What's So Great About Synthesis?

One Thanksgiving weekend I was on an airplane returning from my sister’s home in Chicago with a bag full of students’ essays to read on the way back to New Jersey. However, since professors are not robots, I decided it would be a better idea to sample the in-flight entertainment being streamed into the seatback in front of me. Quickly, I encountered a problem. I had a rectangular plug at the end of my earbuds that would not fit into the circular outlet in the armrest. I needed an adapter with a rectangular outlet on one end and a round plug on the other, a simple device that could relate my earbuds (and me) to that little screen. Without it, the two things remained tantalizingly close to each other, but functionally separate. This forced me to read the English 101 essays in which my students were having trouble connecting ideas from different authors. Because my brain works by force of juxtapositions, it struck me. Writers need to function like electronic adapters and invent the points of attachment.

I say “invent” because writers can’t buy these adapters ready-made, but instead must find and assemble the words to join apparently unlike thoughts from other people. Composition professors call this synthesis and value it highly because it requires so much creativity. Original processes can be hard to manage, and this makes people want nice steps to follow. I like good directions, too, but individual trial and error--plus patience--has to take over at some point. Also, I have to disappoint people hankering for rules and point out that nobody who understands writing has ever come up with the correct number of sentences to connect different ideas. There are only elegant connections (that make reading a complicated idea feel easier) and clunkier ones (that preserve the difficulty of the thought). In academic writing, graceful ease is like champion-level Olympic figure skating, so remember, when synthesis works at all, an undergraduate writer should be pretty darn pleased.

Instead of steps, then, I will offer illustrations. I want to write a paragraph celebrating the deep capacity any person has to create their own meaning while using what others have written. Please note that will not be this paragraph, however, because this one will lack adapter-ideas-made- of-words. The first author’s claim I want to introduce comes from the 19th-century American philosopher and essayist Ralph Waldo Emerson. To me, his words feel not only incredibly relevant, but beautiful: “If it were only for a vocabulary the scholar would be covetous of action. Life is our dictionary”(957). This quotation can be hard to understand, however, and is actually easier if a person reads the second sentence before the first sentence. I strongly suggest pausing now and doing that to see what I mean. Louise Rosenblatt, a favorite thinker featured in my dissertation who began publishing in the 1930s, offers the second assertion I want to attach to Emerson’s idea, but actually I am not doing that yet. Prepare to mentally digest a fairly dense quotation from her work. Since it’s typical of college-level reading, however, I don’t mind putting it all right here:

"Every reading is an event, a transaction involving a particular reader and a particular configuration of marks on a page, and occurring at a particular time in a particular context. Certain organismic states, certain ranges of feeling, certain verbal or symbolic linkages, are stirred up in the linguistic reservoir. From these activated areas, to phrase it most simply, selective attention—conditioned by multiple personal and social factors entering into the situation—picks out elements that synthesize or blend into what constitutes ‘meaning.’ The ‘meaning’ does not reside ready-made in the reader, but happens during the transaction between reader and text” (4).

If that seemed confusing, again, don’t worry. Smart, successful readers pause again to re-read. Note that two quotations from different authors appear in sequence, but I have not synthesized them. While near each other, they remain functionally separate. The following paragraph contains my synthesis.

Sheridan Blau, one of my professors at UCSB, gave students simple advice about thinking and writing. “Notice what you notice,” he would say. He asked students to believe in their own minds because living and doing give everyone some fundamental authority. Similarly, in his essay “The American Scholar,” Ralph Waldo Emerson observes, “Life is our dictionary” (957). Without our actions in the world, and involvement away from books, he suggests people would lose the most important inspiration for our printed words. But celebrating first-hand experience does not explain how people manage the second-hand experience and external points of view received by reading. For this, Louise Rosenblatt’s ideas prove clarifying. She says when readers relate to texts, they bring all their own particularities to interact with all the particularities captured by the words on the page (4). They arrive with accumulated experiences in a “linguistic reservoir,” and then “multiple personal and social factors” influence what activates in their reservoirs while reading (4). Like Emerson, she emphasizes the individual or particular mind, but she adds an understanding of an interactive process between reader and text: “The ‘meaning’ does not reside ready-made in the reader,” or in the text for that matter, “but happens during the transaction between reader and text” (4). Texts address themselves to readers, and readers respond by noticing what they notice, as when I realized I love Emerson’s way of recognizing the primacy of individual experience, but Rosenblatt’s idea of a transaction explains how larger forces are at work in the meaning individuals make.

Notice how that paragraph emerges from my experiences, but I did not write it alone—I needed my professor, my reading, and my years as a teacher whispering, “Talk about this.”

Works Cited

Emerson, Ralph Waldo. “The American Scholar.” The Norton Anthology of American Literature, edited by Nina Baym, et al., 3rd ed. used by me in grad school, Norton, 1989, pp. 931-944. Originally published in 1837.

Rosenblatt, Louise M. Literature as Exploration, 4th ed., Modern Language Association of America, 1976. Originally published in 1938.