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 exponent to write syntheses depends on your ability to imagine relationships among sources - essays, articles, fiction, and also nonwritten sources, such as lectures, interviews, observations. This process is nothing reinvigorated for you, since you infer relationships all the time - say, between something youve read in the composition and something youve seen for yourself, or between the teaching styles of your favorite and least favorite instructors. In fact, if youve written research papers, youve already written syntheses. In an academic synthesis, you draw in explicit the relationships that you have inferred among separate sources.The skills youve already been practicing in this course willing be vital in writing syntheses. Clearly, before youre in a position to draw relationships between two or more sources, you moldiness understand what those sources say in other words, you must(p renominal) be able-bodied to summarize these sources. It will frequently be helpful 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 ground, of course, on your critical interpretation of your sources - as you have practiced in your reading responses and in syllabus discussions. You should already have drawn some conclusions about the quality and validity 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 single(a) sources to determine the relationship among them. Is the information in source B, for example, an extended voice of the generalizations in source A? Would it be useful to compare and subscriber line 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 battle of Wounded Knee every(prenominal) point that the authors of two books make about their subject. What you as a source must do is select the ideas and information from each source that best(p) allow you to achieve your purpose.Your purpose in reading source materials and accordingly in drawing upon them to write your own material is often reflected in the wording of an assignment.