Sources and Information Needs
Professors want to see evidence of your own thinking in your essays and papers. Even so, it will be your thoughts in reaction to your sources:
- What was the author really trying to say?
- What parts of them do you agree with?
- What parts of them do you disagree with?
- Did they leave anything out?
- What does an author’s work lead you to say?
It’s wise to not only analyze—take apart for study—the sources, but also to try to combine your own ideas with those presented in class and in the resources. Professors frequently expect you to interpret, make inferences, and otherwise synthesize—bring ideas together to make something new or find a new way of looking at something old. It might help to think of synthesis as the opposite of analysis.
Getting Better at Synthesis
To get an A on essays and papers in many courses, such as literature and history, when you write in reaction to others’ work you should use synthesis to create new meaning or show a deeper understanding of what you learned. To do so, it helps to look for connections and patterns. One way to synthesize when writing an argument essay, paper, or other project is to look for themes among your sources. So try categorizing ideas by topic rather than by resource—making associations across sources. Synthesis can seem difficult, particularly if you are used to analyzing others’ points but are not used to making your own. Like most things, however, it gets easier as you get more experienced at it. So don’t be hard on yourself if it seems difficult at first.
The video below from the Excelsior Online Reading line describes how to synthesize what you read by teasing out the main ideas and combining them with other ideas to formulate new perspectives.
Excelsior Online Reading Lab. (2023). Synthesizing What You Read is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-4.0 International License.
Check your knowledge: Synthesizing
Excelsior Online Reading Lab. (2023). Synthesizing Activity 1. https://owl.excelsior.edu/orc/what-to-do-after-reading/synthesizing/synthesizing-activity-1/ is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-4.0 International License.
Merging or combining