The Five Analytical Moves 5d4r2o

The Five Analytical Moves Move 1: Suspend Judgment Suspending judgment is a necessary precursor to thinking analytically because our tendency to judge everything shuts down our ability to see and to think. It takes considerable effort to break the habit of responding to everything with likes and dislikes, with agreeing and disagreeing. Consciously leading with the word interesting (What I find most interesting about this is. . .) tends to deflect the judgment response into a more exploratory state of mind, one motivated by curiosity. As a general rule, you should seek to understand the subject you are analyzing before deciding how you feel about it. Move 2: Define Significant Parts and How They Are Related 1) Divide the subject into its defining parts—its main elements or ingredients 2) Consider how these parts are related, both to each other and to the subject as a whole For example, when analyzing the Declaration of Independence, you might break the text into two parts: the “preamble” based on natural law and the list of grievances. Then, you might analyze the connection between the two. One common denominator of all effective analytical writing is that it pays close attention to detail. The move from generalization to analysis, from the larger subject to its key components, is characteristic of good thinking. To understand a subject, we need to get past our first, generic, evaluative response to discover what the subject really is “made of.” However, when you analyze a subject, you must ask not only what it is made of but also “How do these parts help me to understand the meaning of the subject as a whole?” Move 3: Make the Implicit Explicit One definition of what analytical writing does is that it makes the explicit (overtly stated) what is implicit (suggested or implied). Implications are not hidden, but neither are they spelled out so that they can be simply extracted. The word implication comes from the Latin implicare, meaning “to fold in.” The word explicit means “folded out.” The etymology suggests that meanings aren’t hidden, but neither are they opened for full view. An act of mind is required to take what is folded in and fold it out for all to see. Drawing out implications is a logical process. The process of drawing out implications is also known as making inferences. Inference and implication are related but not synonomous . Implication describes something suggested by the material itself; implications reside in the matter you are studying. The term inference describes your thinking process. Move 4: Look for Patterns It is always important to ask what makes some of the details in the material you are studying more worthy of your attention than others? Here are three principles for selecting significant parts of the whole: 1 2

Look for a pattern of repetition or resemblance Look for binary oppositions

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Look for anomalies

Move 5: Keep Reformulating Questions and Explanations The following questions can be asked about anything you are studying and are geared towards helping you locate and try on explanations for the meaning of various patterns of details: 1

Which details seem significant? Why?

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What does the detail mean?

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What else might it mean?

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How do the details fit together? What do they have in common?

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What does this pattern of details mean? How else could it be explained?

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What details don’t seem to fit? How might they be connected with other details to form a different pattern?

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What does this new pattern mean? How might it cause me to read the meaning of individual details differently?

For Teaching: Applying the Five Analytical moves to a Speech Speeches provide right examples for analysis. Using a famous speech, locate its patterns of repetition and contrast. On the basis of your results, formulate a few conclusions about the speech’s point of view and its way of presenting it. Try to get beyond the obvious and general—what does applying the moves cause you to notice that you might not have noticed before? For Teaching: Distinguishing Analysis from Argument Although these categories are not mutually exclusive, the following are basic definitions of the different purposes and types of writing: Argument: writer takes a stand on an issue; its goal is to bring about a change in it reader’s actions or beliefs (audience centered). The thesis of an argument is usually some kind of should statement. Analysis: writer is more concerned with arriving at an understanding of a subject than it is with either self-expression or changing readers’ views. (subject-centered). The thesis of an analysis is usually a tentative answer to a what, how or why question; it seeks to explain. Analysis often operates in areas in which there is no one right answer, but it does require the writer to reason from evidence: A few rules are worth highlighting here: 1. The range of associations for explaining a given detail or word must be governed by context.

