Handout on Analysis Questions and Synthesis Questions
Analysis:
In preparing and writing the essay, consider following a five step process:
I. Begin by reading the selection carefully several times to determine what the poem/passage is about.
II. Determine the poem/passage's theme. Why is the poem exploring its topic? How is the topic presented?
III. Identify formal and stylistic elements in the poem/passage.
IV. Determine how the formal/stylistic elements are supporting the theme of the poem/passage.
V. Your thesis will offer a connection between the formal and thematic elements of the text.
Advice:
Learn standard poetic forms: Blank verse, rhyming couplets, the sonnet (both Petrarchan and English/Shakespearean), ballad stanzas; recognize and determine rhyme schemes; familiarize yourself with metaphor, simile, metonymy, and synecdoche; recognize alliteration (consonance and assonance); imagery and symbolism are highly important features of most texts. Study how to identify the symbolic importance of imagery and detail in poetry and prose.
Learn elements of prose style and their effects: point of view, foreshadowing, tone (and how it emerges), stance (or rhetorical stance) of the writer/speaker (is the piece ironic, satiric, nostalgic, sentimental, realistic). Keep pushing your reading from identification toward analysis.
Choose poems and passages from your class readings and outline analysis possibilities for those poems and passages.
Synthesis:
In preparing and writing the essay, consider the following:
I. Read the question carefully to determine its parameters.
II. Choose texts that allow for a fruitful exploration of the question given the question's parameters.
III. Determine how each text fits the parameters of the question, and then determine the way the texts relate to each other and differ from each other
IV. Elaborate on the details of each text (give each text its own section in the essay) within the parameters of the question
V. As you're writing the essay, be sure that the transitions between sections highlight the connections and differences between the texts you've chosen
Advice:
Familiarize yourself with a wide range of texts of varying themes and styles. Be familiar enough with these texts to write about them in detail. You do not necessarily need to cite passages, but you should know the major movements and elements of the texts you choose.
As you identify themes within works, think about thematic connections between works. How is the presentation of a theme in one work related to and divergent from a similar theme presented in another work. Be creative in how you make connections. Some texts can be connected by the presence of theme in one work and its almost complete absence in another.
Work on developing transitions between divergent works. The transitions are the moments that define and hold synthesis essays together.
