Thanks to a fantastic question coming to me via email, I wanted to post a quick overview of what goes into creating an explanatory synthesis. As our textbook illustrates on pages 102-103, creating an explanatory synthesis involves three basic steps:
- summarize your sources (for response paper 3: “Beach” and at least one other source)
- make judgments about / conduct a critical reading of your sources
- determine the relationship(s) between your sources
Steps 1 and 2 should look familiar, as we’ve just written summaries and critiques. Therefore, step 3 is the new writing task.
Keep in mind that the goal of explanatory synthesis is to help our readers understand something by presenting facts from various sources in a reasonably objective manner. This means that there isn’t a lot of room for our opinions when writing an explanatory synthesis. Instead, we should work to connect the sources we are sharing with the reader — what does one source teach us about the other?
