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How to Write a Synthesis Essay

March 29, 2022 by Beth Hall

Learning how to write a synthesis essay is a crucial skill for students, as it teaches the basics of writing a research paper.

Approaching the Synthesis Essay Prompt

In the AP® Lang synthesis essay prompt, you will be given some context to work with, so it’s important that you carefully read the context to figure out the different perspectives on the issue. This can be especially helpful if the prompt is about a topic you have not previously considered.

The prompt is usually written as a statement that includes “write an essay that synthesizes material from at least 3 sources and develops your position on…” Topics will vary, but the rest of the statement could include phrases such as “the role, if any,” “the extent to which” or “the factors one should consider.” It usually helps if you turn the prompt statement into a question.

Next, you will see six to eight sources, with at least one being a visual text. Take a look at the sources, making sure to note the citation information (located in a box at the top of the page) and the brief source information sentence (which is an italicized sentence above the source.) As you examine each source, try to identify the position or argument of each source. If you feel a source is unusable or you don’t understand it, just skip it.

As you are looking at sources, don’t forget to annotate and write down quotes that you find. This can be really useful later when composing your synthesis essay. Additionally, you may want to write down commentary as you are reading the source. This can help you plan how this source can be used in your essay.

For more information about analyzing a visual text, check out this video.

Creating an outline.

Before you begin writing, I highly suggest that you draft a quick outline. This doesn’t need to be very detailed. The goal of the outline is to make sure your essay has a logical argument, that your ideas progress well, and you know where you will be inserting your sources.

When writing your outline, you want to clearly determine your argument or position. If it helps, make a quick note about what your thesis will be. Next, determine how many body paragraphs you will have and create a map of those paragraphs. Within that map, include which sources you will use – you need to cite at least three sources in your essay.

Lastly, determine if you need a counterclaim and rebuttal or concession and refutation. If so, decide where you will include that in your essay.

Writing a Thesis Statement

In a synthesis essay, you will be developing a position, so it is important that you have a defensible thesis . Within your thesis, be sure to assert your position. Some students also like to include a counterclaim in their thesis. That is completely fine, but be sure you aren’t trying to argue both sides equally.

Once written, the thesis statement will go in your introduction. Don’t spend too much time creating an introduction because the bulk of your score comes from the body paragraphs. As long as you have a defensible thesis, you will be okay. If you have time, you can definitely add a hook and appropriate context to your intro.

Selecting Sources

Synthesis means a combination of sources, so a synthesis essay can be thought of as a “conservation of sources”. The key word here is conversation – you want the sources to support your argument. You don’t want your essay to be a summary of sources.

AP® Lang requires that you include at least three sources. A common mistake students make is using the same source twice and thinking that counts as two citations. Because it’s the same source, it only counts as one.

I often recommend to students that you choose two sources that support your argument, and one that can be used with your rebuttal and counterclaim. 

When learning how to write a synthesis essay, avoid inserting large quotes into your body paragraphs You want the bulk of your essay to be your original thoughts and commentary, so your sources should complement what you have to say – not replace it.

Citing Your Sources

During the AP® Lang exam, you will get two booklets. One will have all of your essay prompts, including the sources for your synthesis essay. The other booklet will be where you actually write your essay.

There are two ways that you can cite your sources. You want to pick one method and use that throughout your synthesis essay. One method is by simply referring to the sources as (Source A) or (Source C). You can also cite by using the author’s name, such as (Dickinson). Make sure you use parenthetical citations. These parenthetical citations should always come at the very end of the sentence, not the end of your quote.

Citation tip: The period goes after the second parenthesis.

Remember, evidence can be in the form of a direct quote or paraphrase. Either way, you must include a citation.

For more information about citing sources in a synthesis essay, check out this blog post.

Developing commentary.

One major components of knowing how to write a synthesis essay is knowing how to develop commentary.

Developing commentary is always the hardest part of any essay. Commentary is analysis. It’s your original thoughts and interpretations. Your synthesis essay will be composed of more commentary than evidence because commentary is what explains the significance of the evidence and makes connections to your thesis.

When developing commentary, think about some of the following questions:

• Do you have any relevant personal experience with the topic?
• Who benefits from this situation/circumstance/solution? Who experiences a disadvantage?
• What will happen if this issue continues? What will happen if it ceases?
• How will this benefit or hurt society?
• What are the real-world or current implications of this issue?

Pacing Tips

Training for the AP® Lang exam is a lot like training for a marathon. You can’t expect yourself to start out running 26 miles in a day. The pacing of the essay is often intimidating for students. It seems like you don’t have a lot of time. The College Board recommends you take 15 minutes to read the prompt and sources and 40 minutes to write the essay.

In order to feel comfortable with that time frame, you are going to need to practice.

For more tips regarding how to write a synthesis essay, check out this video!

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MOSCOW WIDENS NEW POLICY LINE; Essay, Scored During Rule of Khrushchev, Praised for View of Hard Rural Life

MOSCOW, Dec. 26—A growing reversal of the policies of former Premier Nikita S. Khrushchev, especially in agriculture, was‐extended today to the field of literary criticism.

