Notes from Writing Analytically Visual Analysis Paper Notes from Writing Analytically

Showing versus Telling Get in somebody else’s head for a change. Don’t just think who is right…as a writer you should not judge. You should understand. (Hemingway) Judging is the habit of mind most likely to shut down our powers of observation. We tend to screen out anything that runs counter to a judgment once we’ve made it. Judgments cause us to fall back on evaluative adjectives rather than doing the more difficult job of tracing our judgments back to causes.

Description as a Form of Analysis Virtually all forms of description are implicitly analytical. When you choose what you take to be the three most telling details about your subject, you have selected significant parts and used them as a means of getting at what you take to be the character of the whole. This is what analysis does: it goes after an understanding of what something means, its nature, by zeroing in on the function of significant detail.

Counterproductive Habits of Mind Vagueness and generality are major blocks to learning because, as habits of mind, they allow you to dismiss virtually everything you’ve read and heard except the general idea you’ve arrived at. Often the generalizations that come to mind are so broad that they tell us nothing. To say, for example, that a poem is about love accomplishes very little, since the generalization could fit almost any poem. In other words, your generalizations are often sites where you stopped thinking prematurely, not the “answers” you’ve thought they were.

Counterproductive Habits of Mind The simplest antidote to the problem of generalizing is to train yourself to be more self-conscious about where your generalizations come from. Remember to trace your general impressions back to the particulars that caused them. This tracing of attitudes back to their concrete causes is the most basic – and most necessary – move in the analytical habit of mind.

The Judgment Reflex Much of what passes for thinking – in the press, on television, in everyday conversation – is actually not thinking but reflex behavior, reaction rather than thinking: right/wrong, good/bad, loved it/ hated it, couldn’t relate to it, boring. Consider what we do when we judge something and what we ask others to do when we offer them our judgments. “Ugly,” “realistic,” “pretty,” “boring,” “wonderful,” “unfair,” “crazy.” Notice that the problem with such words is a version of the problem with all generalizations – lack of information.

The Judgment Reflex If you can break the evaluation reflex and press yourself to analyze before judging a subject, you will often be surprised at how much your initial responses change. This is not to say that all judging should be avoided. Obviously, our thinking on many occasions must be applied to decision making.

The Judgment Reflex Ultimately analytical thinking does need to arrive at a point of view – which is a form of judgment – but analytical conclusions are usually not phrased in terms of like/dislike or good/bad. They disclose what a person has come to understand about X rather than how he or she imperiously rules on the worth of X. Try eliminating evaluative adjectives – those that offer judgments with no data. “Green” is a descriptive, concrete adjective. It offers something we can experience. “Beautiful” is an evaluative adjective. It offers only judgment.

Rhetorical Analysis To analyze the rhetoric of something is to determine how that something persuades and positions its readers or viewers or listeners. Rhetorical analysis is an essential skill because it reveals how particular pieces of communication seek to enlist our support and shape our behavior. Only then can we decide whether or not we should be persuaded to respond as we have been invited to respond.

Rhetorical Analysis Everything has a rhetoric: classrooms, churches, speeches, supermarkets, department store windows, Starbucks, photographs, magazine covers, your bedroom, this book. What matters is that you can notice how the details of the thing itself encourage or discourage certain kinds of responses in the “consumers” of whatever it is you are studying. What, for example, does the high ceiling of a Gothic cathedral invite in the way of response from people who enter it? What does a tidy row of desks in a classroom say to the students who enter there?