even our way of walking communicates to others. This is one of the reasons that analysis makes some people suspicious and uneasy. They don’t want to acknowledge that they are sending mes- sages in spite of themselves, messages they haven’t deliberately and overtly chosen. We turn now to two common problems writers encounter in interpretation. These problems are so widespread that we have fancifully labeled them “schools.” THE FORTUNE COOKIE SCHOOL OF INTERPRETATION The theory of interpretation that we call the Fortune Cookie School believes that things have a single, hidden, right meaning, and that if a person can only “crack” the thing, it will yield an extractable and self-contained message. There are several problems with this conception of the interpretive process. 62 Chapter 4 Interpretation: What It Is, What It Isn't, and How to Do It
- 191. First, the assumption that things have single hidden meanings interferes with open-minded and dispassionate observation. Adherents of the Fortune Cookie School look solely for clues pointing to the hidden message and, having found these clues, discard the rest, like the cookie in a Chinese restaurant once the fortune has been extracted. The fortune cookie approach forecloses on the possibility of multiple plausible meanings, each within its own context. When you assume that there is only one right answer, you are also assuming that there is only one proper context for understanding and, by extension, that anybody who happens to select a different starting point or context and who thus arrives at a different answer is necessarily wrong. Most of the time, practitioners of the fortune cookie approach aren’t even aware that they are assuming the correctness of a single context because they don’t realize a fundamental truth about interpretations: they are always limited by con- texts. In other words, we are suggesting that claims to universal truths are always problematic. Things don’t just mean in some simple and clear way for all people in all situations; they always mean within a network of beliefs, from a particular point of view. The person who claims to have access to some universal truth, beyond context and point of view, is either naïve (unaware) or, worse, a
- 192. bully—insisting that his or her view of the world is obviously correct and must be accepted by everyone. THE ANYTHING GOES SCHOOL OF INTERPRETATION At the opposite extreme from the single-right-answer Fortune Cookie School lies the completely relativist Anything Goes School. The problem with the anything goes approach is that it tends to assume that all interpretations are equally viable, that meanings are simply a matter of individual choice, irrespective of evidence or plausibility. Put another way, it overextends the creative aspect of interpretation to absurdity, arriving at the position that you can see in a subject whatever you want to see. As we suggest throughout this book, it is simply not the case that meaning is entirely up to the individual. Some readings are clearly better than others: as we argued earlier, the aesthetic or separateness readings of Whistler’s Mother are bet- ter than the mourning or, especially, alien astronaut interpretations. The better interpretations have more evidence and rational explanation of how the evidence supports the interpretive claims—qualities that make these meanings more public and negotiable. In the field of logic there is a principle known as parsimony.
- 193. This principle holds that “no more forces or causes should be assumed than are necessary to ac- count for the facts” (The Oxford English Dictionary). In other words, the explana- tion that both explains the largest amount of evidence (accounts for facts) and is the simplest (no more than necessary) is the best. There are limits to this rule as well: sometimes focusing on what appears to be an insignificant detail as a starting point can provide a revelatory perspective on a subject. But as rules go, parsimony is a useful one to keep in mind as you start sifting through your various interpre- tive leaps about a subject. SEEMS TO BE ABOUT X BUT COULD ALSO BE (IS REALLY) ABOUT Y This book’s opening chapters have focused your attention on three prerequisites to becoming a more perceptive analytical thinker: • Training yourself to observe more fully and more systematically—dwelling lon- ger with the data before leaping to generalizations, using Paraphrase " 3, Notice and Focus (ranking), The Method, and working with binaries. • Pushing yourself to make interpretive leaps by describing carefully and then querying your own observations by repeatedly asking, So what?
- 194. • Getting beyond common misconceptions about where meanings come from— that meanings are hidden, that they are read into something but are really not there (reading between the lines), that there are single right answers or that any- thing goes, that meanings ought to be controlled by a maker’s intentions, that some things should not be analyzed because they weren’t meant to be, and so forth. A useful verbal prompt for acting on these principles is “seems to be about X but could also be (or is really) about Y.” There are several reasons why this formula works to stimulate interpretation. • The person who is doing the interpreting too often stops with the first answer that springs to mind as he or she moves from observation to implication, usu- ally landing upon a cliché. If this first response becomes the X, then he or she is prompted by the formula to come up with other, probably less commonplace interpretations as the Y. • Often a person who is interpreting will, in the data-gathering stage, collect state- ments of intention from spokespersons for the subject—what the book or ad or political speech or whatever is asking us to believe about itself. If we accept this information only as X, then the Y is a prompt that will more
- 195. likely move us to analyze such statements more acutely. In this context we can see how “Appears to Be about X. . . ,′′ like the other prompts in this book, defamiliarizes. When we begin to interpret something, we usually find that less obvious meanings are cloaked by more obvious ones, and so we are distracted from seeing them. In most cases, the less obvious and possibly unintended meanings are more telling and more interesting than the obvious ones we have been conditioned to see. But to get to these more interesting and less obvious meanings, we need to have assimilated two key elements of the interpretive methods offered in this chapter: (1) that there are multiple plausible interpretations because different interpretive contexts cause us to value different things in the evidence and (2) that intention does not control this process of meaning-making. Seems to Be about X but Could Also Be (Is Really) about Y 63 64 Chapter 4 Interpretation: What It Is, What It Isn't, and How to Do It Why, you might ask, are less obvious meanings more likely to be more significant and telling? One reason is that this shift, particularly in the context of advertising or political language, is likely to orient us toward the rhetoric of the subject. We are
- 196. focusing then on its means of persuading an audience. In the case of analyzing a work or art or an historical event, we are more likely to move beyond conventional gener- alizations. (See the discussion of rhetorical analysis in Chapter 6.) Consider the following example: A recent highly successful television ad campaign for Nike Freestyle shoes contains 60 seconds of famous basketball players dribbling and passing and otherwise handling the ball in dexter- ous ways to the accompaniment of court noises and hip-hop music. The ad seems to be about X (basketball or shoes) but could also be about Y. Once you’ve made this assertion, a rapid-fire (brainstormed) list might follow in which you keep filling in the blanks (X and Y) with different possibilities. Alternatively, you might find that filling in the blanks (X and Y) leads to a more sustained exploration of a single point. This is your eventual goal, but doing a little brainstorm- ing first would keep you from shutting down the interpretive process too soon. Here is one version of a rapid-fire list, any item of which might be expanded: Seems to be about basketball but is really about dance. Seems to be about selling shoes but is really about artistry. Seems to be about artistry but is really about selling shoes. Seems to be about basketball but is really about race.
- 197. Seems to be about basketball but is really about the greater acceptance of black culture in American media and society. Seems to be about the greater acceptance of black culture in American media but is really about representing black basketball players as performing seals or freaks. Seems to be about individual expertise but is really about working as a group. Here is one version of a more sustained exploration of a single seems-to-be- about-X statement. The Nike Freestyle commercial seems to be about basketball but is really about the greater ac- ceptance of black culture in American media. Of course it is a shoe commercial and so aims to sell a product, but the same could be said about any commercial. What makes the Nike commercial distinctive is its seeming embrace of African-American culture. The hip-hop sound track, for example, which coincides with the rhythmic dribbling of the basketball, places music and sport on a par, and the dexterity with which the players (actual NBA stars) move with the ball—moonwalking, doing 360s on it, balancing it on their fingers, heads, and backs—is nothing short of dance. The intrinsic cool of the commercial suggests that Nike is targeting an audience of basket-
- 198. ball lovers, not just African-Americans. If I am right, then it is selling blackness to white as well as black audiences. Of course, the idea that blacks are cooler than whites goes back at least as far as the early days of jazz and might be seen as its own strange form of prejudice. . . . In that case, maybe there is something a little disturbing in the commercial, in the way that it relegates the athletes to the status of trained seals. I’ll have to think more about this. Note: don’t be misled by our use of the word really in this formula (“Seems to be about X, is really about Y ”) into thinking that there should be some single, hidden, right answer. Rather, the aim of the formula is to prompt you to think recursively, to come up, initially, with a range of landing sites for your interpretive leap, rather than just one. The prompt serves to get you beyond the obvious—for example, that the ad appears to be about basketball but is really about selling shoes. Try this 4.3: Apply the Formula “Seems to Be about X, but Could Also Be (Is Really) about Y” As we have been saying, this formula is useful for quickly getting past your first responses. An alternative version of this formula is “Initially I thought X about the sub- ject, but now I think Y.” Take any reading or viewing assignment you have been given for class, and write either version of the formula at the top of a
- 199. page. Fill in the blanks several times, and then explain your final choice for X and Y in a few paragraphs. You might also try these formulae when you find yourself getting stuck while drafting a paper. Seems to Be about X . . . is a valuable revision as well as interpretive tool. PUTTING IT ALL TOGETHER: INTERPRETATION OF A NEW YORKER COVER A major point of this section is that interpretive contexts are suggested by the mate- rial you are studying; they aren’t simply imposed. Explaining why you think a subject should be seen through a particular interpretive lens is an important part of making interpretations reasonable and plausible. Our discussion illustrates a writer’s decision- making process in choosing an interpretive context, and how, once that context has been selected, the writer goes about analyzing evidence to test as well as support the usefulness of that context. The example upon which we are focusing is a visual image, a cover from The New Yorker magazine (see Figure 4.3). The cover is by Ian Falconer and is entitled “The Competition”; it appeared on the October 9, 2000, issue. Producing a close description of anything you are analyzing is one of the best ways to begin because the act of describing causes you to notice more and triggers analyti- cal thinking. Here is our description of the New Yorker cover.
- 200. Description of a New Yorker Cover, Dated October 9, 2000 The picture contains four women, visible from the waist up, standing in a row in semi-profile, staring out at some audience other than us because their eyes look off to the side. All four gaze in the same direction. Each woman is dressed in a bathing suit and wears a banner draped over one shoulder in the manner of those worn in the swimsuit competition at beauty pageants. Three of the women are virtually identical. The banners worn by these three women show the letters gia, rnia, and rida, the remainder of the letters being cut off by the other women’s shoulders, so that we have to fill in the missing letters to understand which state each woman represents. Putting It All Together: Interpretation of a New Yorker Cover 65 66 Chapter 4 Interpretation: What It Is, What It Isn't, and How to Do It FIGURE 4.3 Ar tw or k b
- 202. ica tio ns In c. The fourth woman, who stands third from the left in line, tucked in among the others who look very much alike, wears a banner reading york. This woman’s appear- ance is different in just about every respect from the other three. Whereas they are blonde with long flowing hair, she is dark with her hair up in a tight bun. Whereas their mouths are wide open, revealing a wall of very white teeth, her mouth is closed, lips drawn together. Whereas their eyes are wide open and staring, hers, like her mouth, are nearly closed, under deeply arched eyebrows. The dark woman’s lips, eyes, and hair are dark. She wears dark eye makeup and has a pronounced dark beauty mark on her cheek. Whereas the other three women’s cheeks are high and round, hers are sharply angular. The three blonde women wear one-piece bathing suits in a nondescript gray color. The dark-haired woman, whose skin stands out in stark contrast to her hair, wears a two-piece bathing suit, exposing her midriff. Like her face, the dark-haired woman’s breast, sticking out in half profile in her bathing suit,
- 203. is pointed and angular. The other three women’s breasts are round and quietly contained in their high-necked gray bathing suits. Using The Method to Identify Patterns of Repetition and Contrast As we discussed in Chapter 3, looking for patterns of repetition and contrast (that is, The Method) is one of your best means of getting at the essential character of a sub- ject. It prevents you from generalizing, instead involving you in hands-on engagement with the details of your evidence. Our formula for looking for patterns, The Method, has five steps, which you should try to do one at a time so as not to rush to conclu- sions. You will find, however, that step 1, looking for things that repeat exactly, tends to suggest items for step 2, repetition of the same or similar kinds of words or details (strands), and that step 2 leads naturally to step 3, looking for binary oppositions and organizing contrasts. And so, in practice, noticing and listing the elements of strands tend to coincide with the discovery of binary oppositions. Here are our partial lists of exact repetitions and strands and binary oppositions in the New Yorker cover: Some details that repeat exactly: Large, wide open, round eyes (3 pairs)
- 204. Long, blonde, face-framing hair (3) Small, straight eyebrows (3 pairs) Wide-open (smiling?) mouths with expanses of white teeth (3) (but individual teeth not indicated) Banners (4) but each with different lettering Round breasts (3) States that end in a (3) Putting It All Together: Interpretation of a New Yorker Cover 67 68 Chapter 4 Interpretation: What It Is, What It Isn't, and How to Do It Some strands (groups of the same or similar kinds of details): Lots of loose and flowing blonde hair/large, fully open, round eyes/large, open, rather round (curved) mouths: Connecting logic ! open, round Skin uniformly shaded on three of the figures/minimal color and shading contrasts/ mouths full of teeth but just a mass of white without individual teeth showing: Connecting logic ! homogenous, undifferentiated, indistinct
- 205. Binary oppositions: Blonde hair/black hair Open mouths/closed mouth Straight eyebrows/slanted (arched) eyebrows Round breasts/pointed breast Covered midriff/uncovered midriff Notice that we have tried hard to stick with “the facts” here— concrete details in the picture. If we were to try, for example, to name the expression on the three blonde women’s faces and the one on the black-haired woman (expressionless vs. knowing? vapid vs. shrewd? trusting vs. suspicious? etc.), we would move from data gathering— direct observation of detail—into interpretation. The longer you delay interpretation in favor of noticing patterns of like and unlike detail, the more thoughtful and better grounded your eventual interpretation will be. Anomalies: Miss New York Pushing Observations to Conclusions: Selecting an Interpretive Context As we argued throughout this chapter, the move from observations to conclusions
- 206. depends on context. You would, for example, come up with different ideas about the significance of particular patterns of detail in the New Yorker cover if you were analyzing them in the context of the history of The New Yorker cover art than you might if your interpretive context was other art done by Ian Falconer, the cover’s artist. Both of these possibilities suggest themselves, the first by the fact that the title of the magazine, The New Yorker, stands above the women’s heads, and the second by the fact that the artist’s last name, Falconer, runs across two of the women. What other interpretive contexts might one plausibly and fairly choose, based on what the cover itself offers us? Consider the cover’s date— October 9, 2000. Some quick research into what was going on in the country in the early fall of 2000 might provide some clues about how to read the cover in a historical context. November 2000 was the month of a presidential election. At the time the cover was published, the long round of presidential primaries, with presidential hopefuls courting various key states for their votes, had ended, but the last month of campaigning by the presidential nominees—Al Gore and George W. Bush—was in full swing. You might wish to consider whether and how the cover speaks to the country’s po- litical climate during the Gore/Bush competition for the
- 207. presidency. The banners, the bathing suits, and the fact that the women stand in a line staring out at some implied audience of viewers, perhaps judges, reminds us that the picture’s narrative context is a beauty pageant, a competition in which women representing each of the states compete to be chosen the most beautiful of them all. Choosing to consider the cover in the context of the presidential campaign would be reasonable; you would not have to think you were imposing a context on the picture in an arbitrary and ungrounded way. Additionally, the Table of Contents identifies the title of Falconer’s drawing as “The Competition.” Clearly, there is other information on the cover that might allow you to interpret the picture in some kind of political and or more broadly cultural context. A signifi- cant binary opposition is New York versus Georgia, California, and Florida. The three states having names ending in the same letter are represented by look-alike, virtually identical blondes. The anomalous state, New York, is represented by a woman, who, despite standing in line with the others, is about as different from them as a figure could be. So what that the woman representing New York looks so unlike the women from the other states? And why those states? If you continued to pursue this interpretive context, you might want more informa- tion. Which presidential candidate won the primary in each of
- 208. the states pictured? How were each of these states expected to vote in the election in November? When is the Miss America pageant held? Which state won the Miss America title in the time period before the cover was published? Since timing would matter in the case of a topical interpretive context, it would also be interesting to know when the cover art was actually produced and when the magazine accepted it. If possible, you could also try to discover whether other of the cover artist’s work was in a similar vein. (He has a website.) Making the Interpretation Plausible As we have been arguing, the picture will “mean” differently, depending on whether we understand it in terms of American presidential politics in the year 2000, or in terms of American identity politics at the same point, specifically attitudes of and about New Yorkers, and The New Yorker magazine’s place among these attitudes—and influence on them. As we have already observed, analytical thinking involves interpretation, and interpretive conclusions are tentative and open to alternative possibilities. 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 wrong (or some combination of the two), but on whether they are demonstrably plausible.
