How to Write a Synthesis Essay :: Synthesis Essays, Argumentative Essays

A synthesis is a write discussion that draws on unmatched or more authors. It follows that your ability to write syntheses depends on your ability to interpret relationships among sources - essays, articles, fiction, and also nonwritten sources, such as lectures, interviews, observations. This process is nothing new for you, since you substantiate relationships all the time - say, between something youve read in the newspaper 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 make distinct the relationships that you have inferred among separate sources.The skills youve already been practicing in this course will be vital in writing syntheses. Clearly, before youre in a government agency to draw relationships between two or more sources, you essential understand what those sources say in other words, you must be able to add together 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 based, of course, on your critical reading of your sources - as you have practiced in your reading responses and in class discussions. You should already have drawn some conclusions about the quality and validity of these sources and you should exist how much you agree or disagree with the reads made in your sources and the reasons for your reason or disagreement.Further, you must go beyond the critique of individual sources to desexualise the relationship among them. Is the information in source B, for example, an extended illustration of the generalizations in source A? Would it be useful to compare and contrast source C with source B? Having read and considered sources A, B, and C, can you infer something else - D (not a source, but y our own idea)?Because a synthesis is based on two or more sources, you will need to be discriminating 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 point that the authors of two books make about their subject. What you as a writer must do is select the ideas and information from each source that best drop out you to achieve your purpose.Your purpose in reading source materials and then in drawing upon them to write your own material is often reflected in the choice of words of an assignment.