What is Synthesis?

Synthesis is about creating something new out of existing elements. The traditional “research paper” is a synthesis. When you synthesize ideas from various sources, you’re adding your unique voice and perspective to a scholarly conversation. Just as participants in a discussion build on and respond to each other’s points, academic writing involves engaging with and responding to what others have already said.

Whenever you are asked to research a topic and then write a paper about it, you will need to engage in synthesis. You will first read multiple texts on the topic and evaluate those texts to determine first, which ones are relevant and credible, and second, which ideas from the high-quality sources are useful or significant. Then, you will use those ideas to inform your own perspective on the topic. Finally, you will write an essay in which you explain and defend your perspective, referring to those sources and your evaluation of them as support. Note how this is different from a “report” that just draws from various sources and summarizes the information found in them; instead, it’s a type of argument because you are trying to support your own perspective.

This process is different from what many students actually do when confronted with an assignment to write a research paper or a research-supported argument. True synthesis is hard! To avoid it, many students will instead decide in advance what their perspective on the topic is, then skim through texts to find quotes and evidence to support that perspective. The end product may look similar to an essay in which synthesis actually happened. Although we can’t necessarily stop you from engaging in this kind of “pseudo-synthesis,” keep in mind that (1) your instructor will probably be able to tell because your argument is likely to be shallow and ill-informed, and (2) you’re depriving yourself of an opportunity to practice skills that you won’t be able to fake as you progress in your academic career.

Your Synthesis Question

Like all academic writing projects, underlying a synthesis is a question; in this case, the synthesis question is one that invites various perspectives and allows you, as the writer, to critically evaluate these perspectives as you develop your own.

A good synthesis question won’t have an obvious or straightforward answer. Instead, it should invite multiple possible answers, each of which could be potentially supported with evidence and logic, but none of which is certain with the information available to us now. Thus, a question like, “Is smoking cigarettes harmful to your health?” wouldn’t be a strong synthesis question because the answer has already been pretty successfully shown to be “Yes.” However, a question like “Should cigarettes be banned?” would work as a synthesis question because, although people can support their positions with evidence and logic, the “correct” answer is still wide open for debate.

Example Synthesis Questions

Synthesis questions underlie the major topics of interest in all kinds of disciplines. As noted in Ch. 1, academic writing assumes an audience that is educated about a topic, so people usually don’t bother writing about topics where the answers have already been settled. Instead, they focus on questions where debate still exists. These questions often require the integration of multiple perspectives, theories, or data sources to develop a comprehensive argument. They challenge the synthesis writer to think critically, analyze complex information, and draw connections between different ideas or fields of study. Synthesis questions are not merely about recalling facts, but about evaluating, interpreting, and combining information to create new insights or solutions. They reflect the dynamic nature of academic inquiry, where knowledge is constantly evolving and being refined through debate and research. The following examples from various disciplines illustrate the depth and complexity of synthesis questions across different fields of study:

• History: What were the primary causes of the American Civil War?
• Philosophy: Do human beings have free will, and what does this mean about our moral obligations?
• Psychology: How much do genetic versus environmental factors influence human behavior and mental health, and how should we act on this information?
• Literature: How is the concept of the American Dream portrayed across various 20th century American novels and plays?
• Political Science: What should be done to improve voter participation in the United States?
• Sociology: What factors contribute to the racial wealth gap in the United States, and how should this gap be addressed?
• Interdisciplinary: What is the most effective way for governments to increase climate change awareness and motivate action by citizens?

Developing Your Own Synthesis Question

If your instructor asks you to choose your own synthesis question, don’t just pick the first idea that comes to mind (or that pops up when you Google “synthesis questions”). Instead, use the following strategies:

1. Start with a broad topic of interest: Choose a subject area that genuinely intrigues you and where you sense there might be ongoing debates or unresolved issues.
2. Research current discussions: Dive into recent academic literature, articles, or discussions in your chosen field to identify areas of controversy or uncertainty.
3. Look for intersections: Consider how different aspects of your topic might interact, or how insights from other disciplines could apply to your area of interest.
4. Identify multiple perspectives: Ensure your question addresses a topic where various viewpoints or explanations exist. This is crucial for synthesis.
5. Ensure complexity: Your question should not have a simple, straightforward answer. It should require analysis and integration of multiple sources or ideas.
6. Make it specific and focused: While the topic should be complex, the question itself should be clearly defined.
7. Consider relevance and impact: Think about how answering this question could contribute to the field or have real-world applications.
8. Ensure it’s answerable: While the question should be complex, make sure it’s possible to address it with available resources and within your timeframe.
9. Engage in dialectic: Discuss your question idea(s) with your classmates and your instructor.
10. Be willing to revise: It’s normal to revise and refine your question as you delve deeper into your research.

