11 Analysis

An analysis will need to:

• Describe the content.
• Analyze the content.
• Evaluate the content.

Analysis is “the process of methodically breaking something down to gain a better understanding of it. Analysis also includes the ability to connect pieces of information as the basis for generalization or explanation” (“What is Analysis?” par. 1). As a  skill, analysis involves “breaking something down and taking a close look at each of its parts while looking for themes, patterns, and assumptions” (“What is Analysis” Figure 1). Developing and practicing a skill such as this is foundational to creating complex arguments and communicating critically with others and in our communities.

We perform analysis just about every day in our interactions with people, places, and materials. Let’s say you’re walking down the street with your friend and you spot this neat little coffee shop with tables and comfy sofas outside. You think, “Hmm. That looks like a cool place; let’s check it out!” But as soon as you walk in it looks rundown and there’s an odd smell of old food and burnt coffee. What do you do? Well, you might have a look around, think about it for a minute, but then walk right out. Guess what you just did there? You analyzed! You broke down the components of the place, the situation, and your tolerance level to determine whether it was worth your while to stay. You probably also analyzed the shop’s appeal to customers after you left and continued walking down the street, talking with your friend. You may have even discussed the occurrence with your friend. Either way, you analyzed the situation and made a determination based on your analysis.

Analysis can be applied to content but may also cover form, function, and context. For example, an analysis assignment in an art appreciation class might ask you to analyze the subject and iconography of a painting, but also expect you to analyze the use of shape, space, color, and texture, form, as well as the artist’s intended purpose (function) and the culture or time period in which the work was created (context).

While each academic discipline approaches the analytic process a bit differently, the essential skills of analysis are the following:

1. 1. Breaking down information or artifacts into parts
   2. Uncovering relationships among those parts
   3. Determining motives, causes, and underlying assumptions
   4. Making inferences and finding evidence to support generalizations

These all work in conjunction with one another to present critically sound insight on an idea, movement, argument, film, painting, place, or other object of analysis.

As much as analysis is a skill, it is also a genre that comes with certain expectations identifying it as analysis. Recall our discussion regarding genre expectations and how they relate to the audience. When a text or, as we like to say, an artifact,  is classified as a certain genre, the audience expects it to follow a certain pattern. So, in composing an analysis and using this skill to do so you will:

1. 1. Identify and describe the content’s components (Describe)
   2. Examine closely how or why these components are put together (Analyze)
   3. Explain how effective or ineffective the content’s structure and purpose is, and why (Evaluate)

Following these three steps, your audience will recognize it as analysis and be able to understand your purpose better.

Why does analysis matter so much both as a genre and skill, though? Well, analysis helps us understand what we’re seeing, reading, and expressing. The process of breaking an artifact down and looking closely at its parts helps us understand what makes effective writing; and this process  provides us with a blueprint for making our writing more effective. So, regardless of the genre we’re working with, if our analysis is sound, then our message is clearer and our communication is more successful.

How does argument differ from analysis?

Some writing assignments ask for an analysis of a text. These types of assignments are especially popular in literature courses. Professors may ask students to analyze a short story, poem, drama, or some other type of literature, which requires a close reading of the text; however, the thesis consists of the same elements as a regular thesis, a concrete(s) and an abstract(s). In other words, specific literary elements (symbols, tone, characterization, and such) will convey some type of abstract, an opinion.  For example, “In Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, the pentangle on Sir Gawain’s shield signifies not only the chivalric code by which he is bound, but also the levels of conflict by which he is constrained.” Concrete: the pentangle on Gawain’s shield. Abstract/Opinion: the ways that the pentangle illustrates conflicts in the story, such as man vs man (Gawain vs Green Knight) and man vs himself (Gawain’s inner struggle to adhere to the codes of Chivalry).

Rhetoric often depends on reasoning through various means, but not all of those means will be logical or carry good intentions. A fallacy is the use of faulty logic or reasoning, often based on unsound arguments or crafted with the intention to mislead an audience.

When thinking about the logic of an argument, we should be on the lookout for logical fallacies, which can be hard to spot sometimes. For instance, sometimes fallacies are committed when reasoning by way of past cases (called casuistry), when reasoning by what is probable based on common knowledge (enthymemes), or when unnecessarily strict reasoning is used (syllogisms). Likewise, a certain logic may be more fallacious when used with a particular audience in a particular context. Demonstrating one’s logic about death through the use of a syllogism may be inappropriate to include in a graveside eulogy, whether it is strictly logical or not. On the other hand, a “red herring,” though fallacious, may be used to distract a jury to the benefit of the accused. The point is that fallacies pop up in all kinds of places, and it is probably good to assume that your audience will call you out on using them. For this reason, we need to understand some common fallacies that will help you to become a critical thinker and an exceptionally persuasive communicator.

