Paper 2: Synthesizing Positions on a Topic
Purpose: Syntheses are types of writing that are used inside and outside academia. For many academic disciplines and professions, writers are asked to research a topic and provide a synthesis of what experts (scholars or those working in other companies) are saying about the topic in a field. These syntheses represent the multiple perspectives currently discussed and provide a useful context for deciding on a position.
Audience: Since audiences for syntheses are usually people tasked with determining what they think about a topic who want to know what is being discussed about it, your intended audience for this paper will the textbook editors for the textbook. They would like to publish an example of student writing that represents current thinking on an aspect of media studies represented in their text and that is a good example of a synthesis.
Genre: A synthesis forges connections between the arguments of two or more authors. When you write a synthesis making connections among multiple texts, you demonstrate that you are aware of the larger conversation about the issue.
Preparing for Writing the Paper: For your individual paper, select at least 5 of the sources about media studies from your group’s annotated bibliography (they don’t have to be the ones you originally found), and write a paper that synthesizes the arguments in these texts. In keeping with our metaphor of academic writing as a conversation, you might think about using these texts to develop a coherent picture of the “conversation” on your topic. What are people saying, and why? How are they responding to each other, posing complementary or counter-arguments, etc.? Hopefully, your annotations will be a good step in making these connections.
Overall, try to keep two very important things in mind when writing your synthesis: you are trying to develop a coherent picture of the “gist” of what’s going on, and you are not making your own argument about the topic.
Criteria for Evaluation:
Identifies an overarching idea that brings together the among different ideas in the multiple texts
Makes connections among ideas from the different texts
Demonstrates what the connections mean, using and comparing examples from the texts
Create a structure of the essay that clearly signals the direction of the synthesis with clear transitions.
Sources are cited correctly and Works Cited is correctly formatted.
Use of language is appropriate to the academic audience, with relative freedom from sentence-level errors.
Length: 750-1,000 words (roughly 3-4 pages), double-spaced, 12 pt. font, Times New Roman font, 1-inch margins, plus Works Cited (Works Cited does not count toward word count minimum requirement).
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