Your goal is to write an argumentative synthesis, where your objective is to persuade your audience to agree with, or at least consider, your viewpoint – or take certain actions you advocate. In your essay, you will assert your own claim within your paper’s thesis, and support it through the careful reading, summary, analysis, and evaluation of your chosen sources. The two articles must be about your topic, but the authors may agree or disagree with one another about the topic being discussed.
Your goal in synthesizing multiple sources is to join two or more texts together into a single writing. The resulting text needs to be more than just a succession of summaries. That is, avoid merely listing who said what about a topic. Such a list is not a synthesis. It does not create new connections among ideas.
Advice on Process:
Make comparisons with – or contrasts between – concepts, ideas, and information in the articles. Do the sources generally agree or generally disagree? What are the bases of their agreement or disagreement? Are there subtle differences or shades of meaning or emphasis?
Create definitions that combine and extend definitions you encounter in the separate sources.
Use examples or descriptions from one source to illustrate ideas in another.
Use processes described in one source to explain those in others.
In revising, ask, “Have I truly synthesized the sources, or have I just written about one and then the other?”
Last Completed Projects
| topic title | academic level | Writer | delivered |
|---|