An important element of critical writing is how you integrate, synthesise, evaluate and use supporting evidence. It is easy to fall into the trap of allowing your sources to stand alone in making a point for you or simply speaking for you. This guide, therefore, highlights some useful techniques for integrating sources in order to strengthen your criticality, ensuring that your voice is leading the argument and the evidence is back in its place of supporting you.
One of the most important aspects of academic writing is making use of the ideas of other people. Those ideas offer the foundations and evidence for your writing.
There are several ways to report sources:
Quote if you want to use the author’s words;
Paraphrase if you want to keep similar length;
Summarise if you want to make the text shorter;
Synthesise if you need to use information from several sources. Synthesis is generally the preferable way to report sources, as it shows your authorship in creating a logical text, organised by topic, referring to the relevant sources, with a commentary on them.
In all cases you need to acknowledge the author’s work with references, or you will be plagiarising.
To properly introduce a source, follow those tips:
1) When quoting someone for the first time, remember to use their full name. After this, you can refer to them by their surname.
2) Express your voice by indicating to the reader whether you agree or disagree with a source, or are simply stating the evidence. You can for example vary the conjunction (as; although; despite...), preposition (according to; in line with; counter to...), reporting verb (states; claims; maintains; suggests; proposes; discusses...).
Examples
Look at the examples below and consider the words used. As a reader, would you think the writer is agreeing, disagreeing or simply neutral and stating what Smith says?
According to Smith "..."
As Smith points out "..."
Smith suggests that "..."
Although Smith claims that "..."
Quotations can be powerful and compelling, but should be sparse and careful lest making your writing fragmented and difficult to follow (unless you are undertaking textual analysis and need to directly cite a piece of writing). It is important to use quotations correctly, and the following tips can help you:
Example
The marketing of luxury products is quite different to that of mass products. To begin with, the time frame is longer. As Kapferer and Bastien (2009, p. 313) aptly suggest, "one does not launch a luxury brand; one builds it progressively by managing the allocation of resources in a very specific way". For example, for luxury brands, advertising does not aim at immediate increases in sales; rather, it aims at fostering people's dreams, and the dreams can take years to turn into effective purchases of the advertised products. Therefore, luxury brands need a marketing strategy that considers the long term, rather than short-term gains.
Paraphrasing is an effective way of using supporting evidence when we want to express the meaning of someone's work through our own words to achieve greater clarity. It is a useful way of demonstrating to your reader that you have understood the content of your supporting evidence and are able to translate another person's ideas into your own words.
How to paraphrase
Example
Original text:
“But the sensation of roughness had almost entirely been ignored by scientists. Euclid, the Greek geometer whose Elements is the world’s oldest treatise with near-modern mathematical reasoning, focused on its opposite, smoothness. He and innumerable followers studied smoothness in exquisite detail. Lines, planes, and spheres are the matter of Euclidean geometry, as we are all taught in grade school. I love them; but they are concepts in men’s minds and works, not in the irregularity and complexity of nature” (Mandelbrot, 2008, pp. 123-124).
Paraphrase:
Mandelbrot (2008, pp. 123-124) points out that the perception of roughness has generally been overlooked by scientists. Starting with the Greek Euclid, a pioneer of mathematical reasoning, for centuries geometry has been focusing on smooth and neatly drawn figures. This is the geometry we still study at school and are all familiar with. However, those smooth, perfect figures hardly exist in nature, which instead is pervaded by rough, irregular shapes.
Summarising text provides an abridged, shorter version of the original text.
Example
Original text:
“But the sensation of roughness had almost entirely been ignored by scientists. Euclid, the Greek geometer whose Elements is the world’s oldest treatise with near-modern mathematical reasoning, focused on its opposite, smoothness. He and innumerable followers studied smoothness in exquisite detail. Lines, planes, and spheres are the matter of Euclidean geometry, as we are all taught in grade school. I love them; but they are concepts in men’s minds and works, not in the irregularity and complexity of nature” (Mandelbrot, 2008, p. 123-124).
