The Instructor's Resource Manual, which includes tips and special challenges for teaching this chapter, is available through the “Resources” panel.
Tutorials and LearningCurve activities on documentation and working with sources are available at the end of this chapter.
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Using Sources to Support Your Ideas
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Writing a college research project requires you to
analyze sources to understand the arguments those sources are making, the information they are using to support their claims, and the ways those arguments and the supporting evidence they use relate to your topic;
synthesize information from sources to support, extend, and challenge your own ideas;
integrate information from sources with your own ideas to contribute something new to the “conversation” on your topic.
Synthesizing Sources
Synthesizing means making connections among information and ideas from texts and from your own experience. Once you have analyzed a number of sources on your topic, consider questions like the following to help you synthesize ideas and information:
Do any of the sources you read use similar approaches or come to similar conclusions? What common themes do they explore? Do any of them use the same evidence (facts, statistics, research studies, examples) to support their claims?
What differentiates their various positions? Where do the writers disagree, and why? Does one writer seem to be responding to or challenging one or more of the others?
Do you agree with some sources and disagree with others? What makes one source more convincing than the others? Do any of the sources you have read offer support for your claims? Do any of them challenge your conclusions? If so, can you refute the challenge or do you need to concede a point?
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Sentence strategies like the following can help you clarify where you differ from or agree with the sources you have read:
A study by X supports my position by demonstrating that ______ .
X and Y think this issue is about ______ . But what is really at stake here is ______ .
X claims that ______ . But I agree with Y, who argues that ______ .
On this issue, X and Y say ______ . Although I understand and to some degree sympathize with their point of view, I agree with Z that this is ultimately a question of ______ .
To learn more about synthesis, see Chapters 5 and 12.
The report by Maya Gomez and the synthesis chart she created (p. 202) show how ideas and information from sources can be synthesized.