- 209. What makes an interpretation plausible? Your audience might choose not to accept your interpretation for a number of reasons. They might, for example, be New Yorkers and, furthermore, inclined to think that New Yorkers are cool and that this is what the picture “says.” They might be from one of the states depicted on the cover in terms of look-alike blondes and, further, inclined to think that New Yorkers are full of themselves and forever portraying the rest of the country as shallowly conformist and uncultured. Putting It All Together: Interpretation of a New Yorker Cover 69 70 Chapter 4 Interpretation: What It Is, What It Isn't, and How to Do It But none of these personal influences ultimately matters. What matters is that you share your evidence, show your reasons for believing that it means what you say it means, and do this well enough for a reader to find your interpretation rea- sonable (whether he or she actually believes it or not). Then you will have passed the plausibility test. Your interpretation will stand until another person offers an analysis with interpretive conclusions that seems more plausible than yours, point- ing to more or better evidence, and arguing for the meaning of that evidence more
- 210. convincingly. Arriving at an Interpretive Conclusion: Making Choices Let’s try on one final interpretive context, and then see which of the various contexts (lenses) through which we have viewed the cover produces the most credible inter- pretation, the one that seems to best account for the patterns of detail in the evidence. Different interpretations will account better for some details than others—which is why it enriches our view of the world to try on different interpretations. Ultimately, you will have to decide which possible interpretation, as seen through which interpre- tive context, best accounts for what you think is most important and interesting to notice about your subject. We will try to push our own interpretive process to a choice by selecting one inter- pretive context as the most revealing: The New Yorker magazine itself. The dark-haired figure wearing the New York banner stands, in a sense, for the magazine or, at least, for a potential reader—a representative New Yorker. What, then, does the cover “say” to and about New Yorkers and to and about the magazine and its readers? Throughout this book we use the question So what? to prompt interpretive leaps. So what that the woman representing New York is dark when the other women are light, is closed (narrowed eyes, closed mouth, hair tightly
- 211. pulled up and back) when the others are open (wide-open eyes and mouths, loosely flowing hair), is pointed and angular when the others are round, sports a bared midriff when the others are covered? As with our earlier attempt to interpret the cover in the context of the 2000 presi- dential campaign, interpreting it in the context of other New Yorker covers would require a little research. How do New Yorker covers characteristically represent New Yorkers? What might you discover by looking for patterns of repetition and contrast in a set of New Yorker covers rather than just this one? We are willing to bet that you would soon discover the magazine’s droll awareness of its own heralding of New Yorkers as sophisticated, cultured, and cosmopolitan: it at once embraces and sends up the stereotype. How does the cover read in the context, for example, of various jokes about how New Yorkers think of themselves relative to the rest of the country, such as the cover depicting the United States as two large coastlines, east and west, connected by an almost nonexistent middle? Armed with the knowledge that the covers are not only characteristically laughing at the rest of the country but also at New Yorkers themselves, you might begin to make explicit what is implicit in the cover.
- 212. Here are some attempts at making the cover speak. Does the cover “say” that New Yorkers are shrewder, less naïve (less open), warier than other Americans, but largely because they are also more worldly and smarter? Is the cover in some way a “dumb blonde” joke in which the dark woman with the pronounced beauty mark and cal- culating gaze participates in but also sets herself apart from some kind of national “beauty” contest? Are we being invited (intentionally or not) to invert the conven- tional value hierarchy of dark and light so that the dark woman—the sort that gets represented as the evil stepmother in fairy tales such as “Snow White”—becomes “the fairest of them all,” and nobody’s fool? Let’s end this sample analysis and interpretation with two possibilities— somewhat opposed to each other, but probably both “true” of what the cover communicates, at least to certain audiences (East and West Coast Americans, and readers of The New Yorker). At its most serious, the New Yorker cover may speak to American history in which New York has been the point of entry for generations of immigrants, the “dark” (literally and figuratively) in the face of America’s blonde northern European legacy. Within the context of other New Yorker covers, however, we might find ourselves
- 213. gravitating to a less serious and perhaps equally plausible interpretive conclusion: that the cover is a complex joke. It appears to be saying, yes, America, we do think that we’re cooler and more individual and less plastic than the rest of you, but we also know that we shouldn’t be so smug about it. ASSIGNMENTS: Write an Interpretive Essay 1. Build a paper from implications. Begin this assignment by making observations and drawing out implications for one of the topics below. Then use your list as the starting point for a longer paper. Having done the preceding exercise with inferring implications, you could now make up your own list of observations and pursue implications. Make some observations, for example, about the following, and then suggest the possible implications of your observations. • Changing trends in automobiles today • What your local newspaper chooses to put on its front page (or editorial page) over the course of a week • Shows (or advertisements) that appear on network television (as opposed to cable) during 1 hour of evening prime time • Advertisements for scotch whiskey in highbrow magazines
- 214. 2. Analyze a magazine cover by researching an interpretive context. Choose a magazine that, like The New Yorker, has interesting covers. Write an analysis of one such cover by studying other covers from the same maga- zine. (Visit The New Yorker store website to access a wide range of covers, Putting It All Together: Interpretation of a New Yorker Cover 71 72 Chapter 4 Interpretation: What It Is, What It Isn't, and How to Do It including others by Ian Falconer.) Follow the model offered at the end of this chapter: a. Apply The Method—looking for patterns of repetition and contrast—to the cover itself so that you arrive at key repetitions, strands, and organizing con- trasts and begin to ponder a range of possible interpretive leaps to what they signify. b. Use these data to suggest plausible interpretive contexts for the cover. Re- member that interpretive contexts are not simply imposed from without; they’re suggested by the evidence. c. Then move to the other covers. Perform similar operations
- 215. on them to arrive at an awareness of common denominators among the covers, and to analyze what those shared traits might reveal or make more evident in the particular cover you are studying. You will be trying to figure out how the magazine conceives of itself and its audience by the way that it characteristically repre- sents its “face.” It might be illuminating to survey a range of covers by a single artist, such as Ian Falconer, who created the cover we analyze in the chapter. Or try Harry Bliss, who also creates covers and cartons for The New Yorker and is a children’s illustrator. Work by both of these artists may be found on their websites. CHAPTER 5 Analyzing Arguments Our most direct advice on analyzing arguments, and thus on learning to write them more effectively, can be found in this chapter. Here we show you how to un- earth the essentially binary structure of arguments and how to uncover the unstated assumptions upon which arguments typically rest. Arguing with someone else’s argu- ment is usually as much a matter of addressing what is left unsaid—the assumptions
- 216. underneath the argument that the arguer takes to be givens (obvious truths)—as confronting what is argued overtly. THE ROLE OF BINARIES IN ARGUMENT In human—and computerized—thinking, a binary is a pair of elements, usually in opposition to each other, as in off/on, yes/no, right/wrong, agree/disagree, and so on. Many ideas begin with a writer’s noticing some kind of opposition or tension or choice within a subject—capital punishment either does or does not deter crime; a character in a novel is either a courageous rebel or a fool; a new environmental policy is either visionary or blind. As we note in earlier chapters, a major advantage of looking for binaries is that they help you determine what issues are at stake in your subject because binaries position you among competing choices. (See discussion of The Method in Chapter 3, A Toolkit of Analytical Methods.) There is an old joke to the effect that there are two kinds of people: those who like binary thinking and those who do not. Part of the humor here lies in the recognition that we cannot help but think in binary terms. As the philosopher Herbert Marcuse says, “We understand that which is in terms of that which is not”: light is that which is not dark; masculine is that which is not feminine; civilized is that which is not primitive. Creating opposing categories is fundamental to defining things. But as these
- 217. examples may suggest, binaries are also dangerous because they can perpetuate what is called reductive thinking, especially if applied uncritically. If you restrict yourself to thinking in binary terms, you can run into two prob- lems. First, most subjects cannot be adequately considered in terms of only two options—either this or that, with nothing in between. Second, binaries often con- ceal value judgments: the category “primitive,” as opposed to “civilized,” is not a neu- tral description but a devaluation. Civilized, for example, is that which has rejected and moved beyond the primitive. Women, in this way of thinking, are an inverse of 73 74 Chapter 5 Analyzing Arguments men: they are a category defined by unmanly traits. It is useful and necessary to construct binaries, but, as our examples reveal, it is dangerous to ignore the gray areas in between and the value judgments that binaries tend to conceal. Often the trouble starts with the ways binaries are phrased. Two of the most com- mon and potentially counterproductive ways of phrasing binaries are either/or and agree/disagree. In the vast majority of cases, there are more than two alternatives,
- 218. but the either/or or agree/disagree phrasing prevents you from looking for them. And it does not acknowledge that both alternatives may have some truth to them. A new environmental policy may be both visionary and blind. And there may be more accurate categories than visionary and blind for considering the merits and demerits of the policy. Framing an issue in either/or terms can be useful for stimulating a chain of thought, but it is usually not a good way to end one. Consider the either/or binary, “Was the Civil War fought over slavery or economics?” You could begin this way, but if you’re not careful—conscious of the all-or-nothing force of binary formulations— you could easily get trapped in an overly dichotomized position; in this case, that economics caused the war and that slavery had nothing to do with it, or vice versa. You can’t analyze without binaries, but you need to be wary of putting everything into big, undifferentiated categories, labeled all black or all white, with nothing in between. A PROCEDURE FOR REFORMULATING BINARIES IN ARGUMENT We previewed this procedure in brief in our discussion of The Method in Chapter 3. Here we develop it in more detail.