Summary:
Mandelbrot (2008, pp. 123-124) points out that Euclidean geometry studies extensively the concept of smooth and smooth shapes, but does not deal with roughness, which is in fact most common in nature.
Video on summary and paraphrase by Doug Specht, Senior Lecturer at the Westminster School of Media and Communication.
Comparing and contrasting is an effective way to show critical thinking and analysis of supporting evidence, particularly when you then continue by drawing your own conclusions from the evidence.
Example
Ball (2005) argues that TV of a violent nature can influence children’s behaviour. However, Smart (2006) states that behaviour improves when parents watch too. It is possible to argue, therefore that...
Note that the writer proves her critical analysis by suggesting a conclusion. Alternatively, the writer could bring in a third comparison that perhaps suggests another possible outcome or piece of evidence that supports Smart or Ball.
To strengthen the writing further, the writer could relate the comparison back to the topic sentence of the paragraph, demonstrating to the reader why this evidence is relevant in relation to what they are trying to argue in this paragraph, or throughout the essay as a whole.
Synthesis is an important element of academic writing, demonstrating comprehension, analysis, evaluation and original creation.
How to synthesise:
The best synthesis require a "recursive process" whereby you read the source texts, identify relevant parts, take notes, produce drafts, re-read the source texts, revise your text, re-write... (Mateos and Sole, 2009)
What is good synthesis?
The quality of your synthesis can be assessed considering the following (Mateos and Sole, 2009, p. 439):
Example
Original texts (fictitious):
Animal testing is necessary to save human lives. Incidents have happened where humans have died or have been seriously harmed for using drugs that had not been tested on animals (Smith, 2008).
|
Animals feel pain in a way that is physiologically and neuroanatomically similar to humans (Chowdhury, 2012). |
Animal testing is not always used to assess the toxicology of a drug; sometimes painful experiments are undertaken to improve the effectiveness of cosmetics (Turner, 2015) |
Animals in distress can suffer psychologically, showing symptoms of depression and anxiety (Panatta and Hudson, 2016). |
Synthesis:
Animal experimentation is a subject of heated debate. Some argue that painful experiments should be banned. Indeed it has been demonstrated that such experiments make animals suffer physically and psychologically (Chowdhury, 2012; Panatta and Hudson, 2016). On the other hand, it has been argued that animal experimentation can save human lives and reduce harm on humans (Smith, 2008). This argument is only valid for toxicological testing, not for tests that, for example, merely improve the efficacy of a cosmetic (Turner, 2015). It can be suggested that animal experimentation should be regulated to only allow toxicological risk assessment, and the suffering to the animals should be minimised.
Doug Specht, Senior Lecturer at the Westminster School of Media and Communication, explains synthesis for us in the following video.
An essential element of critical thinking, reading and writing is to evaluate the evidence you encounter. The basis of the evaluation can be, for example, the validity, reliability, methodology, date of the study in question.
Example
Smith and Fry (2020) label online learning at the University of Ketchup as a success. However, their conclusions are based on interviews with teaching staff and the University management. The authors failed to investigate the students' views on online learning at the University. Therefore, a major measure of such purported success was not considered by Smith and Fry's study.
In this example, the writer has considered the study carried out by Smith and Fry and suggests a limitation to the study's methodology that may have caused biased results. By suggesting a limitation, the writer has not taken the study for granted, accepting the results without critically analysing and questioning the validity of the study.
Bottomley, J. 2015. Academic Writing for International Students of Science, London: Routledge.
Kapferer, J. and Bastien, V. (2009). The specificity of luxury management: Turning marketing upside down. Journal of Brand Management, 16(5-6), pp.311-322.
Mandelbrot, B. and Hudson, R. (2008). The (Mis)Behaviour of Markets. London: Profile Books.
Mateos, M. and Solé, I. (2009). Synthesising information from various texts: A study of procedures and products at different educational levels. European Journal of Psychology of Education, 24(4), pp.435-451.