Classwork, 3.10.11

Questions to Guide Synthesis Drafting

These questions are designed to help you analyze, compare, and contrast your sources to understand the ways in which they respond to various aspects of your issue and interact with each other. The answers to these questions should provide the basis of a draft of your synthesis of perspectives essay.

For each source you use, consider these content analysis questions:

1. What is the writer’s thesis/main argument? (In other words, what does the writer claim about the issue you’re researching?)

2. How do the claims your authors make relate to the issue you’re examining? How do the claims relate to each other?

3. What aspects of your issue do your sources examine? Do they offer any reasons for focusing on those aspects? If not, can you deduce their reasons (based on their background, expertise, personal experiences, etc.)?

4. On what points do your sources agree with each other? On what points to they disagree? Why do these similarities and differences exist? (Consider the background of the writers, etc.)

5. Based on the above analysis questions, what claim can you make about how your sources address the issue you’re examining? (This type of statement could serve as a thesis.)

For each source you use, consider these questions of rhetorical analysis:

1. Where did each of these sources originally appear?

2. What stylistic elements is each author using (formal/informal language, figurative language, images, etc.)? How effective are these elements for the source’s original publication context?

3. What appeals does the argument use (to ethos, pathos, logos)?

4. Who is making the argument? How effectively does he/she establish ethos?

5. What issues are raised and ignored? How does the choice to address or ignore certain elements of an issue affect the argument?

6. What types of evidence are presented (qualitative/quantitative)? How effective is this evidence for the subject matter?

7. What is the purpose of this argument? How does it achieve or fail to achieve that purpose?

8. Based on these analysis questions (and others from p. 98 in Everything’s an Argument), what claim can you make about the form of the arguments made by people discussing this context? (This type of statement could serve as a thesis.)