- 219. Strategy 1: Locate a Range of Opposing Categories The first step in using binaries analytically is to locate and distinguish them carefully. Consider, for example, the binaries contained in the following question: Does the model of management known as Total Quality Management (TQM) that is widely used in Japan work in the American automotive industry? The most obvious binary in this question is work versus not work. But there are also other binaries in the question— Japanese versus American, for example, and TQM versus more traditional and more traditionally American models of management. These binaries imply further binaries. Insofar as TQM is acknowledged to be a team-oriented, collaborative management model, the question requires a writer to consider the accuracy and relative suitability of particular traits commonly ascribed to Japanese versus American workers, such as communal and cooperative versus individualistic and competitive. Strategy 2: Analyze and Define the Key Terms Having located the various binaries, you should begin to analyze and define terms. What, for example, does it mean to ask whether TQM works in the American automotive industry? Does work mean “make a substantial profit”? Does work mean
- 220. A Procedure for Reformulating Binaries in Argument 75 “produce more cars more quickly”? Does work mean “improving employee morale”? You would probably find yourself drowning in vagueness unless you carefully argued for the appropriateness of your definition of this key term. Strategy 3: Question the Accuracy of the Binary Having begun to analyze and define your terms, you would next need to determine how accurately they define the issues raised by your subject. You might consider, for example, the extent to which American management styles actually differ from the Japanese ver- sion of TQM. In the process of trying to determine if there are significant differences, you could start to locate particular traits in these management styles and in Japanese versus American culture that might help you formulate your binary more precisely. Think of the binary as a starting point—a kind of deliberate overgeneralization—that allows you to set up positions you can then test to refine. Strategy 4: Substitute “To What Extent?” for “Either/Or” The best strategy in using binaries productively is usually to locate arguments on both sides of the either/or choice that the binary poses and then choose a position some- where between the two extremes. Once you have arrived at what you consider the most accurate phrasing of the binary, you can rephrase the original either/or question
- 221. in the more qualified terms that asking “To what extent?” allows. Making this move does not release you from the responsibility of taking a stand and arguing for it. So, in answer to a question such as “Was the Civil War fought over slavery or economics?” you would attempt to determine the extent to which each side of the bi- nary—slavery and economics—could reasonably be credited as the cause of the war. To do so, you would first rephrase the question thus: To what extent did economics, rather than slavery, cause the Civil War? Rephrasing in this way might also enable you to see problems with the original binary formulation. By analyzing the terms of the binary, you would come to question them and ul- timately arrive at a more complex and qualified position to write about. Admittedly, in reorienting your thinking from the obvious and clear-cut choices that either/or formulations provide to the murkier waters of asking “To what extent?” your decision process is made more difficult. The gain, however, is that the to-what-extent mindset, by predisposing you to assess multiple and potentially conflicting points of view, will enable you to address more fairly and accurately the issues raised by your subject. Applying these steps usually causes you to do one or more of the following: 1. Discover that you have not adequately named the binary and
- 222. that another op- position would be more accurate. 2. Weight one side of your binary more heavily than the other, rather than seeing the issue as all or nothing. 3. Discover that the two terms of your binary are not really so separate and opposed after all but are actually parts of one complex phenomenon or issue (a move known as collapsing the binary). 76 Chapter 5 Analyzing Arguments Where might you end up if you approached our earlier sample topic (whether TQM works in the American automotive industry) by asking to what extent one side of the binary better suits available evidence, rather than arguing that one side is clearly the right choice and the other entirely wrong? You would still be arguing that one position on TQM in American industry is more accurate than the other, but you would inevitably arrive at more carefully qualified conclusions than the question might otherwise have led you to. You would most likely take care, for example, to sug- gest the danger of assuming that all American workers are rugged individualists and all Japanese workers are communal bees. Try this 5.1: Reformulating Binaries
- 223. Apply the strategies for using binaries analytically to analyze the following statements (or questions), as we did with the TQM example. This does not mean that you must proceed step-by-step through the strategies, but, at the least, you should list all of the binaries you can find, isolate the key terms, and reformulate them. Even if the original formulation looks okay to you, assume that it is an overgeneralization that needs to be refined and rephrased. 1. It is important to understand why leaders act in a leadership role. What is the driving force? Is it an internal drive for the business or group to succeed, or is it an internal drive for the leader to dominate others? 2. Is nationalism good for emerging third-world countries? 3. The private lives of public figures should not matter in the way they are assessed by the public. What matters is how competently they do their jobs. 4. The Seattle sound of rock and roll known as Grunge was not original; it was just a rehash of Punk and New Wave elements. UNCOVERING ASSUMPTIONS (REASONING BACK TO PREMISES) All arguments ultimately rest on fundamental assumptions called givens—positions that you decide are not in need of argument because you assume
- 224. the reader will “give” them to you as true. Often, however, these assumptions need first to be acknowledged and then argued, or at least tested. You cannot assume that their truth is self-evident. The failure to locate and examine unacknowledged assumptions (premises) is the downfall of many essays. The problem occurs because our categories—the mental boxes we’ve created over time—have become so fixed, so unquestioned, that we cease to be fully aware of them. Everything you read has basic assumptions that underlie it. What are assumptions in this context? They are the basic ground of beliefs from which a position springs, its start- ing points or givens, its basic operating premises. The Oxford English Dictionary defines a premise—from a Latin word meaning “to put before”—as “a previous statement or proposition from which another statement is inferred or follows as a conclusion.” All arguments or articulations of point of view have premises— that is, they are based in a given set of assumptions, which are built upon to arrive at conclusions. Uncovering Assumptions (Reasoning Back to Premises) 77 Often, though, the assumptions are not visible; they’re implicit (which is why they need to be inferred). Usually writers are not hiding from readers
- 225. the subterranean bases of their outlooks, which might be considered unethical. Rather, many writers (especially inexperienced ones) remain unaware of the premises that underlie their points of view. Similarly, most readers don’t stop to think about the starting points of what they read, so they read only the tip of the proverbial iceberg. The ability to uncover assumptions is a powerful analytical procedure to learn—it gives you insight into the roots, the basic givens that a piece of writing (or a speaker) has assumed are true. When you locate assumptions in a text, you understand the text better—where it’s coming from and what else it believes that is more fundamen- tal than what it is overtly declaring. You also find things to write about; uncovering assumptions offers one of the best ways of developing and revising your own work. Uncovering assumptions can help you understand why you believe x, or may reveal to you that two of your givens are in conflict with each other. To uncover assumptions, you need to read “backward”—to ask what a reading must also already believe, given that it believes what it overtly claims. In other words, you need to imagine or reinvent the process of thinking by which a writer has arrived at a position. Say you read a piece that praises a television show for being realistic but faults it
- 226. for setting a bad example for the kids who watch it. What assumptions might we infer from such a piece? • Television should attempt to depict life accurately (realistically). • Television should produce shows that set good examples. • Kids imitate or at least have their attitudes shaped by what they watch on television. • Good and bad examples are clear and easily recognizable by everyone. Note that none of these assumptions is self-evidently true; each would need to be argued for. And some of the assumptions conflict with others— for example, that shows should be both morally uplifting and realistic, given that in “real life” those who do wrong often go unpunished. These are subjects an analytical response to the piece (or a revision of it) could bring out. What’s Beneath the Question? On some occasions, students find that they have confronted an issue that cannot be resolved by the deductive method. This can be exciting for them. Will cutting marginal tax rates cause people to work more? The answer is yes or no, depending on the premises underlying the work- leisure prefer- ences incorporated into your model.
- 227. —James Marshall, Professor of Economics VOICES FROM ACROSS THE CURRICULUM 78 Chapter 5 Analyzing Arguments UNCOVERING ASSUMPTIONS: A BRIEF EXAMPLE Consider the common complaint that “Tax laws benefit the wealthy.” No matter how you might develop this claim (moving it forward), you would get into trouble if you didn’t also move backward to uncover the premises embedded in this thesis about the purpose of tax laws. The wording of this claim seems to conceal an egalitarian premise: the assumption that tax laws should not benefit anyone or, at least, that they should benefit everyone equally. But what is the purpose of tax laws? Should they redress economic inequities? Should they spur the economy by rewarding those who generate capital? You might go to the U.S. Constitution and/or legal precedents to resolve such questions, but our point here is that you would need to move your thesis back to this point and test the validity of the assumptions upon which it rests. Regardless of the position you might adopt—attacking tax laws, defending them, showing how they actually benefit everyone, or whatever—you would risk arguing blindly if you failed to question what the purpose of tax law is
- 228. in the first place. This testing of assumptions would, at the least, cause you to qualify and refine your thesis. (See Figure 5.1.) A PROCEDURE FOR UNCOVERING ASSUMPTIONS How do you actually go about uncovering assumptions? Here’s a fairly flexible proce- dure, which we apply step-by-step to the claim “Tax laws benefit the wealthy.” 1. Paraphrase the explicit claim. This activity gets you started interpreting the claim, and it may begin to suggest the claim’s underlying assumptions. We might paraphrase the claim as “The rules for paying income tax give rich people mon- etary advantages” or “The rules for paying income tax help the rich get richer.” 2. List the implicit ideas that the claim seems to assume to be true. Here are two: “Tax laws shouldn’t benefit anybody” and “Tax laws should benefit those who need the benefit, those with the least money”(which, by the way, are mutually exclusive). Working Thesis Revised Thesis ConclusionsPremises EvidenceEvidence
- 229. FIGURE 5.1 Reasoning Back to Premises Analyzing an Argument: The Example of "Playing by the Antioch Rules" 79 3. Determine the various ways that the key terms of the claim might be defined, as well as how the writer of the claim has defined them. This process of definition helps you see the key concepts upon which the claim depends. How does the writer intend benefit? Does he or she mean that tax laws benefit only the wealthy and presumably harm those who are not wealthy? Where is the line between wealthy and not wealthy drawn? 4. Try on an oppositional stance to the claim to see if this unearths more underly- ing assumptions. Regardless of your view on the subject, suppose for the sake of argument that the writer is wrong. This step allows you to think comparatively, helping you to see the claim more clearly, to see what it apparently excludes from its fundamental beliefs. Knowing what the underlying assumption leaves out helps us see the nar- rowness upon which the claim may rest; we understand better its limits. Two positions that the claim appears to exclude are “Tax laws
- 230. benefit the poor” and “Tax laws do not benefit the wealthy.” ANALYZING AN ARGUMENT: THE EXAMPLE OF “PLAYING BY THE ANTIOCH RULES” Because the following essay originally appeared (in 1993) as a newspaper editorial (in The New York Times), it is less expository than much academic analytical writing. We have included it because it so clearly illustrates how a writer reasons forward to conclusions by reasoning backward to premises. The essay also illustrates how the strategies of refocusing binaries and qualifying claims operate in a finished piece of writing. As we have already noted, these strategies, which are so useful for analyzing arguments, are equally useful for producing them. As you read this editorial on the controversial rules established at Antioch College (which, sadly, is closing its doors) to govern sexual conduct among its students, try to focus not only on the content of the argument, but also on its form; that is, how the writer moves from one phase of his thinking to the next. Toward this end, we have added our own summaries of what each paragraph of the editorial accomplishes. At the end of the editorial we sum up the writer’s primary developmental strategies in a form you can apply to your own writing. Playing by the Antioch Rules
- 231. By Eric Fassin [1] A good consensus is hard to find, especially on sexual politics. But the infamous rules instituted last year by Antioch College, which require students to obtain explicit verbal consent before so much as a kiss is exchanged, have created just that. They have pro- voked indignation (this is a serious threat to individual freedom!) as well as ridicule (can this be serious?). Sexual correctness thus proves a worthy successor to political correct- ness as a target of public debate. [The writer names the issue: the complaint that Antioch’s rules threaten individual freedom.] 80 Chapter 5 Analyzing Arguments [2] Yet this consensus against the rules reveals shared assumptions among liberals, conserva- tives and even radicals about the nature of sex in our culture. [The writer identifies members of an unlikely consensus and focuses on a surprising similarity.] [3] The new definition of consent at Antioch is based on a “liberal” premise: it assumes that sexual partners are free agents and that they mean what they say—yes means yes, and no means no. But the initiator must now obtain prior consent, step by step, which in practice shifts the burden of clarification from the woman to the man. The question is no longer “Did she say no?” but “Did she say yes?” Silence does
- 232. not indicate consent, and it becomes his responsibility to dispel any ambiguity. [The writer identifies assump- tion of freedom underlying the rules.] [4] The novelty of the rules, however, is not as great as it seems. Antioch will not exert more control over its students; there are no sexual police. In practice, you still do what you want—as long as your partner does not complain . . . the morning after. If this is censor- ship, it intervenes ex post facto, not a priori. [The writer questions the premise that rules will actually control individual freedom more than current norms do.] [5] In fact, the “threat” to individual freedom for most critics is not the invasion of privacy through the imposition of sexual codes, but the very existence of rules. Hence the suc- cess of polemicists like Katie Roiphe or Camille Paglia, who argue that feminism in recent years has betrayed its origins by embracing old-style regulations, paradoxically choosing the rigid 1950s over the liberating 1960s. Their advice is simply to let women manage on their own, and individuals devise their own rules. This individualist critique of feminism finds resonance with liberals, but also, strangely, with conservatives, who belatedly discover the perils of regulating sexuality. [The writer locates an antiregulatory (laissez-faire) premise beneath the freedom premise.] [6] But sexual laissez-faire, with its own implicit set of rules,
- 233. does not seem to have worked very well recently. Since the collapse of established social codes, people play the same game with different rules. If more women are complaining of sexual violence, while more men are worrying that their words and actions might be misconstrued, who benefits from the absence of regulation? [The writer attacks the laissez- faire premise for ineffectiveness.] [7] A laissez-faire philosophy toward relationships assumes that sexuality is a game that can (and must) be played without rules, or rather that the invention of rules should be left to individual spontaneity and creativity, despite rising evidence that the rule of one’s own often leads to misunderstandings. When acted out, individual fantasy always plays within preordained social rules. These rules conflict with the assumption in this culture that sex is subject to the reign of nature, not artifice, that it is the province of the individual, not of society. [The writer uncovers an assumption beneath the laissez-faire premise: sex is natural and thus outside social rules.] [8] Those who believe that society’s constraints should have nothing to do with sex also agree that sex should not be bound by the social conventions of language. Indeed, this rebellion against the idea of social constraints probably accounts for the controversy over explicit verbal consent—from George Will, deriding “sex amidst semicolons,”
- 234. to Camille Paglia railing, “As if sex occurs in the verbal realm.” As if sexuality were incompatible with words. As if the only language of sex were silence. For The New Yorker, Analyzing an Argument: The Example of "Playing by the Antioch Rules" 81 “the [Antioch] rules don’t get rid of the problem of unwanted sex at all; they just shift the advantage from the muscle-bound frat boy to the honey- tongued French major.” [The writer develops the linguistic implications of the natural premise and questions the assumption that sex is incompatible with language.] [9] This is not very different from the radical feminist position, which holds that verbal per- suasion is no better than physical coercion. In this view, sexuality cannot be entrusted to rhetoric. The seduction of words is inherently violent, and seduction itself is an object of suspicion. (If this is true, Marvell’s invitation “To His Coy Mistress” is indeed a form of sex- ual harassment, as some campus feminists have claimed.) [The writer develops a fur- ther implication: that the attack on rules masks a fear of language’s power to seduce—and questions the equation of seduction with harassment.] [10] What the consensus against the Antioch rules betrays is a common vision of sexuality
- 235. which crosses the lines dividing conservatives, liberals and radicals. So many of the ar- guments start from a conventional situation, perceived and presented as natural: a heterosexual encounter with the man as the initiator, and the woman as gatekeeper— hence the focus on consent. [The writer redefines consensus as sharing the unacknowledged premise that conventional sex roles are natural.] [11] The outcry largely results from the fact that the rules undermine this traditional erotic model. Not so much by proscribing (legally), but by prescribing (socially). The new model, in which language becomes a normal form of erotic communication, underlines the conventional nature of the old one. [The writer reformulates the claim about the anti-rules consensus: rules undermine attempts to pass off traditional sex roles as natural.] [12] By encouraging women out of their “natural” reserve, these rules point to a new defini- tion of sexual roles. “Yes” could be more than a way to make explicit the absence of “no”; “yes” can also be a cry of desire. Women may express demands, and not only grant favors. If the legal “yes” opened the ground for an erotic “yes,” if the contract gave way to desire and if consent led to demand, we would indeed enter a brave new erotic world. [The writer extends the implication of the claim: rules could make sex more erotic rather than less free.]
