Synthesising sources and presenting an informed understanding
What synthesis is
- The Explanatory Notes name the final step: synthesising information from primary source(s) and critical texts.
- Synthesis means the parts produce a claim none of them contains. If your reading is the sum of what your sources said, you have summarised.
- The standard's own examples show the shape. Using readings from different critics to interpret a character's motivation — the motivation is in no single critic. Using feminist theory to interpret advertising language — the theory says nothing about that campaign until you apply it.
- It is the step the grade turns on, and you can tell it happened because there is a sentence in your response that no source could have written.
- Critical texts supply claims and methods; the primary source supplies proof. Reverse that and the investigation is about criticism, not about literature or language.
The three moves that produce it
- Adjudicate. Two critical texts disagree; you decide, using your primary source. The judgement is yours because the deciding evidence is yours. State the disagreement precisely — not critics differ, but the exact point at which the readings part company — and give a reason a reader could check. A split verdict is legitimate: one reading may hold for part of the text and fail elsewhere.
- Combine partial readings. Two sources each explain part of what your text does; together they explain what neither claimed.
- Apply a theory to fresh material. The lens supplies questions; your primary source supplies answers nobody has recorded. Do not manufacture disagreement — if two sources agree, give them different jobs.
The four elements of a synthesising paragraph
- Claim — your sentence, in your words, the one no source wrote.
- Source — the critical text you are using, with what it argues and how far it is evidenced.
- Primary evidence — the detail from your text that tests it. The standard requires details and/or examples, and a critic's example is not yours.
- Judgement — what the evidence does to the claim: confirms it, restricts it to a condition, or defeats it.
- The order can vary; the four elements cannot. A paragraph missing the fourth is reporting; one missing the third is a literature review. If fewer than half your paragraphs touch the primary source, the balance is wrong.
Structuring the response
- Open with the reading, not the process, then state the hypothesis and where it ended up. If it changed, say so — that is your proof the investigation was real.
- Organise by claim, never by source, and give each critical text a job it is named for as it enters: method, contested claim, opposition, open question. A source-by-source structure is a reading list in order.
- Close on the qualified version of your claim. A conclusion that repeats the introduction says the investigation changed nothing.
- Oral and visual forms are allowed and nothing is relaxed. In an oral, signal each claim aloud; in a visual, attribution has to be on the artefact. Keep your notes and your first hypothesis — this is an internal, so how you worked is evidence.
What the grades look like here
- Achieved — the primary source and critical texts brought together into a coherent reading with judgements and examples.
- Merit — discernment shows in which parts of which sources were combined, and in being precise about strength: saying one claim is demonstrated and another asserted is nearly free.
- Excellence — sophistication is proportion, concession and limit, not vocabulary. Insight lives in relations: between two critics who cannot both be right, between what a lens sees and hides, between a pattern and its single break. The reliable route is the condition — this holds, and here is where it stops.
- Three substitutes markers recognise: elevated vocabulary for sophistication, more sources for insight, and hedging for qualification. Qualifying names a condition; hedging declines to claim.
Worked Example
Worked Example
Materials, all written for these pages:
- Primary source — The Sea Wall. The engineers' revised drawing takes the wall around the grandmother's section; the change is recorded as a variation; the story closes They left a gap where she was.
- Reading A, linguistic analysis: prose that removes agents relocates responsibility rather than dissolving it. Demonstrated on nominalisation and the passive; the claim about readers is asserted.
- Reading C, a review calling coastal-town writing quietly political without saying what makes it so.
Write the conclusion three ways, from Achieved to Excellence.
Answer:
First, decide what each source can do. Reading A gives a method and stops at readers; Reading C gives a question and no answer. Neither touches this story. Then run the method — subtract the agent — on the primary source: funding is won, the drawing came back, the refusal is recorded, so every institutional act arrives without a person.
Version 1 — Achieved.
The Sea Wall keeps its institutional decisions agentless. Funding is won, the drawing comes back, the refusal is recorded as a variation. This fits Reading A, which shows that nominalisation and the passive remove the person who acted.
A reading, primary evidence, a source used accurately — and no critique of that source.
Version 2 — Merit.
Reading A explains the mechanism, but its strongest claim, that readers relocate responsibility rather than dropping it, is asserted rather than demonstrated. In this story it can be tested, because the text names the elsewhere: the minutes. Responsibility is not lost in The Sea Wall; it is filed.
Discerning, because it separates what the source demonstrated from what it asserted and turns the asserted part into a question the text answers.
Version 3 — Excellence.
The condition is what interests me. The pattern holds while nothing forces the institution to act, and it breaks once — They left a gap where she was. That is the only sentence with a human subject performing an institutional act, and it arrives at the only moment a drawing had to be redrawn. Agency returns to the prose exactly when recording is no longer enough. That is the content Reading C's phrase was missing: the story is political because its grammar admits an actor only under pressure. I would not extend the claim beyond texts that describe institutions in their own register.