Welcome to a tutorial on writing a synthesis. Writing a synthesis is very similar to writing a summary but there are some differences so please follow along. What is a synthesis? A synthesis is basically these three things. Number one, you're offering more of your opinions. It's not just summarizing an article but also making a statement, a kind of your personal summation or your personal statement about these articles. A synthesis is also a combination of two or more summaries in a thoughtful or meaningful way. A synthesis is not just two summaries together but organized around a theme or a thesis that compares and contrasts these two summaries.
What's your goal of writing a synthesis? Well, basically your goal is to present information in a way that the reader can see that you've read the material. That's important. But also that you also, you can see where the overlaps are and where the differences are. It's not just reporting verbatim what the article said but demonstrating that you have actually thought about how these two articles go together, how they are similar and how they are different.
It also shows, a synthesis helps you make sense of the sources and helps the reader understand them in greater depth. A synthesis enables you to explore topics in a new way and a synthesis, the goal is to compare and analyze different articles. Again, a summary and synthesis are very similar but there are some differences. Summaries are kind of lower level skills. It just requires you to read and report on what the article says. What were the main points of that article? There's not much analysis here. It's just basically documentation of the article.
Whereas synthesis requires more thinking by the writer. This is a high level skill that requires taking the information and comparing and contrasting more than one source. A synthesis is a much higher level skill than just reporting in a summary. Your steps to writing a synthesis are as follows. Pre-writing. You want to pre-read two or more articles. What are the articles about, who wrote them, look at the headings and categories. You want to read and annotate both articles. Be an active reader. Circle key words. Underline important ideas. Write notes in the margins. Jot down those main ideas and you want to outline both articles.
This is exactly the same steps that you would do when you do a summary. Basically you're just doing two summaries in your pre-writing stage. This is where things get a little different because in the synthesis you really want to organize it around three sections. Your introduction, your body paragraphs, and your concluding paragraphs. Your introduction, unlike just saying this is the article I read, you want to start with a thesis statement that connects both of the articles. You also want to introduce both of the articles right in that introduction.
Then the body is where you actually present each of the articles as summaries but after that, your third paragraph is going to be a paragraph about the similarities and differences between those two. Your conclusion is where you basically take those themes that you started with up in your introduction and just connection them, again to reemphasize how you think about these two articles together. Your last step is basically an editing step so make sure you follow editing guidelines from other checklists to make sure you're producing the highest quality work.
Again, in your synthesis you're going to have three parts, that introduction, the body and the conclusion. This is a little bit different than a summary especially in that introduction and that conclusion where you're connecting the two articles in a thoughtful way as well as that body. You're not just giving summaries but you're also comparing and contrasting.
Let's take a look briefly at a synthesis that I wrote. You can see here this is the first summary that I did around an article called, Supporting English-language learners and struggling readers in content area literacy with "Partner Reading and Content Too" routine. Basically I just went through that summary process and used this organizational guide to help me write a summary. I'm just doing a simple summary on this first article. I then did the same exact thing with another article around a similar topic. This article is called, The critical role of vocabulary development for English Language Learners. Again, I go through that same summary process that I did for the first article. Basically I'm writing two separate summaries to begin.
Then I'm going to put the two summaries together. You can see in this first paragraph, it's my introduction paragraph where I've got my thesis statement and then I go into introduce each of the two articles. After I've given summaries of both of these articles, then within the body I'm going to highlight the comparisons and differences between these two articles and that is what I do in this paragraph here. Finally, I'm going to have my conclusion paragraph that basically tells, summarizes my thesis statement and wraps up the two articles.