- 236. [13] New rules are like new shoes: they hurt a little at first, but they may fit tomorrow. The only question about the Antioch rules is not really whether we like them, but whether they improve the situation between men and women. All rules are artificial, but, in the absence of generally agreed-upon social conventions, any new prescription must feel artificial. And isn’t regulation needed precisely when there is an absence of cultural consensus? [The writer questions the standard by which we evaluate rules; the writer proposes reformulating the binary from artificial versus natu- ral to whether rules will improve gender relations.] [14] Whether we support or oppose the Antioch rules, at least they force us to acknowledge that the choice is not between regulation and freedom, but between different sets of rules, implicit or explicit. They help dispel the illusion that sexuality is a state of nature individuals must experience outside the social contract, and that eroticism cannot exist within the conventions of language. As Antioch reminds us, there is more in eroticism and sexuality than is dreamt of in this culture. [The writer culminates with his 82 Chapter 5 Analyzing Arguments own idea: rules are good because they force us to acknowledge as a
- 237. harmful illusion the idea that sex operates outside social conventions.] Despite its brevity, this editorial covers a daunting amount of ground—an exami- nation of “shared assumptions among liberals, conservatives and even radicals about the nature of sex in our culture” (paragraph 2). The writer, given his audience (readers of the Sunday New York Times), allows himself more breadth in both his topic and his claims than he would if he were writing an article on the same subject in an academic setting, where he would narrow his focus to supply more analysis of issues and evidence. The aim of editorials like this one is not only to inform or persuade but also to provoke and entertain. Nevertheless, the strategies that direct the thinking in this piece are, with some minor exceptions, the same as they would be in a more extended analytical piece. They are central strategies that you can apply to many sorts of writing situations, such as analyzing arguments and as a means of finding and developing your own ideas. STRATEGIES FOR DEVELOPING AN ARGUMENT BY REASONING BACK TO PREMISES 1. Set up a claim but delay passing judgment on it. In the concluding sentence of paragraph 1, the word “target” suggests that the essay might attack Antioch’s policy. In paragraph 2, however, the writer does not go on to demonstrate what
- 238. is threatening and potentially ridiculous about Antioch’s sexual contract, but neither does he yet offer his own conclusion on whether the views he has thus far described are right or wrong. Instead, he slows down the forward momentum toward judgment and begins to analyze what the consensus against the Antioch rules might mean—the “shared assumptions” it reveals “among liberals, con- servatives, and even radicals about the nature of sex in our culture.” In fact, the writer spends the first three-quarters of the essay trying on various answers to this question of meaning. (Note: a careful reader would recognize by tonal signals such as the exclamation mark in “serious threat to individual freedom!” that the opening paragraph has, in fact, begun to announce its position, albeit not overtly, by subtly overstating its opposite. It is not until later in the editorial, however, that we can clearly recognize that the writer is employing a common introductory strategy— defining the posi- tion you plan to argue against.) 2. Decide what is really at issue by reasoning back to premises. Rather than proceed- ing directly to a judgment on whether the Antioch rules threaten individual freedom, the writer carefully searches out the assumptions—the premises and givens—underlying the attacks on the rules. (This is a key step missing from
- 239. most inadequately developed analyses and arguments.) He proposes, for ex- ample, that underneath the consensus’ attack on the rules and its defense of individual freedom lies a basic premise about sex and society— that sexuality should not be governed by rules because it is natural rather than cultural: “These rules conflict with the assumption in this culture that sex is subject to the reign of nature, not artifice, that it is the province of the individual, not of society.” Strategies for Developing an Argument by Reasoning Back to Premises 83 3. Be alert for terms that create false dichotomies. A false dichotomy (sometimes called a false binary) inaccurately divides possible views on a subject into two opposing camps, forcing a choice between black and white, when some shade of gray might be fairer and more accurate. When reading, or when writing an argument of your own, it is a good strategy to question any either/or dichotomy. Consider whether its opposing terms define the issue fairly and accurately before accepting an argument in favor of one side or the other. Consider, too, how you might reject both choices offered by an either/or op- position to construct an alternative approach that is truer to the issues at hand.
- 240. This is what the writer of the editorial does. He outlines and then rejects as a false dichotomy the consensus view that sexual behavior either is a province of individual freedom or is regulated by society: False Dichotomies Freedom vs. regulation Natural vs. artificial No rules vs. rules The writer argues instead that much of what we perceive to be natural is in fact governed by social rules and conventions, such as the notion of men as sexual initiators and women as no-sayers and gatekeepers. He proposes that what is really at stake is a different dichotomy, a choice between two sets of rules, one implicit and one explicit: Reformulated Dichotomies Rules vs. other rules Implicit vs. explicit Not working vs. might work Based on “no” vs. based on “yes” The editorial concludes that we need to decide questions of sexual behavior—at
- 241. Antioch and in the culture at large—by recognizing and evaluating the relative merits of the two sets of rules rather than by creating a false dichotomy between rules and no rules, between regulation and freedom. 4. In your conclusion, return to the position that you set out to explore and restate it in the more carefully qualified way you arrived at in the body of your essay: “The choice is not between regulation and freedom, but between different sets of rules.” Clearly, the essay’s conclusion does not simply repeat the essay’s introductory claims, but it does respond to the way in which the essay began. Notice that virtually the entire essay has consisted of reasoning back to premises as a way of arriving at new ways of thinking. Try this 5.2: Reasoning Back to Premises In the following excerpt from a student paper, the writer advances various claims based on premises that are not articulated. Analyze the excerpt using the procedure for uncovering assumptions detailed earlier. Find the places in the paragraph where 84 Chapter 5 Analyzing Arguments the writer’s operating assumptions—what he or she takes as givens—are left unsaid, and compile a list of these. First, try to find the premises that
- 242. are articulated. On what premises, for example, does the writer base the argument that self-interest contributes to the health and growth of the economy as a whole? In all levels of trade, including individual, local, domestic, and interna- tional, both buyers and sellers are essentially concerned with their own welfare. This self-interest, however, actually contributes to the health and growth of the economy as a whole. Each country benefits by exporting those goods in which it has an advantage and importing goods in which it does not. Importing and exporting allow countries to focus on produc- ing those goods that they can generate most efficiently. As a result of specializing in certain products and then trading them, self- interest leads to efficient trade, which leads to consumer satisfaction. Try this 5.3: Acknowledging Competing Premises In the following paragraph the writer has made his or her premises quite clear but has not acknowledged the possible validity of competing premises. (It is this same neglect of other possible positions that Fassin makes the substance of his editorial against the detractors of the Antioch rules; use him as a model). If the writer could become more self-conscious of reasoning back to premises, he or she would be more likely to discover these competing claims and either qualify the argument
- 243. or overtly counter these competing claims. Field hockey is a sport that can be played by either men or women. All sports should be made available for members of both sexes. As long as women are allowed to participate on male teams in sports such as football and wrestling, men should be allowed to participate on female teams in sports such as field hockey and lacrosse. If women press for and receive equal opportunity in all sports, then it is only fair that men be given the same opportunity. If women object to this type of equal opportunity, then they are promoting reverse discrimination. Examine the paragraph and lay out the writer’s premises in your own words. First (1) Find at least two key assumptions that he or she wishes us to accept. Hint: the writer assumes, for example, that fairness ought to take precedence over other possible values in the selection of athletic teams. More generally, think about how he or she is defining other of her key terms. Then (2) formulate two assumptions that an audience who disagrees with the writer’s point of view might hold. THE PROBLEMS WITH DEBATE-STYLE ARGUMENT Many of you will have been introduced to writing arguments through the debate model—writing pro or con on a given position, with the aim of
- 244. defeating an imagined opponent and convincing your readers of the rightness of your position. But as the American College Dictionary says, “to argue implies reasoning or trying to understand; it does not necessarily imply opposition.” It is this more exploratory, tentative, and dispassionate mode of argument that this book encourages you to practice. Seeing the Trees as Well as the Forest: Toulmin and the Rules of Argument 85 To its credit, the debate model teaches writers to consider more than a single viewpoint, their opponent’s as well as their own. But, unfortunately, it can also train them, even if inadvertently, to see the other side only as the opposition and to concen- trate their energy only on winning the day. The problem with this approach is that it overemphasizes the bottom line—aggressively advancing a claim for or against some view—without first engaging in the exploratory interpretation of evidence that is so necessary to arriving at thoughtful arguments. Thus, debate-style argument produces a frame of mind in which defending posi- tions matters more than taking the necessary time to develop ideas worth defending. And, very possibly, it nourishes the mudslinging and opinionated mindset—attack first—that proliferates in editorials and television talk shows,
- 245. not to mention the conversations you overhear in going about your life. We are not saying that peo- ple should forget about making value and policy decisions and avoid the task of persuading others. We are saying that too many of the arguments we all read, hear, and participate in every day are based on insufficient analysis. In sum, adhering to the more restrictive, debate-style definition of argument can create a number of problems for careful analytical writers: 1. By requiring writers to be oppositional, it inclines them to discount or dismiss problems in the side or position they have chosen; they cling to the same static position rather than testing it as a way of allowing it to evolve. 2. It inclines writers toward either/or thinking rather than encouraging them to formulate more qualified (carefully limited, acknowledging exceptions, etc.) positions that integrate apparently opposing viewpoints. 3. It overvalues convincing someone else at the expense of developing under- standing. Analysis is an important corrective to narrow and needlessly oppositional thinking. A writer who is skeptical of global generalizations and of unexamined value judgments may sound timid and even confused compared with the insistent pronouncements of daytime talk shows and televised political
- 246. debates. And be- cause the argumentative habit of mind is so aggressively visible in our culture, most people never get around to experimenting with the more reflective and less combative approach that analysis embraces. But the effort you put into carefully formulating your ideas by qualifying them, checking for unstated assumptions, and acknowledg- ing rather than ignoring problems in your position will make you a stronger writer and thinker. SEEING THE TREES AS WELL AS THE FOREST: TOULMIN AND THE RULES OF ARGUMENT At this point in our discussion, it will be helpful to digress slightly to talk about the systematic examination of evidence as it is described in the field of logic. Logic as a discipline has offered us various, sometimes conflicting rules of argument—procedures for locating and using evidence in the service of a claim and for determining when that use of evidence can be judged valid. 86 Chapter 5 Analyzing Arguments Philosophers have long quested for forms that might lend to human argu- ment some greater clarity and certainty, more like what is possible with formulas in math. As our discussion of one particular debate within the discipline of
- 247. ph ilosophy demonstrates, however, the examination of evidence is necessarily an untidy process. Probably the most common way of talking about logical argumentation goes back to the Greek philosopher Aristotle. At the heart of the Aristotelian model is the syl- logism, which consists of three parts: 1. Major premise: a general proposition presumed to be true 2. Minor premise: a subordinate proposition also presumed to be true 3. Conclusion: a claim that follows logically from the two premises, if the argument has been properly framed A frequently cited example of a syllogism is: All men are mortal (major premise). Socrates is a man (minor premise). Therefore, Socrates is mortal (conclusion). A premise is a proposition (assumption) upon which an argument is based and from which a conclusion is drawn. In the syllogism, if both of the premises are true and have been stated in the proper form (both containing a shared term), then theoretically the conclusion must also be true. In the example, if it is true that all men are mortal, and if it is true that Socrates is a man, then it must
- 248. follow that Socrates is mortal. The British philosopher Steven Toulmin offered a competing model of argument in his influential book, The Uses of Argument (1958). The Toulmin model can be seen as motivated by a desire to describe the structure of argument in a way that comes closer to what actually happens in practice when we try to take a position. The Toulmin model consists of: 1. Data: the evidence appealed to in support of a claim; data respond to the ques- tion “What have you got to go on?” 2. Warrant: a general principle or reason used to connect the data with the claim; the warrant responds to the question “How did you get there?” (from the data to the claim) 3. Claim: a conclusion about the data Toulmin’s model was motivated by his belief that the philosophical tradition of formal logic, with its many rules for describing and evaluating the conduct of arguments, conflicts with the practice and idiom (ways of phrasing) of arguers. To radically simplify Toulmin’s case, it is that the syllogism does not adequately account for what really happens when thinkers try to frame and defend various claims.
