Believing in Other Species
Source Analysis: Creating a Source Chain in Dynamic Context
Please create in your own way a “chain” of three (3) of our sources we’ve explored together in which SPECIFIC moments in two (2) of the sources inspire you with ideas about how to understand what’s happening in SPECIFIC moments or situations in the third source of your choice. So you’re really staying focused for this, navigating in a sequence YOU create BETWEEN MOMENTS in the different sources and allowing them to play off each other, provide you with inspirations or insights into MOMENTS in the other sources. You might privilege one (1) source we’ve studied together (Jane Goodall’s excerpt from In the Shadow of Man, Pippa Erhlich’s and James Reed’s account of an octopus and Craig Foster in My Octopus Teacher, Barry Lopez’s “Migration: The Corridors of Breath,” and Ann Zwinger’s “A Desert World”) and let the other two (2) sources you explore help you to “see” into the situational dynamics or moments in that third (3rd) source you choose to concentrate on the most. There’s no one way to sequence this. You can organize the specific moments/scenes you explore from the different sources in an order that seems to grow and inspire for you. But the main role of the OTHER two (2) sources is not so much to compare with the third (3rd) source but somehow to inspire you to “look” into moments in that third (3rd) source in ways you would not have exactly “seen” without the inspiration of what’s happening in discrete moments from the other two (2) sources!
Thank you for all your hard work!!
Here are some suggestions as you begin to explore moments from your sources and construct an argument:
Focus your argument so it delivers a specific, carefully defined characterization of the dynamics you are analyzing rather than a set of broad generalities you don’t have the space to argue in such a brief essay.
Make sure your thinking is in fact arguable and not something your readers are likely to grant you in advance. An arguable claim is one that requires your intervention as a thinker and writer rather than one delivering a flat idea most of us take as given.
Anchor your argument in the data set under investigation—in this case, in the three experiential sources you explore—rather than speaking broadly about issues in general or outside the limits of your sources. Manage the scope of that argument so it is commensurate with the scale of your data. You want to use your own thinking, in tandem with evidential specifics, to create a tightly circumscribed space of investigation that has the chance to provide insights into the sources that constitute the data in question. It’s really important, as ever, to focus on details and to build carefully worded sequences of thought out from those details in your evidence.
Strategies to help you get started:
This is a broad prompt and attempts to model one common type of assignment likely to structure your analytical writing as you move forward. Here, what your instructor is frequently asking you to do is to think for yourself within a focused data context, rather than to import a host of opinions and knowledge bases that circulate outside of it. She or he gives precious little in the way of clues and establishes broad parameters within which to work. One peril for those who are on the other end of this kind of prompt is that we misunderstand its generality and assume we are free to respond in kind. Instead, most of the time (things will vary across instructors and individual contexts) and in many disciplines, the trick is not to get distracted by the wide scope offered by the question but to find your own tightly controlled place to “nest” inside that breadth.
How to do this?
In other words, as this prompt suggests, the key for you is to get detailed and focused. There is one stratagem I recommend above all others for how to do this: reverse engineering. Instead of dreaming up an argument in advance, start the whole project in reverse. Begin by seeing which small-scale details catch your eye as you read, or as you inspect a laboratory specimen, or as you watch a film—in other words, as you explore the data set under investigation. Try to keep an open mind and don’t crowd out the possibility of interesting insights at this microscopic level by already being sure what you think on the macro-level. Begin to collect these focused, precise observations about your evidence and try to understand what is going on in the situations you choose. This process is what analytical writers mean when they say you should “name” what you are seeing and collecting. The reason you name, or characterize, the details you are finding is not to sound fancy. Instead, your names and ways of understanding what you locate afford opportunities for organizing your findings and, perhaps most importantly, for finding intersections between diverse details you would not have thought to correlate if you had not named or characterized them in certain ways.
Generating a narrowly defined argument in the wake of these detailed explorations of your data:
Now, and only now, once you have collected your small-scale observations (you’ll decide over time how many details or situations you need to collect and characterize before you start exploring the formulation of your argument that sets out to link them together), you can start creating arguments you build OUT FROM the observed dynamics you’ve found occurring across your details. It is, in other words, the details that inform and generate the argument, not vice-versa. You are trying to avoid, via this method, a reductive, generalizing or tendentious argument that deploys details in the evidence to “prove” a really basic generality. A chief peril of such arguments, in addition to their tendency to come across as generic, is that they can be repetitive, since details are mobilized by the writer to reiterate the same basic point throughout the essay.
Structure:
Instead, since you’ve done all the hard work as a detective to hunt down detailed observations, you can structure your essay so that each body paragraph explores and analyzes a new detail, or a new set of related details. The goal is to ADVANCE a complex argument that relies on the intersection of details from your source over the course of your essay in order fully to unfurl or develop. This kind of essay, then, provides an opportunity to build a complicated idea or set of linked ideas from the ground up, so that each paragraph in the essay is a stage in the exposition, and the structure overall showcases a conceptual elaboration that develops progressively across your pages. The argument to anchor an essay of this kind, must be, as you might imagine, sufficiently detailed and complex to require 5-7 pages (or however long your project is) so as to get laid out in all of its nuance and specificity.
Learning objectives for this progression and beyond:
This, in a reduced form, is the process we’ll work through together in different contexts throughout the semester as we hone our skills as analytical thinkers and writers. The central, twin goals of this course are to allow you to engage deeply with sources while preparing you to structure sophisticated arguments and essays. These are ambitious goals which make for a challenging semester but one, I hope, that’s fun and interesting. Don’t pressure yourself to learn everything at once, or to take all of the methodologies on board in one fell swoop. Try not to get frustrated if some pieces of the analytical writing process seem elusive or opaque. They do succumb to practice and your native ingenuity. Writing, as you’ve no doubt discovered in your own ways and lives, can be really hard work, but it can also be really meaningful.
Feedback:
This is a really insightful essay, moving across our sources with such eloquence and care. I think you can consider now FOCUSING the work a little more on what’s happening in the SPECIFIC moments between the octopus and Craig. As of now, you tend to use the other sources, from Jane Goodall and Ann Zwinger, more to generate truths for all time, that are ALWAYS true EVERYWHERE–SO LIKE “invite us to reflect deeply on our place within this grand tapestry” on p. 4 or “cultivating the potential cruelty of resilience and wisdom” on p. 3 or “reveals that ingenuity is not unique to us” on p. 2. These are familiar and beautiful universals but instead you can practice what we’ve worked on by diving into SPECIFIC MOMENTS, not so much to show how they illustrate some grand truth in the universe, but HOW YOU see the details playing out in THOSE moments, like with the shark on p.2. THEN you give yourself more chances to USE the specifics, not just to reveal what’s true every time everywhere, but HOW THAT SPECIFIC situation unfolds for you. THEN you can link what you FIND and EXPLORE IN DETAIL in THOSE moments to try to make an argument that’s just about the octopus and Craig and THEIR relationship as it evolves in My Octopus Teacher, if that makes sense! Keep up the hard work, Zhida, and I REALLY hope that helps you out!!