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Writing Analytically
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Writing Analytically
FIFTH EDITION
David Rosenwasser
Muhlenberg College
Jill Stephen
Muhlenberg College
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Writing Analytically, Fifth Edition David Rosenwasser
Jill Stephen
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v
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
“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
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
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
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 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
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
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
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 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 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 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
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 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 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 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 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 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 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. 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 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 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 • 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 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.
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, 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 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
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 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
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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 Analyzing Arguments
CHAPTER 6 Topics and Modes of Analysis
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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 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 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 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 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 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- 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 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 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.
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 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 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 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 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, 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
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.
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 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 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 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
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 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-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 (“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 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 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 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 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 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
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
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 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 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- 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 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
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 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
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 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 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 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- 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
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 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 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 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.
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. 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 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- 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
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 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) 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 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.
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