- 249. Toulmin notes that the rules governing the phrasing of syllogistic arguments are very strict, as they must be if the form of an argument alone is to disclose its validity. Seeing the Trees as Well as the Forest: Toulmin and the Rules of Argument 87 The Socrates syllogism cited above earns its validity on the basis of its form. But for Toulmin, the strictness of the rules necessary for guaranteeing formal validity leaves out the greater amount of uncertainty that is a part of reasoning about most ques- tions, issues, and problems. A syllogism is designed to reveal its soundness through the careful framing and arrangement of its terms: All men are mortal. (All x’s are y.) Socrates is a man. (Socrates is an x.) Therefore, Socrates is mortal. (Socrates is y.) But at what price, asks Toulmin, do we simplify our phrasing of complex situa- tions in the world in order to gain this appearance of truth? In how many situations, he asks, can we say that “all x’s are y”? Toulmin observes, using his own argument structure as a case in point, that as soon as an argument begins to add information in support of its
- 250. premises, the com- plexity and inevitable tentativeness of the argument become apparent, rather than its evident truth. Here is one of Toulmin’s examples of what must happen to the form of an argument when a person begins to add this supporting information, which he calls backing: Data: Harry was born in Bermuda. Warrant: The relevant statutes provide that people born in the colonies of British parents are entitled to British citizenship. Claim: So, presumably, Harry is a British citizen. The backing for the warrant would inevitably involve mentioning “the relevant statutes”—acts of Parliament, statistical reports, and so forth— to prove its accuracy. The addition of such information, says Toulmin, would “prevent us from writing the argument so that its validity shall be manifest from its formal properties alone” (The Uses of Argument, p. 123). In other words, formal logic has evaluated an argument on the basis of a tightly structured form (such as the syllogism) that makes the argument’s validity visible (manifest). But as soon as the form of the argument is made to include the greater amount of information that supports its accuracy and truth, it is
- 251. no longer possible to evaluate the argument solely on the basis of its adherence to the required form. On this basis, Toulmin questions the tradition of guaranteeing the soundness of argu- ments solely on rules of form. The advantage of understanding Toulmin’s critique of syllogistic logic is that his model provides an antidote to the notion that there is a ready- made system for con- necting evidence with claims that guarantees that an argument will always be right. To use an analogy, if the Aristotelian syllogism appears to offer us the promise of never mistaking the forest for the trees, Toulmin’s revision of that model is to never let us forget that the forest is in fact made up of trees. As a writer, you naturally want some guidelines and workable methods for selecting evidence and linking it to claims, and this book does what it can to 88 Chapter 5 Analyzing Arguments provide them. But what you can’t expect to find is a set of predetermined slots into which you can drop any evidence and find the truth. Rather, as Toulmin allows us to see, analyses and arguments cannot be separated from the complex set of details and circumstances that are part of life as we live it.
- 252. Clearly, the rules of argument are important for clarifying and testing our think- ing. But an argument depends not only on whether its premises follow logically but on the quality of the thinking that produces those premises in the first place and painstakingly tests their accuracy. This is the job of analysis. REFINING CATEGORICAL THINKING: TWO EXAMPLES We have paused to extol Toulmin because his flexible and sensitive approach to argu- mentative context offers the way out of a problem that besets too many of the argu- ments we all encounter in our daily lives. That problem is categorical thinking, and, to be more precise, the rigidity to which categorical thinking is prone. To generalize from particular experiences, we try to put those experiences into meaningful categories. Analytical thought is quite unthinkable without categories. But these can mislead us into oversimplification when the categories are too broad or too simply connected. This is especially the case with the either/or choices to which categorical thinking is prone: approve/disapprove, real/unreal, accurate/inaccurate, believable/unbelievable. The writer who evaluates leadership in terms of its selfless- ness/selfishness, for example, needs to pause to consider why we should evaluate lead- ership in these terms in the first place.
- 253. We will refer to the following two examples to illustrate how (1) qualifying your claims and (2) checking for the unstated assumptions upon which your claims depend can remedy the two primary problems created by categorical thinking: unqualified claims and overstated positions. Example I: I think that there are many things shown on TV that are damaging for people to see. But there is no need for censorship. No network is going to show violence without the approval of the public, obviously for financial reasons. What must be remembered is that the public ma- jority will see what it wants to see in our mass society. Example II: Some members of our society feel that [the televised cartoon series] The Simpsons promotes wrong morals and values for our society. Other members find it funny and entertaining. I feel that The Simpsons has a more positive effect than a negative one. In relation to a real-life marriage, Marge and Homer’s marriage is pretty accurate. The problems they deal with are not very large or intense. As for the family relationships, the Simpsons are very close and love each other. The main problem with example I is the writer’s failure to qualify his ideas, a problem that causes him to generalize to the point of oversimplification. Note the writer’s habit of stating his claims absolutely (we have italicized the words that make these claims unqualified): “there is no need for censorship”
- 254. “no network is going to show violence without” Refining Categorical Thinking: Two Examples 89 “obviously for financial reasons” “what must be remembered” “the majority will see” Such broad, pronouncement-like claims cannot be supported. The solution is to more carefully limit the claims, especially the key premise about public approval. The assertion that a commercial television industry will, for finan- cial reasons, give the public “what it wants” is true to an extent (our key phrase for reformulating either/ors)—but it is not true as globally as the writer wishes us to believe. Couldn’t it also be argued, for example, that given the power of television to shape people’s tastes and opinions, the public sees not just what it wants but what it has been taught to want? This complication of the writer’s argument about public approval undermines the credibility of his global assertion that “there is no need for censorship.” Example II would appear to be more qualified than example I
- 255. because it acknowledges the existence of more than one point of view. Rather than broadly asserting that the show is positive and accurate, she tempers these claims (as italics show): “I feel that The Simpsons has a more positive effect than a negative one”; “Marge and Homer’s marriage is pretty accurate.” These qualifications, however, are superficial. Before she could convince us to approve of The Simpsons for its accuracy in depicting marriage, she would have to convince us that accuracy is a reasonable criterion for evaluating TV shows (especially cartoons) rather than assuming the unquestioned value of accuracy. Would an accurate depiction of the life of a serial killer, for example, necessarily make for a “positive” show? Similarly, if a fantasy show has no interest in accuracy, is it necessarily “negative” and without moral value? When writers present a debatable premise as if it were self- evidently true, the conclusions built upon it cannot stand. At the least, the writer of example II needs to recognize her debatable premise, articulate it, and make an argument in support of it. She might also precede her judgment about the show with more analysis. Before deciding that the show is “more positive than negative” and thus does not promote “wrong morals and values for our society,” she could analyze
- 256. what the show says about marriage and how it goes about saying it. Likewise, if the writer of example I had further examined his own claims before rushing to argue an absolute position on censorship, he would have noticed how much of the thinking that underlies them remains unarticulated and thus unexamined. It would also allow him to sort out the logical contradiction with his opening claim that “there are many things shown on TV that are da maging for people to see.” If television networks will only broadcast what the public approves of, then apparently the public must approve of being damaged or fail to notice that it is being damaged. If the public either fails to notice it is being damaged or approves of it, aren’t these credible arguments for rather than against censorship? 90 Chapter 5 Analyzing Arguments A BRIEF GLOSSARY OF COMMON LOGICAL ERRORS This last section of the chapter returns briefly to the field of logic, which provides terms to shorthand certain common thinking errors. We mention six errors, all of which involve the root problem of oversimplification. 1. Simple cause/complex effect. The fallacy of simple cause/complex effect involves
- 257. assigning a single cause to a complex phenomenon that cannot be so easily explained. A widespread version of this fallacy is seen in arguments that blame individual figures for broad historical events, for example, “Eisenhower caused America to be involved in the Vietnam War.” Such a claim ignores the Cold War ethos, the long history of colonialism in Southeast Asia, and a multitude of other factors. When you reduce a complex sequence of events to a simple and single cause—or assign a simple effect to a complex cause—you will virtually always be wrong. 2. False cause. Another common cause/effect thinking error, false cause is produced by assuming that two events are causally connected when they aren’t necessarily. One of the most common forms of this fallacy—known as post hoc, ergo propter hoc (Latin for “after this, therefore because of this”)—assumes that because A precedes B in time, A causes B. For example, it was once thought that the sun shining on a pile of garbage caused the garbage to conceive flies. This error is the stuff that superstition is made of. “I walked under a ladder, and then I got hit by a car” becomes “Because I walked under a ladder, I got hit by a car.” Because one action precedes a second one in time, the first action is assumed to be the cause of the second. A more dangerous form
- 258. of this error goes like this: Evidence: A new neighbor moved in downstairs on Saturday. My television dis- appeared on Sunday. Conclusion: The new neighbor stole my TV. As this example also illustrates, typically in false cause some significant alterna- tive has not been considered, such as the presence of flies’ eggs in the garbage. Similarly, it does not follow that if a person watches television and then commits a crime, television watching necessarily causes crime; there are other causes to be considered. 3. Analogy and false analogy. An analogy is a means of understanding some- thing relatively foreign in terms of something more familiar. When you argue by analogy you are saying that what is true for one thing will necessarily be true for something else that it in some way resembles. The famous poetic line “my love is like a red, red rose,” is actually an argument by analogy. At first glance, this rather clichéd comparison seems too far-fetched to be reasonable. But is it a false analogy or a potentially enabling one? Past users of this analogy have thought the thorns, the early fading, the beauty, and so on, sufficient to validate the analogy between roses and women. Analogies, in
- 259. short, are not bad A Brief Glossary of Common Logical Errors 91 or illogical in themselves. In fact, they can be incredibly useful, depending on how you handle them. The danger that arguing analogically can pose is that an inaccurate compari- son, usually one that oversimplifies, prevents you from looking at the evidence. Flying to the moon is like flying a kite? Well, it’s a little bit like that, but . . . in most ways that matter, sending a rocket to the moon does not resemble send- ing a kite into the air. Another way that an analogy can become false is when it becomes over- extended: there is a point of resemblance at one juncture, but the writer then goes on to assume that the two items compared will necessarily resemble each other in most other respects. To what extent is balancing your checkbook really like juggling? On the other hand, an analogy that first appears overextended may not be: how far, for example, could you reasonably go in comparing a presiden- tial election to a sales campaign, or an enclosed shopping mall to a village main street?
