synthesis essay explanation video

hello everybody dr. Jones here and the purpose of today’s video is to talk a little bit about the synthesis essay that you’re going to have to write for your first paper for this particular class so I want to explain the goals of the assignment the process that you go through to write the paper and a couple of the requirements as well you can find these details on the assignment sheet that is in the same page that you’re watching this video in so look for the assignment she read it print it out if you’re a visual concrete person and you need that paper reminder highlight it up if you need to but essentially become very familiar with the assignment sheet watch this video several times if you have to keep coming back to it if you need to in order to make sure you have a good grasp of the requirements and the goals of this particular paper so you should have already started learning a little bit about synthesis in this week’s materials so you have an idea that synthesis is all about taking the best ideas from a variety of different perspectives in order to come to a conclusion or solve a problem it’s a way to create a new stance or a new idea on an issue so one of the main goals in your synthesis essay is not to simply say hey I agree with this person over here or I agree with this person over here and then just take everything that they’ve said as your own stance no that is not synthesizing that is not creation of new ideas that’s just saying you agree with ideas that already exist instead what you want to do is to take the best ideas or the concerns from each of the different perspectives and meld them together mesh them together in order to create something new which is your own individual stance on the subject it’s hard right you can’t just say I agree with this person that’s the hard part about synthesis but you guys can do it the Allanon baking book and myself are here to help you do it so how do you do this thing this creation of a new idea or a new stance through synthesis well the paper asks you to follow a particular process in order to accomplish this goal the first thing you want to do is ask a synthesis question this is very much like a research question so if you’ve ever written a paper from a research question then you’re gonna know what a synthesis question is it’s an open-ended question that asks about a topic or problem that you’re interested in or curious about now keep in mind all research starts from curiosity all research starts from a question or problem something you don’t know but you want to find out we don’t research things we already know right why would we do that so we need to be curious but uninformed about our topic that we choose for this paper about the question that we ask for this paper another reason that we need to be curious but uninformed about our topic is because I’m going to ask you to use this same topic throughout all three of the major papers for this course so you’ll be writing on this topic for the synthesis essay for the argument essay and for the major research paper at the end of the class so you want to make sure it’s a topic you don’t get bored with but you also want to make sure that the topic you can learn lots about that you don’t know a lot about already so that you can grow and learn as a researcher as a writer and as a human being right so ask a question you’re curious about but uninformed about also make sure it’s open-ended you don’t want to ask any yes-or-no questions so um a question like going off the top of my head um do is smoking back for you right there’s already lots of research out there that says the smoking is bad for you so that might be a pretty simply answered question that hasn’t yes or no answer we don’t want those types of questions what we want to do is ask open-ended questions that we don’t know the answers yet to so a question that might instead be more useful to ask is why do people continue to smoke despite research this is it’s bad for you right so when you’re doing the assignment for this week the daily I think it’s your writing assignment where you’re asked to compose a couple of research questions synthesis questions to get your paper off to a good start constantly ask yourself is this a question that can be answered with a yes or no answer and if it is it’s probably not appropriate for this assignment so begin the process of writing this paper with an open-ended synthesis question next we’re going to head to the Internet and to the databases and we’re going to start researching for this paper and you’ll complete a search terms assignment which is I believe a research activity for this week and a annotated bibliography which is another research activity for this week so all of the daily activities the writing activities research activities and reading journals that you’ll be completing during this time period while you’re working on the synthesis essay are all to help you progress make progress on this essay so it’s all connected and associated and to help you move forward at a manageable and productive pace for this essay so stay on track with your course calendar your schedule and stay on track with your weekly assignments so that you can get a really good strong start to this paper now when you go to the Internet and you do your search terms activity and in order to find your sources your two sources for this paper you must have two sources in order to write your annotated bibliography make that those sources are sources that present different ways of answering your synthesis question different ways of addressing the problem we need to see some disagreement here we need to see some alternative perspectives it doesn’t help us learn about a topic when we simply research ideas that are all in agreement with one another that’s not productive that doesn’t help broaden our horizons as researchers and it doesn’t give us all the information that we need to know in order to completely understand a topic and answer a question so make sure that the two sources that you find for this essay come from differing points of view next if you’re wondering how to organize the paper you will have seen that I’ll have drawn your attention either this week or next week to a particular set of pages in ellen and bacon that gives you an outline for this paper so pay attention as you’re reading the pages for the synthesis essay and this week in the next to the pages that talk about how to organize this essay follow that organizational system you’re not plagiarizing if you’re taking the format from that book and fitting your ideas into that format in fact you’re being smart all right so don’t try to reinvent the wheel while you organize your essay simply use the format the organizational schema that is given to you in Allen and bacon let me check my notes see if there’s anything else we need to talk about the most important thing to this paper that’s what we need to talk about so the most important thing you need to remember for this paper is that from those two differing perspectives those two different articles that you find in your research in order to answer the research question you need to compose your own point of view your own answer to that question based on the information that you’ve acquired through your research as I was saying that’s the difficult part of this paper but that’s the goal that’s what we’re looking for can you create your own individualized answer to the research question based on a synthesis of the best ideas from the two articles that you found for the paper all right that’s the challenge but I believe all of you can do it so if you have any questions about the paper after watching this video and reading the assignment instructions and reading through of course the pages and allyn and bacon looking at the PowerPoint that is posted to canvas that explains synthesis Linea male main because after all of that if you’ve still got questions I am just an email away so I look forward to seeing what you guys put together in the following weeks for this paper