What is a Synthesis?

            Synthesis means putting ideas from many sources together.  Our tasks as writers is to find as much information as you can for your topic, which you pick first, and look through it all to determine and support what you will write about.  Basically, you have to synthesize the information and make what arguments you wake to make and an overall general question for the paper.  Remind yourself that a synthesis is not a summary, a comparison or a review.  Also, learning to write a synthesis paper is a critical skill, crucial to organizing and presenting information is academic and non-academic settings. 

            The first step to writing a synthesis paper is choosing a topic.  For example, comparing this to my synthesis paper my topic is Women’s Issues.  Next, you develop a thesis with an outline of ideas you developed.  To make my thesis I already had the sources or texts to work with, which is the third step, to identify them.  My two documents were what I used for this paper.  They were Lucretia Mott’s Discourse on Woman and the interview on Gloria Steinem.  Then you have to read over those two main sources and summarize the main ideas and the overall document.  Analyze your sources to identify the similarities and difference between them.  In both of my documents, it was pretty easy to group together the comparisons together.  An example of a difference for my documents was the time eras which they were based in.  Assemble the generalizations and focus on the ideas.  Also, a rule, which is highly recommended, is to use direct quotes.  In my paper, I had a quote in every paragraph helping to furthermore explain the ideas.  Lastly, for your conclusion you should summarize your main ideas and the questions you proposed.  My conclusion was just an overall summary of the differences and similarities, but then how both topics had a similar topic in the end.

Political Economy and Social Movements: Race, Class and Gender.

http://archives.evergreen.edu/webpages/curricular/2001-2002/poliecon2001/synthesis.htm

(did not give date or author, so I did my best on citation)