What you’ll learn to do: examine strategies for successful synthesis

In some writing assignments, you will be asked to not just analyze material, but to synthesize. Analysis would have you recognize hidden meanings, see patterns, or identify the underlying parts of something. In an analysis paper, you may be asked to do things like separate, order, connect, classify, divide, or explain.

Instead of breaking something down into components to look at the pieces and patterns, in synthesis, your goal is to relate and combine knowledge from different areas to draw conclusions. In a synthesis paper, you may be asked to do things like modify, rearrange, substitute, design, invent, or generalize.

In this section, we’ll take a closer look at synthesis.