Writing Synthesis

A synthesis is a written discussion that draws on two or more sources. It follows that your ability to write syntheses depends on your ability to infer relationships among sources--essays, articles, fiction, and also nonwritten sources, such as lectures, interviews, observations. This process is nothing new to you, since you infer relationships all the time--say, between something you've read in the newspaper and something you've seen for yourself, or between the teaching styles of your favorite and least favorite instructors. In fact, if you've written research papers, you've already written syntheses. In an academic synthesis, you make explicit the relationships that you have inferred among separate sources.

The skills you've already learned and practiced [critical reading, summary, and critique] will be vital in writing syntheses. Clearly, before you're in a position to draw relationships between two or more sources, you must understand that those sources say; in other words, you must be able to summarize 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. You should already have drawn some conclusions about the quality and validity of these sources; and you should know how much you agree or disagree with the points made in your sources and the reasons for your agreement and disagreement.

Further, you must go beyond the critique of individual sources to determine 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 your own idea)?

Because a synthesis is based on two or more sources, you will need to be selective 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 allow you to achieve your purpose.

Although writing syntheses can't be reduced to a lockstep method, it should help you to follow these procedures:

1.) Consider your purpose in writing. What are you trying to accomplish in your essay? How will this purpose shape the way you approach your sources?

2.) Select and carefully read your sources, according to your purpose. Then reread the passages, mentally summarizing each. Identify those aspects or parts of your sources that will help you in fulfilling your purpose. When rereading, label or underline the passages for main ideas, key terms, and any details you want to use in the synthesis.

3.) Formulate a thesis. Your thesis is the main idea that you want to present in your synthesis. It should be expressed as a complete sentence. Sometimes the thesis is the first sentence, but more often it is the final sentence of the first paragraph. If you are writing an inductively arranged synthesis, the thesis sentence may not appear until the final paragraphs.

4.) Decide how you will use your source material. How will the information and the ideas in the passages help you to fulfill your purpose?

5.) Develop an organizational plan, according to your thesis. How will you arrange your material? It is not necessary to prepare a formal outline. But you should have some plan that will indicate the order in which you will present your material and that will indicate the relationships among your sources.

6.) Write the first draft of your synthesis, following your organizational plan. Be flexible with your plan, however. Frequently, you will use an outline to get started. As you write, you may discover new ideas and make room for them by adjusting the outline. When this happens, reread your work frequently, making sure that your thesis still accounts for what follows and that what follows still logically supports your thesis.

7.) Document your sources. You may do this may crediting them within the body of the synthesis or by footnoting them.

8.) Revise your synthesis, inserting transitional words and phrases where necessary. Make sure that the synthesis reads smoothly, logically, and clearly from beginning to end. Check for grammatical correctness, punctuation, and spelling.

Note: The writing of a synthesis is a recursive process, and you should accept a certain amount of backtracking and reformulating as inevitable. For instance, in developing an organizational plan (step 5) you may discover a gap in your presentation, which will send you scrambling for another source--back to step 2. You may find that steps 3 and 4, on formulating a thesis and making inferences among sources, occur simultaneously; indeed, inferences often are made before a thesis is formulated. Our recommendations for writing syntheses will give you a structure; they will get you started. But be flexible in your approach: expect discontinuity and, if possible, be comforted that through backtracking and reformulating you will eventually produce a coherent, well-crafted essay.