When first learning about fallacies, many people turn to Yourlogicalfallacyis.com, which is a visually engaging site that explains about two dozen common logical fallacies with a card-like style. As the site authors state, “a logical fallacy is a flaw in reasoning. Logical fallacies are like tricks or illusions of thought, and they’re often very sneakily used by politicians and the media to fool people. Don’t be fooled!” Their website features each major fallacy with an icon and brief description. “Ambiguity,” for example, says:

You used a double meaning or ambiguity of language to mislead or misrepresent the truth. Politicians are often guilty of using ambiguity to mislead and will later point to how they were technically not outright lying if they come under scrutiny. The reason that it qualifies as a fallacy is that it is intrinsically misleading… When the judge asked the defendant why he hadn’t paid his parking fines, he said that he shouldn’t have to pay them because the sign said ‘Fine for parking here’ and so he naturally presumed that it would be fine to park there.

Arguments with fallacies may still be powerful enough to persuade an audience — but the more skill we have in spotting them, the less likely we are to fall for this type of rhetorically unsound, sometimes even sloppy reasoning. In this PBS video, the speaker discusses five common fallacies you can use to argue more confidently in any context (but especially on the internet).

Additionally, Knachel’s Fundamental Methods of Logic has a useful chapter on logical fallacies. Some of the most common fallacies are appeal to emotion, appeal to force, Straw Man, Red Herring, and Argumentum ad Hominem. As you read through these logical fallacies, think about where you may see fallacies in your daily life. There may be groups you associate with that use one of these more often than the others, or that make a point to explicitly avoid using them. Regardless, as you read you may pause to ask yourself: “In my writing and speaking, do I exploit any of these logical fallacies?

Straw Man

This fallacy involves the misrepresentation of an opponent’s viewpoint—an exaggeration or distortion of it that renders it indefensible, something nobody in their right mind would agree with. You make your opponent out to be a complete wacko (even though he isn’t), then declare that you don’t agree with his (made-up) position. Thus, you merely appear to defeat your opponent: your real opponent doesn’t hold the crazy view you imputed to him; instead, you’ve defeated a distorted version of him, one of your own making, one that is easily dispatched. Instead of taking on the real man, you construct one out of straw, thrash it, and pretend to have achieved victory. It works if your audience doesn’t realize what you’ve done, if they believe that your opponent really holds the crazy view.

Red Herring

This fallacy gets its name from the actual fish. When herring are smoked, they turn red and are quite pungent. Stinky things can be used to distract hunting dogs, who of course follow the trail of their quarry by scent; if you pass over that trail with a stinky fish and run off in a different direction, the hound may be distracted and follow the wrong trail. Whether or not this practice was ever used to train hunting dogs, as some suppose, the connection to logic and argumentation is clear. One commits the red herring fallacy when one attempts to distract one’s audience from the main thread of an argument, taking things off in a different direction. The diversion is often subtle, with the detour starting on a topic closely related to the original—but gradually wandering off into unrelated territory. The tactic is often (but not always) intentional: one commits the red herring fallacy because one is not comfortable arguing about a particular topic on the merits, often because one’s case is weak; so instead, the arguer changes the subject to an issue about which he feels more confident, makes strong points on the new topic, and pretends to have won the original argument.

Appeal to Emotion or Argumentum ad Populum

The Latin name of this fallacy literally means “argument to the people,” where ‘the people’ is used in the pejorative sense of “the unwashed masses,” or “the fickle mob”—the hoi polloi. It’s notoriously effective to play on people’s emotions to get them to go along with you, and that’s the technique identified here. But, the thought is, we shouldn’t decide whether or not to believe things based on an emotional response; emotions are a distraction, blocking hard-headed, rational analysis.

Think about Hitler for a minute. He was an expert at the appeal to emotion. He played on Germans’ fears and prejudices, their economic anxieties, their sense of patriotism and nationalistic pride. He stoked these emotions with explicit denunciations of Jews and non-Germans, promises of the return of glory for the Fatherland — and also used techniques within well-produced settings and hyper-sensational speechifying. There are as many different versions of the appeal to emotion as there are human emotions. Fear is perhaps the most commonly exploited emotion for politicians. Political ads inevitably try to suggest to voters that one’s opponent will take away medical care or leave us vulnerable to terrorists, or some other scary outcome—usually without a whole lot in the way of substantive proof that these fears are at all reasonable. This is a fallacious appeal to emotion.

