Created by Colleen Warwick
Adapted by J. Clevenger 9/2011
Help…I've Been Asked to Synthesize!
Writing a strong researched paper requires the ability to synthesize—or combine elements of
several sources—to help you make a point. The purpose of the Multiple Source Essay is to give
students the chance to practice this process of "synthesis". In English 1120, synthesis is not
magic, but is a tool for drawing together particular themes or traits that you observe in various
texts and reorganizing the material according to themes or traits put forth by you and driven by
your thesis.
If you are breathing, you are synthesizing. It's simply a matter of making connections or putting
things together. We synthesize information naturally to help others see the connections between
things. For example, when you report to a friend the things that several other friends have said
about a song or movie, you are engaging in synthesis. However, synthesizing is much more than
simply reporting. Synthesis is related to, but not the same as, classification, division, or
comparison and contrast. Instead of merely attending to different categories and trying to find
some sort of similarity or difference, synthesizing is a matter of pulling various sources together
into some kind of harmony. It is the ability to combine clearly and coherently the ideas of more
than one source with your own. For example, you have probably already, early in your college
years, stored up a mental databank of the various things you have heard about particular
professors. If your databank contains several negative comments, you might synthesize that
information and use it to help you decide not to take a class from a particular instructor.
Although at its most basic level a synthesis involves combining two or more theses/ideas,
synthesis writing is more difficult than it might first appear because this combining must be done
in a meaningful way, and the final product must be thesis driven.
So you might be asking yourself, "What the heck am I supposed to do?" The key to writing any
researched essay is to read well, to understand the main idea and developmental structure of the
source articles, and to identify the points of contact between the various sources and your own
argument. This means seeing how they agree, disagree, reinforce, subvert, explain and contradict
one another in the context of your thesis. So, in a nutshell, synthesizing finds and explicates links
between materials for the purpose of constructing a new thesis (syn-thesis) or theory.
There are several things students should keep in mind while beginning to attempt writing essays
that use synthesis.
Here are a few things it is usually best to AVOID:
1. AVOID constructing the body of your paper out of a series of summaries.
This is the most c
ommon e
rror tha
t writers fall into w
hen
first attempting
this
kind of essay. Since you already know how to write summaries (Remember the Critique?), it is easy to
think that a synthesis is just a summary of different sources. It's not; writing a true synthesis
is a different, more demanding, and more sophisticated task. Why? Because a mere collection
of summaries, while much easier to produce, has one very serious shortcoming. Keep in
mind that written sources dealing with the same topic typically include many of the same
facts and arguments (usually just phrased differently). So, if you just summarize each source