From Inquiry to Academic Writing A Practical Guide, 3rd edition

HAvEn | THE nEW liTERACy 165

wrote a summary. The difference is that in a synthesis, your gist should be

a succinct statement that brings into focus not the central idea of one text

but the relationship among different ideas in multiple texts.

To help you grasp strategies of writing a synthesis, read the follow-

ing essays by journalists Cynthia Haven and Josh Keller, which, like Clive

Thompson’s essay, deal with the effects of new media on the quality of stu-

dents’ writing. We have annotated the Haven and Keller readings not only

to comment on their ideas but also to connect their ideas with those of

Thompson. Annotating your texts in this manner is a useful first step in

writing a synthesis.

Following the Haven and Keller selections, we explain how annotat-

ing contributes to writing a synthesis. Then we show how you can use a

worksheet to organize your thinking when you are formulating a gist of

your synthesis. Finally, we present our own synthesis based on the texts of

Thompson, Haven, and Keller.

T

oday’s kids don’t just write for grades anymore

They write to shake the world.

Moreover, they are writing more than any previous

generation, ever, in history. They navigate in a bewil-

dering new arena where writers and their audiences

have merged.

Begins with claims

in the first two

paragraphs for our

consideration.

1

2

The New Literacy: stanford study Finds Richness

and Complexity in students’ Writing

Cynthia Haven has written for The Times Literary Supplement, The Vir-

ginia Quarterly Review, The Washington Post, The Los Angeles Times, The

San Francisco Chronicle, World Literature Today, and other publications.

Her work has also appeared in Le Monde, La Repubblica, The Kenyon

Review, Quarterly Conversation, The Georgia Review, Civilization, and

others. She has been a Milena Jesenská Journalism Fellow with the

Institut für die Wissenschaften vom Menschen in Vienna. Peter Dale in

Conversation with Cynthia Haven was published in London, 2005. Her

Czestaw Mitosz: Conversations was published in 2006; Joseph Brodsky:

Conversations in 2003; and An Invisible Rope: Portraits of Czeslaw Milosz

was published in 2011 with Ohio university Press/Swallow Press. She is

currently a visiting scholar at Stanford, working on a book about rené

Girard.

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CyNThiA hAveN

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