Finding Sources

If your instructor has provided the question, your instructor may also provide sources for you to use. If you are responsible for finding your own sources, you may want to refer to the chapters on Finding Your Own Secondary and Tertiary Sources and Evaluating Sources. For best results, try to find sources that represent multiple perspectives on the issue. Your instructor may tell you a specific number of sources to use, but if not, a good rule of thumb is approximately one source for every 300-400 words the essay is expected to be. However, it’s possible to write a lengthy synthesis with as few as two sources! Some students are tempted to believe that more sources are always better, but a few high-quality sources used well are more meaningful than a dozen sources that only receive shallow treatment.

How to Write a Synthesis

Before you even begin to write your synthesis, it can be a useful exercise to jot down your ideas about the synthesis question prior to reading any sources. As we read, our ideas change in ways we aren’t always even consciously aware of, and having a written record of what you used to think can make it easier to bring your own ideas back into the conversation when you reach that step of the process.

Read, Annotate, and Summarize Your Sources

The first formal step in writing a synthesis essay is to carefully read and annotate your texts. It’s important that you truly understand their ideas so you can represent them fairly in your essay; use the strategies from the chapter on Reading Well to guide you in this process.

Analyze Your Sources

Then, you need to analyze the texts rhetorically – looking at their perspectives, areas of agreement and disagreement, and evaluating the credibility of each source. Particularly when the sources contradict each other, you will need to determine which to believe, and why. Most of your analysis probably won’t actually end up written into a synthesis essay, although you may include a few bits and pieces. Mainly, though, you’re analyzing so that you can make sense of how your sources fit together with each other, why they don’t always agree with each other, and what useful ideas each source has to offer. Here are a few questions to consider as you analyze your sources:

• What different perspectives, purposes, and intended audiences are represented in your sources?
  • How do these differences affect what is included in or excluded from each source?
  • How do these differences explain why the sources are different in style, tone, use of evidence, etc.?
  • What potential biases or agendas might the authors have, and how could that influence their perspectives?
• Where do the sources agree and disagree?
  • Do they agree on details but differ on broader conclusions or explanations? Or perhaps vice versa?
  • Do they present similar values but differ on the facts? Or perhaps vice versa?
  • Are there areas where sources partially agree or disagree, offering nuanced or qualified perspectives?
  • Are there any underlying assumptions that differ among the sources?
• What would the authors of each source say to the others?
• How would you rate or rank the sources in terms of credibility, and why?

Reflect on Your Sources

The next step is to interrogate your own ideas and understanding based on what you’ve learned from the texts. If you took the time to jot down some notes about your initial thoughts, now is the time to return to those to remind yourself where you stood before. A few questions to think about:

• What new insights or perspectives have you gained from reading the texts?
• Where do you disagree with or doubt the texts, and why?
• How have your initial thoughts or ideas changed or been reinforced after engaging with these sources?
• What questions do you still have after engaging with the sources?
• How well do the sources collectively answer the synthesis question? Are there perspectives that seem to be missing or underrepresented?

Draft a Thesis Statement

Your analysis and reflection should have prepared you to take a new position in answering your original synthesis question. That new position will become your thesis statement. Now that you’ve carefully read and analyzed the sources, think about what you’ve learned from them, but also where you have your own ideas that supplement or conflict with the sources. Draft an answer to the synthesis question with those ideas in mind. It will probably be a fairly long and complex statement!

A good synthesis statement should present your own perspective on the question. This perspective should be

• arguable. You should expect that a fair number of reasonable people will disagree with your thesis. If that’s not true, meeting the following criteria will help you get there.
• informed. Base your thesis statement on what you’ve learned from the texts, even if you disagree with some elements. You can even incorporate that disagreement into your thesis statement!
• nuanced. To develop nuance, it can be helpful to introduce tension into your thesis statement, showing how your ideas contradict or complicate other perspectives, rather than stating an just a broad claim.
• specific. Try to forecast the details you’ll want to cover in your body paragraphs.

Develop Your Body Paragraphs

Once you have your thesis statement, you can use the conventional closed-form essay structure as a framework for your essay. Many synthesis essays will use either the Classical Argument Structure or the Modified Classical Argument Structure, but any organizational pattern could work; refer to the chapter on Argument Structures for more information.