2. It’s fine to use your personal reactions as a way of exploring what a subject means, but take care not to make an interpretive leap stretch farther than the actual details . 3. Because the tendency to transfer meanings from your own life onto a subject can lead you to ignore the details of the subject itself, you need always to be asking yourself: “What other explanations might plausibly for this same pattern of detail?” Of course, the best arguments are built on careful analysis: the better you understand your subject, the more likely you will be to find valid positions to argue about it. For Teaching: Fundamental Analytical Exercises and Activities Paraphrase X 3 Three Steps: 1 2 3

Select a single sentence or phrase from a text you are studying and that you think is interesting, perhaps puzzling, and especially useful for understanding the material. Do Paraphrase X 3. Find synonyms for all the key and do this three times. Reflect. What have you come to recognize about the original age on the basis of repeated restatement?

Experimenting with Paraphrase X3: Recast the language of the following statement using Paraphrase X 3: We hold these truths to be self evident . . . What do you come to understand about this sentence as a result of paraphrasing? Which words, for example, are most slippery (that is difficult to define)? It is interesting to note by the way that Thomas Jefferson originally wrote the words “sacred and undeniable” in his draft of the Declaration of Independence instead of self evident. So what?

Doing Paraphrase X 3 with a Reading Recast the language of a key sentence or short age in something you are reading—say, a age you find central or difficult in any of your assigned reading, the kind of age most likely to attract a yellow highlighter. Try not to make the language of your paraphrase more general than the original. This method is a excellent way to prepare for class discussion or to generate thinking about the reading that you might use in a paper. Notice and Focus (Ranking) The activity called Notice and Focus guides you to dwell longer with the data before feeling compelled to decide what the data mean. Repeatedly returning to the question, “What do you notice?” is one of the best

ways to counteract the tendency to generalize too rapidly. “What do you notice?” redirects attention to the subject matter itself and delays the pressure to come up with answers. Step 1: What do you notice? Be sure to cite actual details of the thing being observed rather than moving to more general observations about it. This phase of the exercise should produce an extended and unordered list of details—features of the thing being observed—that call attention to themselves for one reason or another. Step 2: Focus on the details and rank the various features that you have noticed. Which three details are most interesting (or revealing or strange or significant?)? The purpose of relying on “interesting” or one of the other suggested words is that these will likely deactivate the like/dislike switch and replace it with an analytical perspective. Step 3: Figure out why the three things you selected struck you as most interesting. Your attempts to answer this why question will trigger leaps from observation to interpretive conclusions. 10 on 1 10 on 1 is a version of Notice and Focus. It also depends on extended observation but with more focus usually occurring at a later stage of analysis. 10 on 1 in built on the idea that one sure way to notice more is to narrow your scope. 10 on 1 is shorthand for the principle that it is better to make ten observations or point s about a single representative issue or example than to make the same basic point about ten related issues or examples. The shift from making one observation about ten examples to making ten possible observations about your single best example is the aim of the exercise. 10 on 1 can also be used as an organization principle for papers. The Method: Working with Patterns of Repetition and Contrast The Method is procedure for analyzing evidence by looking for patterns of repetition and contrast. Whereas Notice and Focus and 10 on 1 cut through a wealth of data to focus on individual details, The Method goes for the whole picture, involving a methodical application of a matrix of observational moves on a subject. Here is The Method in its most basic form: What repeats? What goes with what? What is opposed to what? What doesn’t fit? And, for any of these, so what? Step 1: Locate exact repetitions: identical or nearly identical words, details, images and note the number of times each repeats

Step 2: Locate repetitions of the same or similar kind of detail or word—which we call strands—and name the connecting logic. (For example, accuse, defense, justice and witness are strands). Step 3: Locate details or words that from or suggest binary oppositions, and select from these the most important ones, which function as organizing contrasts. To find these oppositions, ask, what is opposed to what? Keep in mind that oppositions can be implied. This process of constructing binary oppositions from the data usually leads you to discover an organizing contrast. An organizing contrast is a central binary, one that reveals the central issues and concerns in the material you are studying and also provides its unifying shape. Some examples are: nature/culture; city/country; public/private. Tips for working with binaries: 1 2 3 4

Locate range of opposing categories (binaries) Define and analyze the opposing Question the accuracy of the binary and rephrase the Substitute “to what extent?” for “either/or”

