Synthesizing involves presenting ideas and information gleaned from different sources. It can help you see how different sources relate to one another. For example, one reading may provide information that fills out the information in another reading, or a reading could present arguments that challenge arguments in another reading.
When you synthesize material from different sources, you construct a conversation among your sources, a conversation in which you also participate. Synthesizing contributes most when writers use sources, not only to support their ideas but to challenge and extend them as well.
In the following example, the reader uses a variety of sources related to the King passage (pp. 523–27) and brings them together around a central idea. Notice how quotation, paraphrase, and summary are all used.
Synthesis
When King defends his campaign of nonviolent direct action against the clergymen’s criticism that “our actions, even though peaceful, must be condemned because they precipitate violence” (King excerpt, par. 3), he is using what Vinit Haksar calls Mohandas Gandhi’s “safety-valve argument” (“Civil Disobedience and Non-Cooperation” 117). According to Haksar, Gandhi gave a “non-threatening warning of worse things to come” if his demands were not met. King similarly makes clear that advocates of actions more extreme than those he advocates are waiting in the wings: “The other force is one of bitterness and hatred, and it comes perilously close to advocating violence” (King excerpt, par. 5). King identifies this force with Elijah Muhammad, and although he does not name him, King’s contemporary readers would have known that he was referring also to his disciple Malcolm X, who, according to Herbert J. Storing, “urged that Negroes take seriously the idea of revolution” (“The Case against Civil Disobedience” 90). In fact, Malcolm X accused King of being a modern-day Uncle Tom, trying “to keep us under control, to keep us passive and peaceful and nonviolent” (Malcolm X Speaks 12).
Synthesizing