(From the Definition and Synthesis Essay prompt):

Write an essay that defines the topic of your research for this course and synthesizes different perspectives on the issue from sources you have read critically.

Your Definition and Synthesis Essay should

• Clearly define the topic of your essay and the specific issue (or issues) you will address
• Clarify your position: what exactly are you wanting to say about the issue? Why is it relevant? What is at stake, and for whom?
• Connect (synthesize) differing perspectives on this topic and set of issues, and explain how existing perspectives portray the issue in overlapping or contradictory ways
• Revise your research question and research proposal in response to the new sources you have found and the new connections you have made

Write an essay that defines the topic of your research for this course and synthesizes different perspectives on the issue from sources you have read critically.

Your Definition and Synthesis Essay should

• Clearly define the topic of your essay and the specific issue (or issues) you will address
• Clarify your position: what exactly are you wanting to say about the issue? Why is it relevant? What is at stake, and for whom?
• Connect (synthesize) differing perspectives on this topic and set of issues, and explain how existing perspectives portray the issue in overlapping or contradictory ways
• Revise your research question and research proposal in response to the new sources you have found and the new connections you have made

Note: this essay is not asking you to evaluate or make an argument about your chosen issue. We will move on to consider arguments in the next unit. Focus instead on writing that tries to understand and "deepen" your relationship with your chosen issue.

 Notes and Tips:

• This essay is not asking you to evaluate or make an argument about your chosen issue. We will move on to consider arguments in the next unit. Focus instead on writing that tries to understand and "deepen" your relationship with your chosen issue. Try to explain rather than persuade.
• You are not writing two essays here, but rather writing a single essay that focuses on using two rhetorical tools (defining and synthesizing) at the same time.
• The form this essay takes is close to the genre of a literature review (Links to an external site.), which "collects key sources on a topic and discusses those sources in conversation with each other" (from the Purdue Online Writing Lab (Links to an external site.)). If it helps you, you can think of the Definition and Synthesis essay as a literature review that studies the different perspectives on a particular topic and presents these perspectives as part of the context for a larger social issue. 

 Objectives:

In this project, you will

• Define the context for the issue you are writing about for this course, framing the significance, relevance, and urgency of the issue for one or more audiences
• Synthesize existing research perspectives on the topic, making connections between sources and analyzing why these connections are important
• Connect the existing conversation to your primary research question and start to identify the threads of the conversation that will be most important to the position you want to take