Step 4: Rank the data within your lists to isolate what you take to be the most important repetitions, strands, binaries. Then write a paragraph—half a page or so—in which you explain your choice of one repetition or strand or one binary as central to understanding whatever you have been observing. Step 5: Search for anomalies: look for data that do not seem to fit any of the dimensional patterns, Sometimes when you see an anomaly, you will find that it is part of a strand you had not detected. Exercise 1: Try The Method on a piece of reading that you wish to understand better, such s an essay, one or more poems by the same author, a collection of stories, a political speech, and so on. You can work with as little as a few paragraphs or as much as an entire article or book. Exercise 2: write a few paragraphs in which you work with the binaries suggested by the following familiar expression: “School gets in the way of one’s education.” Keep the focus on working through the binaries implicit in the quotation. What other would you substitute for “school” and “education?” Coming up with a range of synonyms for each term will clarify what is at stake in the binary. to consider the accuracy of the claim. To what extent, and in want ways, is the expression true or false? Exercise 3: Pick a single scene from a play, a photograph from a collection or some other single example that is interestingly representative of a larger subject. Do 10 on 1 with your scene or other representative example. Notice as much as you can about it. Then organize your observations using The Method: What details repeat? What is opposed to what? Use the results to generate a piece of writing. Exercise 4: Work with binaries to develop a short essay. You might consider, for example, some of the either/or categories that students tend to put each other in, or their teachers. Exercise 5: Find a subject to analyze using Notice and Focus and then The Method. Your aim here is not to write a formal paper but to do data-gathering on the page. After you have written the paragraph that is the final part of The Method, revise and expand your work into a short essay. Initially, just write about

what you noticed and what you selected as most revealing or interesting or strange or significant, and why. You might use a story, essay, or a poem by a writer you like, perhaps a painting or the stained glass windows in the Basilica. The Method could also yield interesting results applied to the student newspaper, campus clothing styles or the latest news about the economy. Pushing Observations to Conclusions: Asking So What? The prompt for making the move from observation to implication and ultimately, interpretation is So what?, which is shorthand for such questions as: What does the observation imply? Why does this observation matter? Where does this observation get us? How can we begin to generalize about the subject? In Step 1 of this process, you describe your evidence, paraphrasing key language and looking for interesting patterns of repetition and contrast In Step 2 you begin querying your own observations by making what is implicit explicit In Step 3 you push your observations and statements of implications to interpretive conclusions by asking, So what? Or its milder cousin, And, so? For Collaboration: Inferring Implications from Observations The following statement is rich in interpretation. Working with a group, write a list of as many plausible implications as you can think of the statement. After you have made your list of implications for each item, consider how you arrived at then. On the basis of experience, how would you answer the following questions: what is the difference between an idea being hidden and an idea being implied? What is an implication? To what extent did you think that most people would arrive at the same implications that you did? 1Good fences make good neighbors.—Robert Frost

For Teaching: The Limits on Interpretation Although “everything means” (which is to say that everything in life calls on us to interpret) it is not the case, that things can mean whatever we want them to. There are powerful limits on interpretation because 1) meanings are bound by rules of logic and evidence, and 2) meanings always occur within one or more particular interpretive contexts. Tips:

