Analysis Of Synthesis Essay

In “Helping Students Use Textual Sources Persuasively,” Margaret Kantz talks about how individuals should read texts to write a synthesis essay. To write a synthesis essay, one should be able to come up with an argument and find information from other sources, and use them as proofs to back up the argument. First, Kantz talks about the mistakes that students usually make when they write this essay. For instance, Shirley made a mistake by reading a repeating and telling the story instead of creating her own original argument. Another mistake that she made was believing that everything that she read in the History textbook is true. Kantz also mentions that the way students read and interpret the assignment can affect the way they write their essays. Then she talks about the three causes that make it
I did not know what synthesis essay was before reading this, but now I know what it is and how to write them. There are many points that I concur with in this assignment. One of them is that many facts that we know of are not facts. I knew about this before because I know the different history “facts” between different countries. For example, in Vietnamese history book, Vietnamese created their own country themselves; while in Chinese history book, Vietnam was a part of China. Even though I already knew about this concept before, I still believed a lot of “facts” from the textbooks so I find it’s interesting that we should not believe in them fully. Another point that I agree with the authors was that teachers should give students more time to develop their thoughts. I hope that Dr. Bresch can give us more time to write our visual argument essays, and I think that writing only Draft 1 is not enough, as it is not really what “multiple drafting” is. Also, it would be better for the teacher to check the students’ works as well as peer revising because the teacher can comment on whether the students are on track or