Synthesis Essay

Purpose

You'll write an essay that synthesizes three academic articles from peer-reviewed journals on the same topic. Synthesis means that you'll compare the articles in terms of their overall argument, claims, methods, and context. You'll explain what common aspects of the topic they address, and what they contribute to readers' understandings of the issues and their importance. Your paper should also describe how they present evidence, methods, and data. In other words, focus on these questions:

• How do the main arguments of these articles compare with each other?
• How do the articles make claims that support or reinforce each other?
• Ho do the articles present claims or information that might contradict each other?
• How did the authors set up their studies and gather their information? Did they use similar methods, or different ones? How important are these differences?
• How do the authors explain the importance of their projects to readers? Do they mention context or implications that the other articles don't? What are they, and what explains these differences?
• Do the articles address slightly different readers/audiences? Do they come from the same discipline? You can answer these questions by looking at the author bios and journal information.

The articles might not refer to each other directly, but your job is to explain how they are part of a wider conversation. For example, you might write about three articles on cyber-bullying or climate change from different disciplinary perspectives--a social scientist, a lawyer, and psychologist. Each article might present different ideas on the issue, even if they largely agreed on a few things. Remember, you are writing for an audience (including instructor) who may only have passing familiarity with this topic. Your job is to lay out the issue and tell us what these articles are worth.

Your paper should do the following

• A clear introduction (1-2 paragraphs) that introduces the topic, explains its importance, and identifies the articles and authors you plan to discuss. Identify the authors and titles of the pieces, as well as what journals they appeared in. Here, it's also best to provide a brief overview of their positions in relation to another.
• A discussion of the articles by subtopic. For example, in one paragraph you could discuss how each of the articles defines the importance of the issue to different audiences. In another, you could compare the kinds of claims they make, or how their approaches to the problem differ. Some summary will be necessary, but you should do more than just summarize each article in sequence.
• Citations: You should provide detailed citations to back up your analysis. A good principle is to include at least 1-2 direct or indirect citations in each paragraph. Quote phrases or sentences. Avoid quoting entire passages. Only quote in order to capture important phrasing that aids your explanations. Otherwise, provide detailed paraphrases, especially when discussing numerical data and statistics.
• Works Cited Page: You must include a work cited page. See the Purdue OWL for details.
• Current & Relevant Sources: Your three sources should've been published within the last 5-7 years. Anything older than this will likely contained outdated information.

You can follow these steps to complete the article

• Spend some time browsing newspapers and websites to decide on a topic.
• Try to narrow your interest to a specific debate. For example, you might begin with an interest in climate change, but you'll want to narrow to a specific topic like the recent U.S. decision to abandon the Paris Climate Accord agreement. A specific question might be, what is the real economic impact of climate change regulation in the U.S., or what is the economic cost of climate change? Another example: Why do politicians and scientists disagree on climate change so severely?
• You can spend some time on the web, but eventually focus your search in the library databases. You can try different databases, or search using discipline or an alphabetized list of journals.
• Initially, take your time and view at least the first 50 results for each search. Experiment with key words (synonyms, tenses, wild card searches).
• Gather several articles before you select your final three. It would be a mistake to simply grab the first three articles you find. Curating 10-12 articles and then reviewing them is part of your process.
• Keep a file on your computer or Google Drive to store all your work on this project.
• Read the abstracts, introductions, and conclusions of each article before making a final decision about it.
• Read the articles multiple times. Take notes. Make outlines. Mark up the PDFs using Adobe annotation tools. Try to understand how the articles might be in an indirect conversation.