Synthesizing Information

Synthesis Overview

Synthesis in academic writing is the process of blending ideas from various sources to generate a new, original insight. It involves not just repeating or evaluating others’ viewpoints but actively thinking through them to reach a deeper understanding or unique conclusion. This intellectual engagement transforms reading into discovery, as you move from summarizing the resources you found while in the research process, to crafting a meaningful interpretation.

Synthesis involves listening to different perspectives through reading and research and thoughtfully combining them. In academic writing, this requires setting a purpose, organizing ideas from your sources, guiding the flow of their arguments, and then commenting on and interpreting these ideas to help readers follow your logic. The last step is to develop your own informed conclusion, which reflects a synthesis of the materials and answers your central research question.

Importantly, synthesis is not the same as summarizing every opinion, critiquing positions, or comparing texts unless specifically asked to. It is about showing your understanding of a topic by weaving together multiple viewpoints into a cohesive, nuanced perspective.

Many students struggle to synthesize their research because they structure their papers source by source. True synthesis means organizing your writing around ideas rather than individual sources. This video from USU Libraries discusses how to bring together research from various sources and your own ideas to create a well-organized research paper:

Synthesis Power Tools: Summarizing, Paraphrasing, and Quoting

When incorporating someone else’s ideas into your writing, you can do so by summarizing, paraphrasing, or quoting their work. Summarizing condenses key points, paraphrasing rewords the idea in your own voice, and quoting uses the author’s exact words. However, using outside information requires more than just including it in your work. You must clearly indicate that the idea isn’t your own by citing the source, typically through in-text citations like footnotes or parentheticals. Finally, to give full credit and help readers locate your sources, you must include a bibliography or works-cited page at the end of your paper listing all the materials you used. See the “Citation Basics” chapter for more on citation styles.

Summarizing

• Summaries allow you to describe general ideas from a source. You do not express detailed information as you would with a paraphrase.
• Summaries are shorter than the original text.
• Any summaries of the text should not include direct wording from the original source. All text should be in your words, though the ideas are those of the original author.
• A signal phrase should let your readers know where the summarized material begins.
• If you are offering a general summary of an entire article, there is no need to cite a specific page number.

Paraphrasing

• Paraphrases allow you to describe specific information from a source (ideas from a paragraph or several consecutive paragraphs) in your own words.
• Paraphrases are like translations of an author’s original idea. You retain the detail of the original thought, but you express it in your own way.
• Paraphrases of the text should be expressed in your own words, with your own sentence structure, in your own way. You should not simply word swap—that is, replace a few words from the original with synonyms.
• If you must use a few of the author’s words within your paraphrase, they must have quotation marks around them.
• Paraphrases often include signal phrases to let your readers know where the paraphrased material begins.
• As with a quote, you need to explain to your reader why the paraphrased material is significant to the point you are making in your paper.

Directly Quoting

• Quoted material should be enclosed in quotation marks to set it off from the rest of the text. The exception to this is block quotes, which are longer and generally require different formatting. Always follow your specific citation style.
• Quoted material should be an accurate word-for-word reproduction from the author’s original text. You cannot alter any wording or any spelling. If you must do so, you must use a bracket or an ellipsis.
• Direct quotes should be used when the author’s words are especially effective and not as a substitute for paraphrasing and summary.
• A clear signal phrase should precede each quotation.

Support Your Writing

For UW-Green Bay students, the Learning Center offers in-person, virtual, and asynchronous writing feedback. Find additional writing support with these resources:

• Harvard Guide to Using Sources: Summarizing, Paraphrasing, and Quoting
• UW-Madison Libraries Research Guides: Synthesizing Multiple Sources, APA (while this guide is specific to APA style, the overall intent applies to writing in general).
• MLA Style Center provides advice on many aspects of academic writing.
• APA Style and Grammar Guidelines provides guidelines that cover in-text citations, references, paper format, and more.

Attributions

This chapter contains material adapted from:

• Rhetoric Matters: A Guide to Success in the First Year Writing Class Copyright © 2022 by Adam Falik; Doreen Piano; Dorie LaRue; Johannah White; and Tracey Watts is licensed under a CC-BY-NC-SA 4.0, except where otherwise noted.
• The Word on College Reading and Writing Copyright © by Carol Burnell, Jaime Wood, Monique Babin, Susan Pesznecker, and Nicole Rosevear is licensed under a CC-BY-NC 4.0, except where otherwise noted.
• Research Synthesis Copyright © by USU Libraries is licensed under a CC BY 4.0 except where otherwise noted.