Meanings must be reasoned from sufficient evidence if they are to be judged plausible Meanings must have value outside one’s own private realm of experience and should make sense to other people. Although people are free to say that things mean whatever they want them to mean, saying doesn’t make it so. Context determines meanings and an interpretive context is a lens. In the field of logic, there is a principle known as parsimony. This principle holds that “no more forces or causes should be assumed than are necessary to for the facts (OED). In other words, the explanation that both explains the largest amount of evidence (s for facts) and is simplest (no more than necessary) is the best. For Teaching: Seems To Be About X But Could Also Be (is really) About Y A useful verbal prompt for analytic thinking is “seems to be about X, but could also be about Y. There are several reasons why this formula works to stimulate interpretation: 1) The person who is doing the interpreting too often stops with the first answer that springs to mind as he moves from observation to implication, usually landing upon a cliché. If this first response becomes the X, the he is prompted by the formula to come up with another, probably less commonplace interpretations as the Y. 2) Often a person who is interpreting will, in the data-gathering stage, collect statements of intention from authorities. If we accept this information as X, then the Y is a prompt that will more likely move us to analyze such statements acutely. Why are less obvious meanings more likely to be more significant? One reason is that this shift, particularly in the context of advertising or political language, is likely to orient us toward the rhetoric of the subject. We are focusing then on its means of persuading an audience. In the case of analyzing a work of art or an historical event, we are more likely to move beyond generalizations and clichés. Example: Macbeth seems to be about the consequences of unbridled ambition, but it is really about the equivocal nature of language. Exercise: Apply they formula, “Seems to be about X, but could also be about Y” to a text. Take any reading assignment and write the formula at the top of the page. Fill in the blanks several times, and then explain your final choice for X and Y in a few paragraphs. Students might also try this formula when they find themselves stuck while drafting a paper. It is also a valuable revision tool. Exercise: Build a paper from implications. Begin this assignment by making observations and drawing out implications for topics related to the readings in class. For Teaching: Procedure for Uncovering Assumptions

1. Paraphrase the explicit claim. This activity gets you started interpreting the claim, and it may begin to suggest the claim’s underlying assumptions. 2. List the implicit ideas that the claim seems to assume to be true. 3. Determine the various ways that the key of the claim might be defined, as well as how the writer of the claim has defended them. This process of definition helps you see the key concepts upon which the claim depends. 4

Try on an oppositional stance to the claim to see if this unearths more underlying assumptions. Regardless of your view on the topic, suppose for the sake of argument that the writer is wrong. This step allows you to think comparatively and to see the claim more clearly.

Strategies for Developing an Argument by Reasoning Back to Premises 1. Set up a claim but delay ing judgment on it. 2. Decide what is really at issue by reasoning back to premises. Search out the assumptions, premises and givens of any text. 3. Be alert for that create false dichotomies: A false dichotomy inaccurately divides possible views on a subject into two opposing camps, forcing a choice between black and white. 4. In your conclusion, return to the position that you set out to explore and restate it in the more carefully qualified way you arrived at in the body of your essay. Summary Summary and analysis go hand in hand; the primary goal for both is to understand rather than evaluate. Summary is a necessary early step in analysis because it provides perspective on the subject as a whole by explaining the meaning and function of each of that subject’s parts. It creates a fair picture of what is there. Summarizing isn’t simply the unanalytical reporting of information; it’s more than just shrinking someone else’s words. To write an accurate summary, you have to ask analytical questions: 1 2 3

Which of the ideas in the reading are most important? How do these ideas fit together? What do the key ages in the reading mean?

Tips for Making Summaries More Analytical: 1 2 3 4

Look for underlying structure Select information that you wish to discuss on some principle other than general coverage Reduce scope and say more about less Get some detachment: Shift from What? to How? and Why?

Comparison and Contrast

Although comparison and contrast is meant to invite analysis, it is too often treated as an end in itself. The fundamental reason for comparing and contrasting is that you can usually discover ideas about a subject much more easily when you are not viewing it in isolation. When executed mechanically, however, without the writer pressing to understand the significance of the similarity or difference, comparison and contrast can suffer from pointlessness. Strategies for making comparison and contrast more analytical: 1 2 3 4

Argue for the significance of a key comparison Use one side of the comparison to illuminate the other Imagine how one side of your comparison might respond to the other Focus on difference within similarity or similarity within difference

Definition Definition becomes meaningful when it serves some larger purpose. Like comparison/contrast, definition can produce pointless essays if the writer gets no further than assembling information. Moreover, when you construct a summary of existing definitions with no clear sense of purpose, you tend to list definitions indiscriminately. As a result, you are likely to overlook conflicts among the various definitions and overemphasize their surface similarities. Definitions are in fact a site at which there is some contesting of authorities—different voices who seek to make their definition triumphs. Strategies for Making Definition More Analytical: 1 2 3 4

Test the Definition against Evidence Use a definition from one source to critique and illuminate another Problematize as well as synthesize the definition Shift from what? To How and Why? Questions