- 260. When you find yourself reasoning by analogy, ask yourself two questions: (1) are the basic similarities greater and more significant than the obvious dif- ferences? and (2) am I overrelying on surface similarities and ignoring more essential differences? 4. Equivocation. Equivocation confuses an argument by slipping between two meanings for a single word or phrase. For example: “Only man is capable of religious faith. No woman is a man. Therefore, no woman is capable of religious faith.” Here the first use of man is generic, intended to be gender neutral, while the second use is decidedly masculine. One specialized form of equivocation results in what are sometimes called weasel words. A weasel word is one that has been used so much and so loosely that it ceases to have much meaning (the term derives from the weasel’s reputed practice of sucking the contents from an egg without destroying the shell). The word natural, for example, can mean good, pure, and unsullied, but it can also refer to the ways of nature (flora and fauna). Such terms (love, reality, and experience are others) invite equivocation because they mean so many different things to different people. 5. Begging the question. To beg the question is to argue in a circle by asking read- ers to accept without argument a point that is actually at stake. This kind of
- 261. fallacious argument hides its conclusion among its assumptions. For example, “Huckleberry Finn should be banned from school libraries as obscene because it uses obscene language” begs the question by presenting as obviously true issues that are actually in question: the definition of obscenity and the assumption that the obscene should be banned because it is obscene. 6. Overgeneralization. An overgeneralization is an inadequately qualified claim. It may be true that some heavy drinkers are alcoholics, but it would be not fair to claim that all heavy drinking is or leads to alcoholism. As a rule, be wary of “totalizing” or global pronouncements; the bigger the generalization, the more likely it admits exceptions. 92 Chapter 5 Analyzing Arguments ASSIGNMENTS: Analyze or Produce an Argument 1. Locate the binaries in an editorial or other position piece and explore the extent to which these are adequate and inadequate ways of defining the subject. Once you have arrived at the essential claims of the piece, analyze these using the tools offered in this chapter. In particular, you should use the strategies for reformu- lating binaries in A Procedure for Reformulating Binaries in Argument and for
- 262. unearthing premises in the A Procedure for Uncovering Assumptions sections. Remember to share your thinking, not just to present your conclusions, as you write your analysis. 2. Write an essay in which you reason back to the premises that underlie some idea or attitude of your own, preferably one that has undergone some kind of change in recent years (for example, your attitude toward the world of work, marriage, family life, community, religion, etc.). Take care not to substitute unanalyzed narrative for analysis. Even though you are working from your own experience, stay focused on analysis of your assumptions and binaries (which you can use the two procedures cited in the previous assignment option to produce). 3. Compose an argument of your own (it can be an editorial), using the chapter’s Strategies for Developing an Argument by Reasoning Back to Premises. As you have seen, the editorial on the Antioch Rules is both a critique of the thinking in another argument and an argument in its own right. And so if you wish you may use an analysis of an existing argument to prompt your own. CHAPTER 6
- 263. Topics and Modes of Analysis The first unit of this book, The Analytical Frame of Mind, has sought to persuade you that analysis is worth the challenge—that you can unlearn less productive ways of thinking and take on fresh habits that will make you smarter. In this final chapter of Unit I, we offer concrete advice about how to succeed in creating writing that fulfills some of the most common basic writing tasks that you will be asked to produce at the undergraduate level and beyond. A unifying element of the chapters in this unit is their focus on the stage of the composing process that rhetoricians call invention. This chapter takes up several of classical rhetoric’s topics of invention, which are places (from the Greek topoi) from which a writer or orator might discover the things he or she needs to say. These top- ics include comparison/contrast and definition, to which we have added summary, reaction papers, and agree/disagree topics because these are such common forms in college and other writing settings. The chapter offers you strategies for making the best use of these topics as analytical tools. The chapter opens by focusing on rhetorical analysis: an approach that we have been featuring from the opening pages, without labeling it as such. Rhetorical analysis is a concern for analytical thinkers because it focuses on how and why our responses
- 264. are triggered and shaped by things in the world, from a sign we read on the subway to the language of a presidential speech. Like analysis in general, rhetorical analysis asks what things mean, why they are as they are and do what they do. But rhetorical analysis asks these questions with one primary question always foregrounded: how does the thing achieve its effects on an audience? Rhetorical analysis asks not just what do I think, but what am I being invited to think (and feel) and by what means? RHETORICAL ANALYSIS To analyze the rhetoric of something is to determine how that something persuades and positions its readers or viewers or listeners. Rhetorical analysis is an essential skill because it reveals how particular pieces of communication seek to enlist our support and shape our behavior. Only then can we decide whether we should be persuaded to respond as we have been invited to respond. 93 94 Chapter 6 Topics and Modes of Analysis Everything has a rhetoric: classrooms, churches, speeches, supermarkets, department store windows, Starbucks, photographs, magazine covers, your bedroom, this book. In-
- 265. tention, by the way, is not the issue. It doesn’t matter whether the effect of a place or a piece of writing on its viewers (or readers) is deliberate and planned or not. What mat- ters is that you can notice how the details of the thing itself encourage or discourage certain kinds of responses in the consumers of whatever it is you are studying. What, for example, does the high ceiling of a Gothic cathedral invite in the way of response from people who enter it? What do the raised platform at the front of a classroom and the tidy rows of desks secured to the floor say to the students who enter there? If you are reading this book in a first-year college writing course, you may be asked to write a rhetorical analysis, often of a visual image of some kind, early in the semester. What follows is an exercise in rhetorical analysis that will help you better understand the aims and methods of this kind of analysis. We think it is easiest to start with analysis of visual rhetoric—the rhetoric, for example, of a typical classroom. Rhetorical Analysis of a Place: A Brief Example To get you started on a rhetorical analysis of a place, here is the beginning of one on the layout of our college campus. It was written as a freewrite and could serve as the basis for further observation. The campus is laid out in several rows and quadrangles. It is interesting to observe where the differ-
- 266. ent academic buildings are, relative to the academic departments they house. It is also interesting to see how the campus positions student housing. In a way, the campus is set up as a series of quadrangles—areas of space with four sides. One of the dormitories, for example, forms a quad- rangle. Quadrangles invite people to look in—rather than out. They are enclosed spaces, the center of which is a kind of blank. The center serves as a shared space, a safely walled-off area for the de- velopment of a separate community. The academic buildings also form a quadrangle of sorts, with an open green space in the center. On one side of the quadrangle are the buildings that house the natu- ral and social sciences. Opposite these—on the other side of a street that runs through the center of campus—are the modern brick and glass structures that house the arts and the humanities . . . If you push these observations by asking “So what?,” here are some of the rhetori- cal implications at which you might arrive: • That the campus is inward-looking and self-enclosed • That it invites its members to feel separate and safe • That it announces the division of the sciences and the social sciences from the arts and humanities, so the campus layout arguably creates the sense of a divided community. Rhetorical Analysis of an Advertisement: A Student Paper This example is excerpted from a student’s rhetorical analysis of a perfume advertise-
- 267. ment that appeared in a magazine aimed at young women. The analysis was written in a course called Introduction to Communication. The writer’s aim is not only to tell Rhetorical Analysis 95 her readers what the advertisement “says” but to locate it in a social context. The stu- dent also uses secondary sources to provide an interpretive context (a lens) through which to see the rhetoric of the ad—its means of persuasion. The visual imagery of advertisements offers instructive opportunities for rhetori- cal analysis because advertising is a form of persuasion. Advertisers attend to rhetoric by carefully targeting their audiences. This means advertisements are well suited to the questions that rhetorical analysis typically asks: how is the audience being invited to respond and by what means (in what context)? You’ll notice that in the rhetorical analysis of the magazine ad, the writer occasionally extends her analysis to evaluative conclusions about the aims and possible effects (on American culture) of the adver- tisement. We’ve included the first five paragraphs of the essay along with a piece of its conclusion. Marketing the Girl Next Door: A Declaration of Independence? [1] Found in Seventeen magazine, the advertisement for “tommy girl,” the perfume manu-
- 268. factured by Tommy Hilfiger, sells the most basic American ideal of independence. Various visual images and text suggest that purchasing tommy girl buys freedom and liberation for the mind and body. This image appeals to young women striving to establish them- selves as unbound individuals. Ironically, the advertisement uses traditional American icons as vehicles for marketing to the modern woman. Overall, the message is simple: American individualism can be found in a spray or nonspray bottle. [2] Easily, the young woman dominates the advertisement. She has the look of the all- American “girl next door.” Her appeal is a natural one, as she does not rely on makeup or a runway model’s cheekbones for her beauty. Freckles frame her eyes that ambitiously gaze skyward; there are no limits restricting women in capitalist America. Her flowing brown hair freely rides a stirring breeze. Unconcerned with the order of a particular hairstyle, she smiles and enjoys the looseness of her spirit. The ad tells us how wearing this perfume allows women to achieve the look of self-assured and liberated indifference without appearing vain. [3] The second most prevalent image in the advertisement is the American flag, which neatly matches the size of the young woman’s head. The placement and size of the flag suggest that if anything is on her cloudless mind, it is fundamental American beliefs
- 269. that allow for such self-determination. The half-concealed flag is seemingly continued in the young woman’s hair. According to the ad, American ideals reside well within the girl as well as the perfume. [4] It is also noticeable that there is a relative absence of land surrounding the young woman. We can see glimpses of “fruited plains” flanking the girl’s shoulders. This young woman is barely bound to earth, as free as the clouds that float beneath her head. It is this liberated image Americans proudly carry that is being sold in the product. [5] The final image promoting patriotism can be found in the young woman’s clothing. The young woman is draped in the blue jean jacket, a classic symbol of American ruggedness and originality. As far as we can see, the jacket is spread open, supporting the earlier claim of the young women’s free and independent spirit. These are the very same 96 Chapter 6 Topics and Modes of Analysis ideals that embody American pride and patriotism. The ad clearly employs the association principle in linking the tommy girl fragrance with emotionally compelling yet essentially unrelated images of American nationalism and patriotism. [. . .] [10] Yet in reality, this marketing of liberation is paradoxical;
- 270. although this freeing message promotes rebellion and nonconformity, it actually supports the market economy and feeds into capitalism and conformity. When advertisers employ political protest messages to be associated with products, they imply that buying the product is a form of political action. We now move to strategies for making your response to some traditional topics more analytical. Like the other thinking tools in this unit, each of these topics can aid in the invention stage of your writing. SUMMARY Summary and analysis go hand in hand; the primary goal for both is to understand rather than evaluate. Summary is a necessary early step in analysis because it provides perspective on the subject as a whole by explaining the meaning and function of each of that subject’s parts. Within larger analyses—papers or reports—summary performs the essential function of contextualizing a subject accurately. It creates a fair picture of what’s there. Summarizing isn’t simply the unanalytical reporting of information; it’s more than just shrinking someone else’s words. To write an accurate summary, you have to ask analytical questions, such as the following: • Which of the ideas in the reading are most significant? Why? • How do these ideas fit together?
- 271. • What do the key passages in the reading mean? Summarizing is, then, like paraphrasing, a tool of understanding and not just a mechanical task. When summaries go wrong, they are just lists, a simple “this and then this” sequence. Often lists are random, as in a shopping list compiled from the first thing you thought of to the last. Sometimes they are organized in broad categories: fruit and vegetables here, dried goods there. At best, they do very little logical connecting among the parts beyond “next.” Summaries that are just lists tend to dollop out the information monotonously. They omit the thinking that the piece is doing—the ways it is connecting the informa- tion, the contexts it establishes, and the implicit slant or point of view. Writing analytical summaries can teach you how to read for the connections, the lines that connect the dots. And when you’re operating at that level, you are much more likely to have ideas about what you are summarizing. Strategies for Making Summaries More Analytical Strategy 1: Look for the Underlying Structure Use The Method to find patterns of repetition and contrast. (See Chapter 3.) If you apply it to a few key para- graphs, you will find the terms that are repeated, and these will suggest strands,
- 272. Summary 97 which in turn make up organizing contrasts. This process works to categorize and then further organize information and, in so doing, to bring out its underly- ing structure. Strategy 2: Select the Information That You Wish to Discuss on Some Principle Other Than General Coverage Use the Notice and Focus strategy to rank items of information in some order of importance. (See Chapter 3.) Let’s say that you are writ- ing a paper on major changes in the tax law or on recent developments in U.S. policy toward the Middle East. Rather than simply collecting the information, try to arrange it into hierarchies. What are the least or most significant changes or developments, and why? Which are most overlooked or most overrated or most controversial or most practical, and why? All of these terms—significant, overlooked, and so forth—have the effect of focusing the summary, guiding your decisions about what to include and exclude. Strategy 3: Reduce Scope and Say More about Less Both The Method and Notice and Focus involve some loss of breadth; you won’t be able to cover everything. But this is usually a trade-off worth making. Your ability to rank parts of your subject or choose
- 273. a revealing feature or pattern to focus on gives you surer control of the material than if you just reproduce what is in the text. You can still begin with a brief survey of major points to provide context, before narrowing the focus. Reducing scope is an especially efficient and productive strategy when you are trying to understand a reading you find difficult or perplexing. It moves you beyond passive summarizing and toward having ideas about the reading. If, for example, you are reading Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales and start cataloging what makes it funny, you are likely to end up with unanalyzed plot summary— a list that arranges its elements in no particular order. But narrowing the question to “How does Chaucer’s use of religious commentary contribute to the humor of ‘The Wife of Bath’s Tale’?” reduces the scope to a single tale and the humor to a single aspect of humor. Describe those as accurately as you can, and you will begin to notice things. Strategy 4: Get Some Detachment: Shift Your Focus from What? to How? and Why? Most readers tend to get too single-minded about absorbing the information. That is, they attend only to the what: what the reading is saying or is about. They take it all in passively. But you can deliberately shift your focus to how it says what it says, and why.