In the body of your essay, you will develop main points that explain your new answer to the question, drawing on how the texts contributed to your understanding as well as your own new ideas and critiques. To demonstrate synthesis, it’s important to do the following:

• Incorporate specifics from the sources
• As much as possible, use more than one source in each body paragraph
• Respond to things you disagreed with in the sources
• Show how the sources respond or relate to each other

These qualities help to show that you are truly engaging with the sources and putting them in conversation with each other, rather than doing the kind of “pseudo-synthesis” described at the beginning of the chapter.

Example Synthesis Paragraph

This example synthesis paragraph goes with next-to-last example thesis statement provided above. The motivating synthesis question for that thesis statement was “What factors contribute to the racial wealth gap in the United States, and how should this gap be addressed?”

One important factor in the wealth gap is the continued impact of slavery, which prevented Black families from accumulating wealth for generations; even the poorest White immigrants have had an enormous head start since their families were not legally prevented from owning assets. Darity supports this notion, noting that slavery has “prevent[ed] the intergenerational transmission of wealth that occurs at much higher rates among other ethnic/racial groups in the USA” (146). It is true that slavery has had long-term effects that are often ignored, and that the intergenerational transmission of wealth (or lack thereof) certainly contributes to the wealth gap. However, as Shapiro notes, the gap has remained fairly stable since the 1970s (7); something beyond the lasting impact of slavery therefore must be contributing to its persistence, or we might expect that the gap would continue to narrow as slavery recedes more into the past. Furthermore, focusing solely on the historical causes can distract us from the very real current types of discrimination which are in our power to address. In fact, Darity suggests reparations as a potential solution, but this solution is incomplete because reparations can only go so far in a society that is still marked by active racial discrimination.

Notice how the example paragraph connects information and ideas from two different sources. The quote from Darity is straightforward support for the topic sentence, but the information from Shapiro is more complicated. Here, instead of using Shapiro as support for the topic sentence, the writer has made an inference from Shapiro’s information to show why they believe that slavery is not the sole or even primary cause of the racial wealth gap. Finally, the writer addresses an element of Darity’s argument with which they disagree, and explain why.

At a minimum, you should aim to incorporate material from at least two of your sources in every body paragraph of your synthesis essay. Furthermore, to show that you’re not just cherry-picking quotes that support what you already believed, consider ways you can incorporate inferences based on the texts and/or critique of the texts into at least some of your body paragraphs.

Common Struggles and Pitfalls

• Oversimplifying complexities:
  • When attempting to combine perspectives from multiple sources, it’s easy for students to oversimplify nuanced ideas or flatten out important complexities and tensions. Be careful not to try to force sources into 100% agreement with each other. The whole point of synthesis is that there isn’t one objectively “right” answer.
• Cherry-picking evidence:
  • Rather than fully engaging with sources, some students may latch onto partial quotes or evidence that confirms their pre-existing view while ignoring complicating information. Taking material out of context, particularly when doing so betrays the author’s original intent, is both dishonest and intellectually lazy. Some sources may be very difficult to understand, but the solution is to get help with understanding them, not to ignore the parts you don’t get.
• Lacking critical evaluation:
  • Students sometimes treat all sources as equally credible and authoritative, rather than assessing the strengths and weaknesses of each source. If you reject information or an argument from one source, you need to be able to articulate why – and that reason needs to be better than “it didn’t confirm what I already believed.”
• Failing to create an original perspective:
  • The whole point of synthesis is to craft a new and insightful position, but students may get bogged down in summarizing what sources say instead of forging their own argument or conceptualization.
• Organizational challenges:
  • Synthesizing divergent sources coherently is difficult. It can be helpful to look back at your synthesis question and jot down the main points you want to make in answering that question, without thinking too much about what the sources say. Then, you can go back to the sources and see how each one relates to your points. Of course, this method only works if you have already thoughtfully engaged with the sources!

Write Your Introduction and Conclusion

The introduction and conclusion for a synthesis essay can follow the standard closed-form strategies described in the chapter on Introductions & Conclusions, with modifications as needed based on your selected Argument Structure.

Related Writing Projects

• Synthesis Essay

Works Cited

Darity, William, Jr. “Stratification Economics: The Role of Intergroup Inequality.” Journal of Economics & Finance, vol. 29, no. 2, Summer 2005, pp. 144-53. EBSCOhost, https://doi.org/10.1007/BF02761550.

Shapiro, Thomas M. The Hidden Cost of Being African American: How Wealth Perpetuates Inequality. Oxford UP, 2004.