Introduction

Synthesis is a skill you probably practice all the time in your everyday life. When you synthesize, you combine ideas from multiple sources to improve your understanding of a topic and to develop your own point of view. When you talk with friends about a controversial issue, when you read different news stories about a current event you’re tracking, when you compare reviews of a product you plan to buy—in all of these situations, your understanding of the topic grows as you incorporate new ideas from your sources and develop your opinion.

In college, synthesis usually means writing about academic sources that your instructor provides for you or that you discover through research. In your College Composition courses, your sources will probably be academic essays, but in your other college classes, you may find yourself synthesizing information from graphs and tables, works of art, or oral presentations, among other possibilities. Whatever the nature of the sources you are synthesizing, your goals will likely be the same: 1) to explain what has already been written about your topic and 2) to support your own original argument using evidence from your sources.

This chapter will help you to achieve these goals by explaining the different types of synthesis and the different roles that synthesis can play in your writing. It will explain how to organize a synthesis essay—an essay that weaves together information from multiple sources. It will also show you how to synthesize at the sentence-level by using deliberate sentence structures and citation practices to provide information from your sources and to draw connections between them.

What is a Synthesis?

Synthesis is something that you do—you combine information from various sources to understand a topic—but in college, a synthesis is also something that you write.

In academic research and writing, synthesis describes the process of bringing multiple ideas into conversation. We call this type of paper a synthesis because it refers to the act of synthesizing that occurs within the paper itself, bringing diverse sources together into one complex conversation. Synthesizing information can help the writer build on the work of previous writers while creating new knowledge. Your goal in writing a synthesis can be:

• to discover novel ideas
• to realize how older knowledge links to more current ideas
• to reach a middle-ground perspective on a debatable issue
• to clarify the perplexity of a subject under discussion, or
• to make a point on a controversial topic.

As you see, synthesis can serve so many purposes.

Your instructor will identify your rhetorical goal for writing a synthesis essay when giving the assignment. Even within the English Program at LCCC, students will find that different instructors approach the synthesis assignment differently. Not only are there different ways to approach synthesis, but each instructor crafts their own requirements for the synthesis paper in their classroom.

Continue Reading: 17.2 Argumentative Synthesis