Appeal to Force or Argumentum ad Baculum

Perhaps the least subtle of the fallacies is the appeal to force, in which you attempt to convince your interlocutor to believe something by threatening him. Threats pretty clearly distract one from the business of dispassionately appraising premises’ support for conclusions, so it’s natural to classify this technique as a Fallacy of Distraction. There are many examples of this technique throughout history. In totalitarian regimes, there are often severe consequences for those who don’t toe the party line (see George Orwell’s 1984 for a vivid, though fictional, depiction of the phenomenon). The Catholic Church used this technique during the infamous Spanish Inquisition: the goal was to get non-believers to accept Christianity; the method was to torture them until they did. An example from much more recent history: when it became clear in 2016 that Donald Trump would be the Republican nominee for president, despite the fact that many rank-and-file Republicans thought he would be a disaster, the Chairman of the Republican National Committee (allegedly) sent a message to staffers informing them that they could either support Trump or leave their jobs. Not a threat of physical force, but a threat of being fired; same technique.

Argumentum ad Hominem

Everybody always uses the Latin for this one — usually shortened to just ‘ad hominem’, which means ‘at the person’. You commit this fallacy when, instead of attacking your opponent’s views, you attack your opponent himself. This fallacy comes in a lot of different forms; there are a lot of different ways to attack a person while ignoring (or downplaying) their actual arguments. To organize things a bit, we’ll divide the various ad hominem attacks into two groups: Abusive and Circumstantial. Abusive ad hominem is the more straightforward of the two. The simplest version is simply calling your opponent names instead of debating him. Donald Trump has mastered this technique. During the 2016 Republican presidential primary, he came up with catchy little nicknames for his opponents, which he used just about every time he referred to them: “Lyin’ Ted” Cruz, “Little Marco” Rubio, “Low-Energy Jeb” Bush. If you pepper your descriptions of your opponent with tendentious, unflattering, politically charged language, you may get a rhetorical leg-up.

To summarize, logical fallacies are flaws in reasoning that are widely used. You can avoid falling into these logical pitfalls by making reasoned claims supported by credible evidence. Keep your arguments clear and ethical by avoiding logical fallacies and you’ll have more success persuading audiences.

Writing summaries is one of the best skills you can have as a student– and this is true in almost all of your college classes! In most classes, your main “job” is to read texts or listen to lectures and retain the important knowledge within. The problem is, most of us do not have a perfect photographic or audiographic memory with the ability to recite an entire book chapter from memory after one reading. So, our brains need us to create files and file drawers full of information– at least enough information that we can apply what we learned to other situations and topics or pull up enough of a memory to help us dig deeper into the topic. To do this, we must train our brains to quickly summarize information. Now, you may read an important article on immunology for a science class and then need to refer back to the key points for a test or in a real lab situation. But, the article was 25 pages long… How can you get the key points from a 25-page article into a short enough summary that your brain can actually hold onto the information?

A rhetorical précis (pronounced pray-see) differs from a summary in that it is a less neutral, more analytical condensation of both the content and method of the original text. If you think of a summary as primarily a brief representation of what a text says, then you might think of the rhetorical précis as a brief representation of what a text both says and does. Although less common than a summary, a rhetorical précis is a particularly useful way to sum up your understanding of how a text works rhetorically.

The rhetorical precis assignment helps you to summarize a ten to twenty-five page article into five succinct, concise sentences which will allow you to remember the important points of the article. Writing a precis, a shorter version of an article annotation, for everything you read in all of your college classes will also help you keep track of valuable information, organize articles and other sources for your research papers, and help you build your own set of resources for your classes and future career. Writing précis can be an excellent study skill, particularly for essay exams that allow you to bring your own notes, or just to help you weed out the less important information and hone in on the things you really need to learn.

THE STRUCTURE OF A RHETORICAL PRÉCIS:

Sentence One: Name of author, genre, and title of work, date in parentheses; a rhetorically active verb; and a THAT clause containing the major assertion or thesis in the text.

Sentence Two: An explanation of how the author develops and supports the thesis.

Sentence Three: A statement of the author’s apparent purpose, followed by an “in order to” phrase.

Sentence Four: A description of the intended audience and/or the relationship the author establishes with the audience.

Sentence Five: An analysis of the significance or importance of this work.

If it helps, make a template of the above structure using what we learned in the They Say I Say template activity earlier this semester.

Time to Practice:

Read this essay: “Writing as Reckoning”

Read the essay once and try to find the thesis statement, author’s purpose, audience, and why the author feels this work is important or significant to the field of study. Practice writing out a precis.