The literary‐union newspaper Literaturnaya Gazeta published a laudatory review of Yefim Dorosh's essay “Half Rain, Half Sunshine,” which gives what is widely regarded as a realistic depiction of the countryside of central European Russia.

The essay, published last summer in the liberal literary monthly Novy Mir, was violently attacked in the Soviet press just before Mr. Khrushchev's overthrow in October as misrepresenting life in rural areas.

One critique, by L. Lebedev, a collective farm chairman from the Galich area northeast of Moscow, appeared in Selskaya Zhizn (Rural Life), the farm newspaper of the Communist party's Central Committee over whose content Mr. Khrushchev had direct control.

Mr. Lebedev charged Mr. Dorosh with conveying a picture of “prerevolutionary dreariness, despondency, stagnation, and complete hopelessness drifting from every page.”

The farm chairman accused the author of concentrating attention “on an old monastery, an ancient lake, an abandoned grave of some count instead of writing, say, about the new widescreen moviehouse.”

Mr. Lebedev said Mr. Dorosh had misrepresented the cultural level of farm youth and the rural intelligentsia by depicting them as “primitive, uneducated people without interest in literature or the arts.”

Mr. Dorosh had written that the residents of his fictitious country town of Raigorod “read little, went, to be sure, to the movies, but had not been in the regional museum, in the picture gallery, in the theater or at the philharmonic concert.”

Today's review in Literaturnaya Gazeta by Vladimir Voronov, a critic, contended that Mr. Dorosh had performed a useful service by drawing attention to problems that continued to bedevil Soviet agriculture and life in the countryside.

The essay, published while Mr. Khrushchev was still in power, questioned the effectiveness of some reforms inspired by the former Premier and criticized the continuing close supervision of farm production and the imposition of output plans from above.

In an evident allusion to Mr. Khrushchev's style of running Soviet agriculture, Mr. Voronov wrote:

“Dorosh regards the struggle for a growth of the rural economy not as a short‐lived, noisy campaign but as a long, complicated haul.”

Mr. Voronov assailed the farm chairman for having judged the essay simply on the basis that his own area was more prosperous than the one pictured in “Half Rain, Half Sunshine.”

The reviewer said it was not literary criticism to say:

“We live better” and to tell “about a milkmaid who had obtained 800 quarts of milk more from a cow than in the previous year.”

The controversial essay is part of a series of “rural diaries” that Mr. Dorosh, a resident of Moscow, has been writing since 1956 on the basis of periodic visits to an unidentified small town and the surrounding countryside in central Russia.

Literary Theory and Criticism

Home › Uncategorized › Russian Formalism: An Essay

Russian Formalism: An Essay

By NASRULLAH MAMBROL on March 17, 2016 • ( 10 )

Russian Formalism, which emerged around 1915 and flourished in the 1920s, was associated with the OPOJAZ (Society for the Study of Poetic Language) and with the Moscow Linguistic Society (one of the leading figures of which was Roman Jakobson) and Prague Linguistic Circle (established in 1926, with major figures as Boris Eichenbaum and Viktor Shklovsky) The school derives its name from “form”, as these critics studied the form of literary work rather than its content, emphasizing on the “formal devices” such as rhythm, metre, rhyme, metaphor, syntax or narrative technique.

Formalism views literature as a special mode of language and proposes a  fundamental opposition between poetic/literary language and the practical/ordinary language. While ordinary language serves the purpose of communication, literary language is self-reflexive, in that it offers readers a special experience by drawing attention to its “formal devices”, which Roman Jakobson calls “literariness’ — that which makes a given work a literary work. Jan Mukarovsky described literariness as consisting in the “maximum of foregrounding of the utterance”, and the primary aim of such foregrounding, as Shklovsky described in his Art as Technique , is to “estrange or “defamiliarize”. Thus literary language is ordinary language deformed and made strange. Literature, by forcing us into a dramatic awareness of language, refreshes our habitual perceptions and renders objects more perceptible.

Though Formalism focused primarily on poetry, later Shklovsky, Todorov and Propp analysed the language of fiction, and the way in which it produced the effect of defamiliarization. They looked at the structure of a narrative and explored how elements like plot and characterization contributed to the narrative’s effect. Propp studied folk narratives () and Shklovsky treated Sterne’s Tristram Shandy , as a novel that parodied earlier conventions of writing.

Jakobson and Todorov were influential in introducing Formalist concepts and methods into French Structuralism. Formalism was strongly opposed by some Marxist critics, proponents of Reader Response theory, Speech Act theory and New Historicism – all reject the view that there is a sharp and definable distinction between ordinary language and literary language.

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Categories: Uncategorized

Tags: Boris Eichenbaum , Close Reading , Formalism , Linguistics , Literary Theory , New Criticism , OPOJAZ , Roman Jakobson , Russian Formalism , Todorov , Viktor Shklovsky

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