You can't spell synthesis without 'thesis'

I often feel that synthesis is the most common missing element among the student writing I see in my sessions as a tutor. Students can often summarize or describe a text, and the good ones can even break it down to its parts in some sort of analysis. But few students I see do a significant synthesis of those parts in a way that looks anything different than their original deconstructive process.

Part of the problem, I think, is that much of our education process lends authorities to texts that students encounter. They’re simply discouraged from being skeptical of the information presented to them. But if you accept a text or argument at face value, you can never complicate it, refute it or synthesize its factors with a separate text.

That’s why so many student papers have the exact same thesis. But those theses often blur together because they simply describe the text or argument rather than actually rising to the level of synthesis.

I see a similar difficulty in forcing students to think outside their ideologies. Ramage, Bean and Johnson point out that in order to engage the truth-finding process of argument, students must question their own preconceptions. It’s often something that they’ve never been asked to do before, but it’s a crucial building block.

I’m tempted to trick my students in the course of the semester by having them write a short essay based on their personal opinions and then write a longer, more-involved paper that disproves their first assertions. Yeah. That’ll show ‘em.