WORKING WITH SOURCES: EVALUATING YOUR NOTES AND SYNTHESIZING

Before you begin drafting, you’ll need to make sense of the information you’ve gathered by synthesizing information and ideas. Synthesis means “a pulling together of information to form a new idea or point.” You synthesize information every day. For example, after you watch a preview of a movie, talk with friends who have seen the film, and read a review of it, you then pull together the information you have acquired and come up with your own idea — that the movie is your cup of tea, or that you will probably not like it.

You often synthesize information for your college courses. In a biology course, for instance, you might evaluate your own lab results, those of your classmates, and the data in your textbook or another reference source to reach a conclusion about a particular experiment.

Synthesis involves putting ideas together to see how they agree, disagree, or otherwise relate to one another. When working with sources, ask yourself the following questions.

Before you begin the synthesis process, however, you must evaluate the sources you’ve consulted in terms of how well they suit your purposes and audience.

EVALUATING YOUR RESEARCH

Before you began researching your topic, you most likely wrote a working thesis — a preliminary statement of your main point about the topic — and a list of research questions you hoped to answer. Then, as you researched your topic, you may have discovered facts, statistics, or experts’ ideas about the topic that surprised you.

As you evaluate your research notes, keep the following questions in mind.

  1. What research questions did I begin with?
  2. What answers did I find to those questions?
  3. What other information did I discover about my topic?
  4. What conclusions can I draw from what I’ve learned?
  5. How does my research affect my working thesis? (For more on evaluating the reliability of sources, see Chapter 22.)

In many cases, the answers to these questions will influence your thinking on the topic, requiring you to modify your working thesis. If you can’t answer these questions in a way that you find satisfactory, you will need to conduct more research to clarify or refine your thinking. In some cases, you may even need to rethink the direction of your paper.

The process of evaluating your research will often result in decisions not to use specific sources in your final paper. Perhaps the source does not provide any new or relevant information; perhaps it comes from a source that you decide is unreliable; perhaps you have too much information to fit in the length of your assignment, and you need to narrow your focus. View this research as information that has contributed to your understanding of the topic, and then set aside the note cards or move the information to a separate notebook section or file where it will not get in your way.

USING CATEGORIES TO SYNTHESIZE INFORMATION FROM SOURCES

In order to make sense of what you’ve learned, you will need to find patterns in the information you have gathered. One way to find patterns is to categorize information according to your research questions. For example, one student found numerous sources on and answers to his research question “What causes some parents to abuse their children physically?” After rereading his research notes, he realized the information could be divided into three categories:

Category Sources
1. Lack of parenting skills Lopez, Wexler, Thomas
2. Emotional instability Wexler, Harris, Thompson, Wong
3. Family history of child abuse Thompson, Harris, Lopez, Strickler, Thomas

Evaluating his research in this way made him see that he needed to revise both his working thesis and the scope of his paper to include lack of parenting skills as a major cause of child abuse. Notice how he modified his working thesis accordingly:

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For controversial topics, you may want to categorize the information you’ve gathered in terms of each position on the issue (pro, con, or somewhere in between). Alternatively, you could categorize information in terms of the reasons sources offer to support their positions. On the issue of gun control legislation, for example, some sources may favor it for national security reasons: Gun control makes it harder for terrorists to acquire guns. Others may favor it for statistical reason: Statistics prove that owning a gun does not prevent crime. Still others may favor it for emotional reasons: A loved one was injured or killed by a firearm.

If your research project focuses on comparing or contrasting two things (for example, communism and capitalism), you could categorize the information you found on each subtopic separately, and then use that organized information to prepare an outline or graphic organizer of your paper.

DRAWING A GRAPHIC ORGANIZER TO SYNTHESIZE SOURCES

Using a graphic organizer is another way to make sense of the information you gather from sources. Simply the process of creating a graphic organizer may reveal patterns, as well as show you how main ideas and supporting details connect.

Suppose, for example, that you are arguing in favor of adopting voluntary simplicity — the minimizing of personal possessions and commitments to create a happier, more manageable life. You have located three reliable and relevant sources on voluntary simplicity, but each develops the idea somewhat differently.

  1. Source 1 (Walker) is a practical how-to article that includes some personal examples.
  2. Source 2 (Parachin) offers a theoretical look at statistics about workloads and complicated lifestyles and the reasons that voluntary simplicity is appealing.
  3. Source 3 (Remy) presents some strategies for simplifying but emphasizes the values of a simplified life.

Figure 23.7 presents a sample organizer that synthesizes information from these three sources.

Depending on the types of information you uncover, you can use a variety of organizer formats: If all your sources compare and contrast the same things, such as the policies and effectiveness of two U.S. presidents, you could adapt one of the graphic organizers for comparison and contrast shown in Chapter 16. If most of your sources focus on effects, such as the effects of a recession on retail sales and employment, you could adapt one of the cause-and-effect graphic organizers shown in Chapter 19. Whatever style of organizer you use, be sure to keep track of the sources for each idea and to include them in your organizer.

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Figure 23.6: FIGURE 23.7 Graphic Organizer for Synthesizing Sources