synthesis essay tips ap lang

synthesis essay tips ap lang

Mastering the Art of Synthesis Essays in AP English Language

1. Introduction to Synthesis Essays

Writing a synthesis essay, a paper devoted to exploring different views and concerns about a given issue, is a great way to develop the critical thinking skills and knowledge of the topic that are so important throughout your years in college. In order to find useful information on a topic that you’re struggling with and would like to investigate further, you should perform a convergence of the various sources that you’ve read on the relative topic. Not only does this create more meaning to your paper, but it also offers you many opportunities to learn new ideas and insights on the topic that you might not have come upon before. With this elaborate discussion of some topics, you will easily be able to find the best synthesis essay topics and formulate a good paper with the support of various sources that you’ll find interesting and will use.

2. Strategies for Effective Synthesis

Synthesize: In the best case scenario, the writer pulls all the sources together and presents their creative collaboration. The result is a new work that combines information from many sources to explain synthesis in its written form. In the flow of an essay, the synthesis must go beyond the critics’ quotes; a writer should rationalize the connection with thoughtful generalization or refinements about the course in question. Start thinking about this collaboration as a grand conversation, not only in sources but in content.

In the discipline of English, formulating an effective synthesis essay requires practice, critical thinking, and strategy. Below you will find a structure that can help you achieve both efficacy and comprehensiveness. Even if none of the prompts specifically ask you to synthesize, look for a way to weave the sources together. A good synthesis does not repeat information; the writers crowd-source each other, creating a unique semi-public library in every essay.

3. Incorporating Sources and Citations

Consequently, to accomplish a well-written synthesis essay, use a review of personal, society, and aspects of a novel or play to encompass a more complete overview of the complex and nuanced relationships that the chapter or chapters that the prompt asks us to compare have among them. The label of a generic character is not enough to demonstrate a full grasp of that character. Good luck and enjoy the process of making good essays. In the process, your ability to read comprehension questions and to develop opinions in response to a thesis statement and fully prepared essays will increase.

To create a high-quality synthesis essay, you must demonstrate a grasp of the relationships found in the sources you are given and describe how these complex relationships can affect and support a thesis. One of the great motifs of literature, the individual and society, is in many instances a topic for the synthesizing of sources. Think about the books you have read in this class and in your other classes: doesn’t the blend of personal, societal, and literary qualities build a far more interesting character than just personal and societal traits?

4. Structuring Your Synthesis Essay

Still, synthesis is key in informational writing. Developing an awareness of synthesis starts with reading, and students should be reading a range of texts, including fiction. Having a strong reading schedule, which includes various forms – essays, novels, articles, nonfiction books, poetry, journals, and papers – is vital to students’ success on the AP exam. It will also help them develop as writers from August to May when the test takes place. By the time April rolls around and they take on the synthesis prompt, students should be reading widely and they should be familiar with an array of stylistic and rhetorical strategies.

Writing a synthesis essay involves a complex set of skills, many of which are important in academic and professional writing. Unfortunately, when a single, overarching skill like synthesis is aimed at on the AP exam, it is easy to lose sight of the value and importance of subordinate skills – the ability to summarize, paraphrase, and quote from sources – that are critical for argumentative and analytical writing. My concern is that we can spend too much time teaching synthesis and too little on these other critical competencies.

5. Refining Your Writing Style

The Grapes of Wrath is a long, long book. But students reading such a lengthy text are not tasked with writing lengthy responses. Instead, they are faced with a series of questions that require only a few sentences each. We utilize the reading techniques detailed in previous chapters because as you discuss a specific prompt, the reasoning behind the choice of a certain bird for the work of argumentation, pattern in the text, the comparison of the strategies used in the text, or the choice of diction for a rhetorical analysis essay will come springing to your mind quickly and more easily. The tools of explication will arise easily in your thoughts when needed. Those very same inductive or deductive reasoning processes that formed the basis for previous discussions about synthesis writing will also prove beneficial to make use of during the editing process because through that process, your interest is piqued, or your responses are fine-tuned.

Many of the prompts in this book were written in response to actual exercises in the real AP Language course. After discussing the prompt itself, strategies for responding to the prompt, and ways of limiting a thesis, we were faced with the unpleasant necessity of actually writing a response to the prompt. As we penned our responses to these mock situations, we often realized that the task at hand would be more effectively accomplished if we turned to certain tools or tricks that transcended the specific brevity of the task. For instance, remember the emphasis on word choice or rhetorical devices that we’ve stressed in earlier chapters. Also, we relied very heavily on inductive and deductive reasoning throughout the process of crafting a mini-essay. These exercises aren’t a negative exercise though. Quite the opposite. They were beneficial in that they facilitated our apprehension of a particular topic more fully than larger projects would have allowed and on a faster scale.

Mastering the art of synthesis essays in AP English Language