- 274. If, for example, you were asked to discuss the major discoveries that Darwin made on The Beagle, you could avoid simply listing his conclusions by redirecting your attention to how he proceeds. You could choose to focus, for example, on Darwin’s use of the scientific method, examining how he builds and, in some cases, discards hypotheses. Or you might select several passages that illustrate how Darwin proceeded from evidence to conclusion and then rank them in order of importance to the over- all theory. Notice that in shifting the emphasis to Darwin’s thinking—the how and why—you would not be excluding the what (the information component) from your discussion. 98 Chapter 6 Topics and Modes of Analysis PERSONAL RESPONSE: THE REACTION PAPER The biggest advantage of reaction papers is that they give you the freedom to explore where and how to engage your subject. They bring to the surface your emotional or intui- tive response, allowing you to experiment with placing the subject in various contexts. Another advantage of personal response questions is that they allow you to get some distance on your first impressions. If, as you reexamine your first reactions, you look for ways that they might not be accurate, you will often find places
- 275. where you now disagree with yourself, in effect, stimulating you to think in new ways about the subject. Personal response becomes a problem, however, when it distracts you from ana- lyzing the subject. In most cases, when you are invited to respond personally, you are being asked for more than your endorsement or critique of the subject. If you find yourself constructing a virtual list—I agree with this point or I disagree with that point—you are probably doing little more than matching your opinions with the points of view encountered in a reading. In most cases, you misinterpret the intent of a personal response topic if you view it as an invitation to: 1. Assert your personal opinions unreflectively. 2. Substitute narratives of your own experience for careful consideration of the subject. In an academic setting, an opinion is more than simply an expression of your beliefs; it’s a conclusion that you earn the rights to through a careful examination of evidence. Strategies for Making Personal Responses More Analytical Strategy 1: Trace Your Responses Back to Their Causes As we noted in Chapter 2, tracing your impressions back to their causes is the key to making personal response analytical—because you focus on the details that gave you the response rather than
- 276. on the response alone. Let’s say, for example, that you are responding to an article on ways of increasing the numbers of registered voters in urban precincts. You find the article irritating; your personal experience working with political campaigns has taught you that get- ting out the vote is not as easy as this writer makes it seem. From that starting point, you might analyze one (to you) overly enthusiastic passage, concentrating on how the writer has not only overestimated what campaign workers can actually do but also condescends to those who don’t register—assuming, perhaps, that they are ignorant rather than indifferent or disillusioned. Tracing your response back to its cause may help to defuse your emotional response and open the door to further investigation of the other writer’s rationale. You might, for example, discover that the writer has in mind a much more long-term effect or that urban models differ significantly from the suburban ones of your experience. Strategy 2: Assume That You May Have Missed the Point It’s difficult to see the logic of someone else’s position if you are too preoccupied with your own. Similarly, it is difficult to see the logic, or illogic, of your own position if you already assume it to be true. Personal Response: The Reaction Paper 99
- 277. Although an evaluative response (approve/disapprove) can sometimes spur analy- sis, it can also lead you to prejudge the case. If, however, you habitually question the validity of your own point of view, you will sometimes recognize the possibility of an alternative point of view, as was the case in the voter registration example. (See Figure 6.1.) Assuming that you have missed the point is a good strategy in all kinds of analytical writing. It causes you to notice details of your subject that you might not otherwise have registered. Strategy 3: Locate Your Response within a Limiting Context Suppose you are asked in a religion course to write your religious beliefs. Although this topic would naturally lead you to think about your own experiences and beliefs, you would probably do best to approach it in some more limiting context. The reading in the course could provide this limit. Let’s say that thus far you have read two modern religious thinkers, Martin Buber and Paul Tillich. Using these as your context, “What do I believe?” could become “How does my response to Buber and Tillich illuminate my own assumptions about the nature of religious faith?” An advantage of this move, beyond making your analysis less general, is that it would help you to get perspective on your own position. Another way of limiting your context is to consider how one
- 278. author or recognizable point of view that you have encountered in the course might respond to a single statement from another author or point of view. If you used this strategy to respond to the topic “Does God exist?” you might arrive at a formulation such as “How would Martin Buber critique Paul Tillich’s definition of God?” Although this topic appears to exclude personal response entirely, it in fact does not. Your opinion would necessarily enter because you would be actively formulating something that is not already evident in the reading (how Buber might respond to Tillich). Evaluative Personal Response: “The article was irritating.” This response is too broad and dismissively judgmental. Make it more analytical by tracing the response back to the evidence that triggered it. A More Analytical Evaluative Response: “The author of the article oversimplifies the problem by assuming the cause of low voter registration to be voters’ ignorance rather than voters’ indifference.” Although still primarily an evaluative response, this observation is more analytical. It takes the writer’s initial response (”irritating”) to a specific cause. A Nonevaluative Analytical Response: “The author’s emphasis on increased cover- age of city politics in local/neighborhood forums such as the
- 279. churches suggests that the author is interested in long-term effects of voter registration drives and not just in immediate increases.” Rather than simply reacting (”irritating”) or leaping to evaluation (”oversimplifies the problem”), the writer here formulates a possible explanation for the difference between his or her point of view on voter registration drives and the article’s. FIGURE 6.1 Making Personal Response More Analytical 100 Chapter 6 Topics and Modes of Analysis AGREE/DISAGREE We offer here only a brief recap of this kind of topic because it is discussed at length in earlier chapters. Topics are frequently worded as agree/disagree, especially on essay exams, but the wording is potentially misleading because you are rarely being asked for as unqualified an opinion as agree or disagree. In most cases, your best strategy in dealing with agree/disagree questions is to choose neither side. Instead, question the terms of the binary so as to arrive at a more complex and qualified position to write about. In place of choosing one side or the other, decide to what extent you agree and to what extent you disagree. You are still responsible for coming down more on one side than the other,
- 280. but this need not mean that you have to locate yourself in a starkly either/or position. The code phrase for accomplishing this shift, as we’ve suggested in Chapter 5, is “the extent to which”: “To what extent do you agree (or disagree)?” COMPARISON/CONTRAST Although comparison/contrast is meant to invite analysis, it is too often treated as an end in itself. The fundamental reason for comparing and contrasting is that you can usually discover ideas about a subject much more easily when you are not viewing it in isolation. When executed mechanically, however, without the writer pressing to understand the significance of a similarity or difference, comparison/contrast can suffer from pointlessness. Comparison/contrast topics produce pointless essays if you allow them to turn into matching exercises—that is, if you match common features of two subjects but don’t get beyond the equation stage (a, b, c = x, y, z). Writers fall into this trap when they have no larger question or issue to explore and perhaps resolve by making the comparison. If, for example, you were to pursue the comparison of the representa- tions of the Boston Tea Party in British and American history textbooks, you would begin by identifying similarities and differences. But simply presenting these and concluding that the two versions resemble and differ from each
- 281. other in some ways would be pointless. You would need to press your comparisons with the So what? question (see Chapter 4) to give them some interpretive weight. Strategies for Making Comparison/Contrast More Analytical Strategy 1: Argue for the Significance of a Key Comparison Rather than simply cov- ering a range of comparisons, focus on a key comparison. Although narrowing the focus might seem to eliminate other important areas of consideration, in fact it usu- ally allows you to incorporate at least some of these other areas in a more tightly con- nected, less list-like fashion. So, for example, a comparison of the burial rites of two cultures probably reveals more about them than a much broader but more superficial list of cultural similarities and differences. In the majority of cases, covering less is covering more. Comparison/Contrast 101 You can determine which comparison is key by ranking. You are ranking whenever you designate one part of your topic as especially important or reveal- ing. Suppose you are asked to compare General Norman Schwarzkopf ’s strat- egy in the first Persian Gulf War with General Douglas MacArthur’s strategy in World War II. As a first move, you could limit the comparison
- 282. to some reveal- ing parallel, such as the way each man dealt with the media, and then argue for its significance above other similarities or differences. You might, for instance, claim that in their treatment of the media we get an especially clear or telling vantage point on the two generals’ strategies. At this point you are on your way to an analytical point—for example, that because MacArthur was more effectively shielded from the media at a time when the media was a virtual instrument of propaganda, he could make choices that Schwarzkopf might have wanted to make but couldn’t. Strategy 2: Use One Side of the Comparison to Illuminate the Other Usually it is not necessary to treat each part of the comparison equally. It’s a common misconception that each side must be given equal space. In fact, the purpose of your comparison governs the amount of space you’ll need to give to each part. Often, you will be using one side of the comparison primarily to illuminate the other. For example, in a course on contemporary military policy, the ratio between the two parts would probably be roughly seventy percent on Schwarzkopf to thirty percent on MacArthur rather than fifty percent on each. Strategy 3: Imagine How One Side of Your Comparison Might Respond to the Other This strategy, a variant of the preceding one, is a
- 283. particularly useful way of helping you to respond to comparison/contrast topics more purposefully. This strategy can be adapted to a wide variety of subjects. If you were asked to compare Sigmund Freud with one of his most important follow- ers, Jacques Lacan, you would probably be better off focusing the broad ques- tion of how Lacan revises Freud by considering how and why he might critique Freud’s interpretation of a particular dream in The Interpretation of Dreams. Similarly, in the case of the Persian Gulf War example, you could ask yourself how MacArthur might have handled some key decision in the Persian Gulf War and why. Or you might consider how he would have critiqued Schwarzkopf ’s handling of that decision and why. Strategy 4: Focus on Difference within Similarity (or Similarity within Difference) The typical move when you are asked to compare two subjects is to collect a number of parallel examples and show how they are parallel, which can lead to bland tallying of similarities without much analytical edge. In the case of obvious similarities, you should move quickly to significant differences within the similarity and the implica- tions of these differences. In this way, you better define your subject, and you are more likely to offer your readers something that is not already clear to them. For example, the Carolingian and Burgundian Renaissances share an emphasis
- 284. on education, but if 102 Chapter 6 Topics and Modes of Analysis you were asked to compare them, you could reveal the character of these two histori- cal periods more effectively by concentrating on the different purposes and origins of this emphasis on education. A corollary of the difference within similarity formula is that you can focus on unexpected similarity rather than obvious difference. It is no surprise that President Bill Clinton’s economic package differed from President Ronald Reagan’s, but much could be written about the way that Clinton “out-Reaganed Bush” (as one politi- cal commentator put it) by appealing to voters with Reagan’s brand of populist optimism—a provocative similarity within difference. DEFINITION Definition becomes meaningful when it serves some larger purpose. You define “rhythm and blues” because it is essential to any further discussion of the evolution of rock-and-roll music, or because you need that definition to discuss the British Invasion spearheaded by groups such as the Beatles, the Rolling Stones, and the Yard- birds in the late 1960s, or because you cannot classify John Lennon, Mick Jagger, or
- 285. Eric Clapton without it. Like comparison/contrast, definition can produce pointless essays if the writer gets no further than assembling information. Moreover, when you construct a sum- mary of existing definitions with no clear sense of purpose, you tend to list definitions indiscriminately. As a result, you are likely to overlook conflicts among the various definitions and overemphasize their surface similarities. Definition is in fact a site at which there is some contesting of authorities—different voices who seek to make their definition triumph. Strategies for Making Definition More Analytical Strategy 1: Test the Definition against Evidence One common form of definition asks you to apply a definition to a body of information. It is rare to find a perfect fit. Therefore, you should, as a general rule, use the data to assess the accuracy and the limitations of the definition, rather than simply imposing it on your data and ignoring or playing down the ways in which it does not fit. Testing the definition against evidence makes your definition evolve. The definition, in turn, serves as a lens to better focus your thinking about the evidence. Suppose you were asked to define capitalism in the context of third-world
- 286. economies. You might profitably begin by matching some standard definition of capitalism with specific examples from one or two third-world economies, with the express purpose of detecting where the definition does and does not apply. In other words, you would respond to the definition topic by assaying the extent to which (that phrase again!) the definition provides a tool for making sense of the subject. Definition 103 Strategy 2: Use a Definition from One Source to Critique and Illuminate Another As a general rule, you should attempt to identify the points of view of the sources from which you take your definitions, rather than accepting them as uncontextualized answers. It is essential to identify the particular slant because otherwise you will tend to overlook the conflicting elements among various definitions of a key term. A paper on alcoholism, for example, will lose focus if you use all of the defini- tions available. If, instead, you convert the definition into a comparison and contrast of competing definitions, you can more easily generate a point and purpose for your definition. By querying, for example, whether a given source’s definition of alcohol-
