Overlapping Source Judgments, Methods, and Evidence: Strategies for Developing Independent Theses by Combining Secondary Sources
In the Product Purchase Recommendation assignment, I introduced you to "the Grid," a pre-writing strategy for reorganizing your source information into a logical order from which you could generate an insight about the products. That insight, carefully stated as a complete sentence, turns into the thesis of your paper. Then you must turn the evidence into a logical sequence you can use to convince your best readers to agree with you. Evidence plus reasoning becomes persuasive knowledge. To decide how to lead your best readers to accept your thesis, start with the most important common topic knowledge you share with them, and take them logically, step by step, toward your least obvious, most important knowledge, supplying the evidence and reasoning as you go. The evidence, drawn from overlapping patterns you see in the Grid, then will be reorganized to serve your thesis in an order different from that in which you found it in the sources.
Doing this with scholarly, rather than commercial sources, produces successful academic writing with predictable features. Scholars recognize successful academic writing by its combination of
First, go to the journals. Look for a topic that they consider debatable, in need of research. The clue could be in any published scholarly article, since they'll all start by describing the current state of the discipline's knowledge and go on to explain what researchers need know and why. That usually will expose the names of the scholars with which the author is allied, and often the scholars whose views the author opposes. Look up those sources and you have discovered your field of debate.
Here is a typical pattern of agreements and disagreements you might find among a cluster of sources, arranged in a simplified grid:
| Scholar | Issue 1 | Issue 2 | Issue 3 |
| A | Yes | No | No |
| B | Yes | Yes | No |
| C | No | Yes | No |
What does it mean that all three agree the answer to questions about issue 3 is "no"? It is common ground they share, perhaps a place to start from in your paper when you want to analyze the disagreements about 1 and 2. What does it mean that Scholars A and B are allies about Issue 1, but B and C are allies about Issue 2? Look at their evidence and their reasoning for an explanation of their disagreement, and consider looking at other sources who might shed light on the nature of either the evidence or reasoning that constructs Issues 1 and 2. That may give you something to say that none of these scholars have yet said.