How to Write a Synthesis Essay :: Synthesis Essays, Argumentative Essays

A synthesis is a written discussion that draws on one or more sources. It follows that your ability to write syntheses depends on your ability to guess relationships among sources - essays, articles, fiction, and also nonwritten sources, such as lectures, interviews, observations. This process is nothing new for you, since you infer relationships all the time - say, surrounded by something youve read in the newspaper and something youve seen for yourself, or between the t for each oneing styles of your favorite and least favorite instructors. In fact, if youve written research papers, youve already written syntheses. In an academic synthesis, you make explicit the relationships that you have inferred among disjoined sources.The skills youve already been practicing in this course will be vital in writing syntheses. Clearly, before youre in a position to draw relationships between cardinal or more sources, you must understand what those sources say in other words, you must be able to summarize these sources. It will frequently be stabilizing for your readers if you provide at least partial summaries of sources in your synthesis essays. At the same time, you must go beyond summary to make judgments - judgments based, of course, on your hypercritical reading of your sources - as you have practiced in your reading responses and in class discussions. You should already have drawn some conclusions about the quality and boldness of these sources and you should know how much you agree or disagree with the points made in your sources and the reasons for your agreement or disagreement.Further, you must go beyond the critique of individual sources to larn the relationship among them. Is the information in source B, for example, an extended illustration of the generalizations in source A? Would it be useful to compare and contrast source C with source B? Having read and considered sources A, B, and C, can you infer something else - D (not a source, but your own idea )?Because a synthesis is based on two or more sources, you will need to be selective when choosing information from each. It would be neither possible nor desirable, for instance, to discuss in a ten-page paper on the combat of Wounded Knee every point that the authors of two books make about their subject. What you as a writer must do is select the ideas and information from each source that best allow you to achieve your purpose.Your purpose in reading source materials and then in drawing upon them to write your own material is frequently reflected in the wording of an assignment.