- 287. ism is moral or physiological or psychological, you can more easily resolve the issue of definition. Strategy 3: Problematize as Well as Synthesize the Definition To explore competing definitions of the same term requires you to attend to the difficul- ties of definition. In general, analysis achieves direction and purpose by locating and then exploring a problem. You can productively make a problem out of defining. This strategy is known as problematizing, which locates and then explores the significance of uncertainties and conflicts. It is always a smart move to problematize definitions to reveal complexity that less careful thinkers might miss. The definition of capitalism that you might take from Karl Marx, for example, differs in its emphases from Adam Smith’s. In this case, you would not only isolate the most important of these differences but also try to account for the fact that Marx’s villain is Smith’s hero. Such an accounting would probably lead you to consider how the definition has been shaped by each of these writers’ political philosophies or by the culture in which each theory was composed. Strategy 4: Shift from What? to How? and Why? Questions It is no accident that
- 288. we earlier offered the same strategy for making summary more analytical: analytical topics that require definition also depend on “why?” or “how?” questions, not “what?” questions (which tend simply to call for information). If, for example, you sought to define the meaning of darkness in Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness and any two other modern British novels, you would do better to ask why the writers find darkness such a fertile term than simply to accumulate various examples of the term in the three novels. You might start by isolating the single best example from each of the works, preferably ones that reveal important differences as well as similarities. Then, in analyzing how each writer uses the term, you could work toward some larger point that would unify the essay. You might show how the conflicts of definition within Conrad’s meta- phor evolve historically, get reshaped by female novelists, change after World War I, and so forth. 104 Chapter 6 Topics and Modes of Analysis ASSIGNMENTS: Using the Topics and Modes of Analysis 1. Locate any magazine ad that you find interesting. Ask yourself, what is this a picture of ? Use the student paper on the perfume ad as a kind of model for
- 289. ways of thinking about the ad’s rhetorical agenda. If you find yourself getting stuck, rephrase the question as, “What is this ad really about, and why did the advertiser choose this particular image or set of images? Strategies in this unit that might work well with this assignment are Seems to Be about X . . . (in Chapter 4) and Make the Implicit Explicit (see Chapters 1 and 4). 2. Analyze a New Yorker cover in more than one interpretive context. The cover we recommend is by Harry Bliss, dated August 1, 2005, and is entitled “King Kong.” It depicts a large gorilla near the Empire State Building in New York squirting a crowd of overheated New Yorkers with a large green squirt gun. You can see this cover either on the artist’s website or at The New Yorker store website (click on Browse by Artist; choose Harry Bliss.) One obvious context for the cover is the movie King Kong, which was about to come out in the latest Peter Jackson version. Another context is international terrorism in general, and probably 9/11 in particular, given that the gorilla (gue- rilla?) is perched near a prominent NYC architectural icon. Also, just before the cover was published, a bombing had occurred in the London underground. In your paper you should focus on how the cartoonist is negotiating both his
- 290. contexts and his audience. How, in other words, does the rhetoric of the cover work in the context of current fears about international terrorism? Which details of the cover “speak” most interestingly in this regard—and what do they say? 3. Write two summaries of the same article or book chapter. Make the first one consecutive (the so-called “coverage” model)—that is, try to cover the piece by essentially listing the key points as they appear. Limit yourself to a typed page. Then rewrite the summary, doing the following: • Rank the items in order of importance according to some principle that you designate, explaining your rationale; • Eliminate the last few items on the list, or at most, give each a single sentence; and • Use the space you have saved to include more detail about the most important item or two. The second half of this assignment will probably require closer to two pages. 4. Write a paper in which you explore significant differences and similarities, using any item from the following list. List as many similarities and differences as you can: go for coverage. Then
- 291. review your list and select the two or three most revealing similarities and the two or three most revealing differences. At this point, you are ready to write a few paragraphs in which you argue for the significance of a key difference or similarity. In so doing, you may find it interesting to focus on an unexpected Definition 105 similarity or difference—one that others might not initially notice. (We recom- mend trying the “unexpected” gambit.) a. Accounts of the same event from two different newspapers or magazines or textbooks b. Two CDs (or even songs) by the same artist or group c. Two ads for the same kind of product d. Graffiti in men’s bathrooms versus graffiti in women’s bathrooms e. The political campaigns of two opponents running for the same or similar office f. Courtship behavior as practiced by men and by women g. Two breeds of dog
- 292. h. Two clothing styles as emblematic of socioeconomic class or a subgroup in your school, town, or workplace i. Two versions of the same song by different artists 5. Write a comparative definition in which you seek out different and potentially competing definitions of the same term or terms. Begin with a dictionary such as the Oxford English Dictionary (popularly known as the OED, available in most library reference rooms or online) that contains both historically based definitions tracking the term’s evolution over time and etymological definitions that identify the linguistic origins of the term (its sources in older languages). Be sure to locate both the etymology and the historical evolution of the term or terms. Then look up the term in one or preferably several specialized dictionaries. We offer a list of some of these in Chapter 16, Finding, Citing, and Integrating Sources, but you can also ask your reference librarian for pertinent titles. Gener- ally speaking, different disciplines generate their own specialized dictionaries. Summarize key differences and similarities among the ways the dictionaries have defined your term or terms. Then write a comparative essay in which you argue for the significance of a key similarity or difference, or
- 293. an unexpected one. Here is the list of words: hysteria, ecstasy, enthusiasm, witchcraft, leisure, gos- sip, bachelor, spinster, romantic, instinct, punk, thug, pundit, dream, alcoholism, aristocracy, atom, ego, pornography, conservative, liberal, entropy, election, tariff. Some of these words are interesting to look at together, such as ecstasy/ enthusiasm or liberal/ conservative or bachelor/spinster. Feel free to write on a pair instead of a single word. This page intentionally left blank UNIT II Writing the Analytical Essay CHAPTER 7 What Evidence Is and How It Works CHAPTER 8 Using Evidence to Build a Paper: 10 on 1 versus 1 on 10 CHAPTER 9 Making a Thesis Evolve CHAPTER 10 Structuring the Paper: Forms and Formats
- 294. CHAPTER 11 Introductions and Conclusions CHAPTER 12 Recognizing and Fixing Weak Thesis Statements This page intentionally left blank CHAPTER 7 What Evidence Is and How It Works Most of what goes wrong in using a thesis is the result of a writer leaping too quickly to a generalization that would do as a thesis, and then treating evidence only as something to be mustered in support of that idea. This chapter is about evidence—what it is, what it is meant to do, and how to recognize when you are using it well. The chapter’s overall argument is that you should use evidence to test, refine, and develop your ideas, rather than just to prove that they are correct. The chapter begins by analyzing two common problems: claims without evidence (unsubstantiated claims) and evidence without claims (pointless evidence). A claim is an assertion that you make about your evidence—an
- 295. idea that you be- lieve the evidence supports. The governing claim in a paper is the thesis. In analytical writing, the thesis is a theory that explains what some feature or features of a subject mean. When the material of your subject, your data, is used to demonstrate the truth or falsity of a particular claim, that material becomes evidence. This chapter opens Unit II, which is about writing the thesis- driven essay. Unit I demonstrates how to make observations about data and reason to implications and conclusions, but it does not take this process to the point at which a writer settles on a formal claim (a thesis) and uses it to govern the development of an entire essay. In this unit we demonstrate how to employ the analytical methods (tools) offered in Unit I—especially Notice and Focus, The Method, the So what? question, and Dif- ference within Similarity—to find, formulate, and evolve a thesis. This unit’s approach to essay organization and the thesis may differ from what you’re used to. Writing Analytically is most unlike other writing texts in its treatment of the thesis. We argue that the problem with much writing of the sort that people are taught to do in school is that it arrives prematurely at an idea that the writer then “proves” by attaching it to a number of examples—a pattern we call 1 on 10 (see Chapter 8). Textbooks about writing tend to present thesis
- 296. statements as the finished products of an act of thinking—as inert statements that writers should march through their papers from beginning to end. As we show in Chapters 8 and 9, the relationship between thesis and evidence is far more fluid and dynamic. In most good writing, the thesis grows and changes in response to evidence, even in final drafts. 109 For now, though, we delay further discussion of the thesis to focus first on evidence—the stuff that generates thesis statements and responds to them. THE FUNCTION OF EVIDENCE A common assumption about evidence is that it is “the stuff that proves I’m right.” Although this way of thinking about evidence is not wrong, it is much too limited. Corroboration (proving the validity of a claim) is one of the functions of evidence, but not the only one. It helps to remember that the word prove actually comes from a Latin verb mean- ing “to test.” The noun form of prove, proof, has two meanings: (1) evidence sufficient to establish a thing as true or believable and (2) the act of testing for truth or believ- ability. When you operate on the first definition of proof alone,
- 297. you are far more likely to seek out evidence that supports only your point of view, ignoring or dismissing other evidence that could lead to a different and possibly better idea. You might also assume that you can’t begin writing until you have arrived at an idea you’re convinced is right because only then could you decide which evidence to include. Both of these practices close down your thinking instead of leading you to a more open process of formulating and testing ideas. The advantage to following the second definition of the word proof—in the sense of testing—is that you are better able to negotiate among competing points of view. Doing so predisposes your readers to consider what you have to say because you are offering them not the thoughts a person has had, but rather a person in the act of thinking. Writing well means sharing your thought process with your readers, telling them why you believe the evidence means what you say it does. THE MISSING CONNECTION: LINKING EVIDENCE AND CLAIMS Evidence rarely, if ever, can be left to speak for itself. The word evident comes from a Latin verb meaning “to see.” To say that the truth of a statement is self-evident means that it does not need to be proved because its truth can be plainly seen by all. When a writer leaves evidence to speak for itself, he or she is assuming that it
- 298. can be interpreted in only one way, and that readers necessarily will think as the writer does. But the relationship between evidence and claims is rarely self- evident: that relationship virtually always needs to be explained. One of the five analytical moves discussed in Chapter 1 was making the implicit explicit. This move is critical for working with evidence. The thought connections that have occurred to you about what the evidence means will not automatically occur to others. (See Figure 7.1.) Persuasive writing always makes the connections between evidence and claim overt. Writers who think that evidence speaks for itself often do very little with their evidence except put it next to their claims: “The party was terrible: there was no alcohol”—or, alternatively, “The party was great: there was no alcohol.” Just juxtapos- ing the evidence with the claim leaves out the thinking that connects them, thereby 110 Chapter 7 What Evidence Is and How It Works Distinguishing Evidence from Claims 111 implying that the logic of the connection is obvious. But even for readers prone to agreeing with a given claim, simply pointing to the evidence is
- 299. not enough. Of course, before you can attend to the relationship between evidence and claims, you first have to make sure to include both of them. Let’s pause to take a look at how to remedy the problems posed by leaving one out: unsubstantiated claims and pointless evidence. “BECAUSE I SAY SO”: UNSUBSTANTIATED CLAIMS Problem: Making claims that lack supporting evidence. Solution : Learn to recognize and support unsubstantiated assertions. Unsubstantiated claims occur when a writer concentrates only on conclusions, omit- ting the evidence that led to them. At the opposite extreme, pointless evidence results when a writer offers a mass of detail attached to an overly general claim. Both of these problems can be solved by offering readers the evidence that led to the claim and explain- ing how the evidence led there. The word unsubstantiated means “without substance.” An
- 300. unsubstantiated claim is not necessarily false; it just offers none of the concrete “stuff” upon which the claim is based. When a writer makes an unsubstantiated claim, he or she has assumed that readers will believe it just because the writer put it out there. Perhaps more important, unsubstantiated claims deprive you of details. If you lack some actual “stuff” to analyze, you can easily get stuck in a set of abstractions, which tend to overstate your position and leave your readers wondering exactly what you mean. The further away your language is from the concrete, from references to physical detail—things that you can see, hear, count, taste, smell, and touch—the more abstract it becomes. DISTINGUISHING EVIDENCE FROM CLAIMS To check your drafts for unsubstantiated assertions, you first have to know how to recognize them. It is sometimes difficult to separate facts from judgments, data from
- 301. interpretations of the data. Writers who aren’t practiced in this skill can believe that they are offering evidence when they are really offering only unsubstantiated claims. In your own reading and writing, pause once in a while to label the sentences of a paragraph as either evidence (E) or claims (C). What happens if we try to categorize the sentences of the following paragraph in this way? Evidence Claim Crucial site of connection FIGURE 7.1 Linking Evidence and Claims The owners are ruining baseball in America. Although they claim they are losing money, they are really just being greedy. A few years ago, they even fired the commissioner, Fay Vincent, be- cause he took the players’ side. Baseball is a sport, not a business, and it is a sad fact that it is
- 302. being threatened by greedy businessmen. The first and last sentences of the paragraph are claims. They draw conclusions about as yet unstated evidence that the writer needs to provide. The middle two sen- tences are harder to classify. If particular owners have said publicly that they are losing money, the existence of the owners’ statements is a fact. But the writer moves from evi- dence to unsubstantiated claims when he suggests that the owners are lying about their financial situation and are doing so because of their greed. Similarly, it is a fact that commissioner Fay Vincent was fired, but it is only an assertion that he was fired “be- cause he took the players’ side,” an unsubstantiated claim. Although many of us might be inclined to accept some version of this claim as true, we should not be asked to accept his opinion as self-evident truth. What is the evidence in support of the claim? What are the reasons for believing that the evidence means what he says it does?
- 303. GIVING EVIDENCE A POINT: MAKING DETAILS SPEAK Problem: Presenting a mass of evidence without explaining how it relates to the claims.