Week Four: Making Connections
No doubt, by this time in the semester, you’ve already heard a lot about “making connections.” We’ve mentioned this activity a number of times already in these tutorials; our emphasis on this activity is reflected in the grading criteria discussed in the gradatorium; and your teacher has certainly discussed this in class. Why bother with “making connections”?
It could be argued—indeed, it has been argued in our own classes—that making connections between the essays in The New Humanities Reader is an arbitrary activity. There is no explicit connection between Susan Faludi’s essay on the Citadel’s transition to co-education in the 1990s and Jasper Becker’s essay exploring the causes of famine in China in the late 1950s and early 1960s, so why devote the time and energy to creating a connection? Why practice a skill that could just as well be called “making things up” or “hallucinating” or “indulging your imagination”?
When we hear objections of this kind, we feel that what were hearing is the sound of an educational system that has failed to train its students to take their own thoughts seriously. And this is the central project of The New Humanities Reader: to provide you with the opportunity to explore what you think about the issues and cultural forces that will shape the world you will graduate into. Anyone can be trained to accurately summarize what they’ve read: the creative aspect of thinking emerges when connections are made between the texts you’ve read, between what you’ve read and your own experience, and between what you’ve read and thought in the past and what you’re coming to think now. By learning how to make connections, you will learn how to make ideas mobile and active and this is the habit of mind that is most highly rewarded both inside and outside the academy.
So, what’s to gain from creating a “virtual connection” between Faludi’s essay on the Citadel and Becker’s essay on the Great Famine? Although the events discussed by these two essays are separated by several decades and thousands of miles, both essays can be seen to be implicitly concerned with the same issue: how authoritarian regimes are created and maintained. By making a virtual connection of this kind (there are many more that could be made between these two essays), you create an opportunity to think further about an issue that is not fully covered in either essay: that is, you shift the attention in your writing away from being primarily concerned with repeating what you’ve read to focusing on your own thoughts about what you’ve read. This is why learning how to make virtual connections is so important—it puts the activity of developing and advancing your own thoughts at the center of your education.
In a very real sense, your brain has been
hardwired to make connections: it is the ability to make connections
that permits you to navigate the unfamiliar situations that emerge everyday.
In fact, this activity is so routine, you don’t even notice it:
when a road is blocked on the way to school, you find another route
to get you to your destination; when you get to class and no one’s
there, you check the door to see if the class has been moved; when a
hand is raised in class, you know, by recollecting all your previous
experiences in class, that this is a standard way of requesting an opportunity
to speak. Your mind is always at work saying: X is like Y or X isn’t
like Y or X is and isn’t like Y.
So, when we ask you to make connections within a given
reading or between the readings, we’re asking you to do the kind
of mental work you do everyday—we’re just asking you to do
this mental work on the ideas and issues raised by The New Humanities
Reader. It’s that simple, really: we want you to make connections
between ideas, experiences, and events and then we want you to evaluate
the significance of the connections you’ve made.
Most beginning writers rely on the word “and”
when they are making connections. Such connections, obviously, look
at what the readings have in common. Returning to the example we discussed
above, we can see that this is a promising place to start.
Connecting with AND:
Faludi and Becker are concerned with authoritarianism.
There are other ways to make connections, though, and
we would encourage you to explore thinking about making qualifying connections
(ones that are made through the use of words like “but, nevertheless,
however, on the other hand”) and connections that offer alternatives
or that lead to speculations (ones that are made through the use of
words like “or, if, perhaps, maybe”).
Connecting with BUT:
Faludi and Becker are concerned with authoritarianism, but
they are not concerned with the same kind of authoritarianism, as
I will show in the paper that follows.
Either authoritarianism has its roots in political systems, as
Faludi and Becker contend, or its roots go much deeper—to
the aggressive essence of human existence.
As you work on the next exercise, try following your
initial “and” connection with either a “but” connection
that qualifies your initial observation or an “or" connection
that offers an alternative.
If you’re always making connections,
as we’ve said above, then how do you tell when you’ve made
a “good” connection? The best way to answer this question is to
think about the essays we’ve included in The New Humanities
Reader: what these essays do well is make connections that have
considerable explanatory power. That is, the essays don’t simply
“make a point”; they seek to understand an idea, issue, or
problem in depth and to open a discussion about the idea, issue,
or problem under consideration. Any two essays can be connected in some
way, as can any two ideas, problems, or issues: the challenge is to
make a connection that extends the understanding of the topic being
considered or advances the discussion.
So, to make connections of this kind, you need to be
able to identify or to argue for what you consider to be the most important
or significant ideas covered in the assigned readings. The authors of
the essays have, of course, made conscious efforts to steer your attention
to the connections that they think are most important. The place to
begin, then, is with seeking out those moment when the authors in The
New Humanities Reader are doing just the kind of connective thinking
we’re asking you to do.
If you return to your assigned reading with this in
mind, you should keep an eye out for opportunities to identify and evaluate
the connections that the author of the assigned readings wants you to
make. Here’s what you should look for:
- Rhetorical
questions: Rhetorical questions are opportunities for writers
to place issues in new and
larger contexts; they also reveal the connections the author assumes
he or she can count on you making. If rhetorical questions assume
a yes answer, what happens if you reply in the negative? What connections
can be made by going down a different road than the one the author
offers you?
- Abstract
concepts: Often the most important words in an essay are the
ones that seem most familiar—e.g. democracy, identity, evolution,
altruism, justice, equity. These familiar words stand in for abstract
concepts that always warrant further consideration. When you find
an author using a term of this kind, pay particular attention to
the connections the author is trying to make between this term and
other similarly abstract terms in his or her essay.
For example, in de Waal’s essay on “Survival of the Kindest,” what connection is he trying to establish between “evolution” and “altruism”?
- Pivotal
terms: What word is
most repeated in the assigned essay? Which words has the author
chosen to italicize? Which words show up in the section headings
of the essay? These are all ways for a writer to draw attention
to the pivotal terms in his or her argument—to the terms that
help turn the argument in one direction or another.
In Guinier’s essay on voting and democracy, for instance, she introduces the term “reciprocity” into the conversation about majority rule to shift the terms of the debate. Pivotal terms work in just this way: they provide a way for the author to make a connection that changes the direction of the discussion.
-
And,
But, Or and other connective terms: Look for moments where the
writer uses the connective terms we’ve discussed above. Almost
every essay has a “hinge” moment—a moment when the
writer either begins to qualify his or her position or to speculate
about the implications of the argument he or she has been developing.
More often than not, these moments will be marked by the use of
a key connective term, such as: and, but, or, however, nevertheless,
perhaps, on the other hand.
-
The
use of unexpected sources: In establishing his or her argument,
what sources has the author turned to? What connections has the
author made in his or her essay? Whenever the writer references
a source that is outside his or her field, this is always a fruitful
place to explore the author’s connective thinking.
Why, for example, does Lani Guinier open her essay on voting reform with a discussion of a high school prom? Has she trivialized the discussion of voting reform by making this connection or has she shown the broader implications of “majority rule”?
Connective thinking is what lies
at the heart of the writing process: it is how relationships between
any two ideas are formed. Connective thinking occurs between
ideas and is made possible by the use of linking words, but as “and,”
“but,” and “or,” which signal the kind of relationship
the author is trying to establish. So, to see where connective thinking
is occurring in the assigned readings, you need to do two things: 1.)
you need to identify what you believe to be the central ideas, concepts,
or pivotal terms in the assigned reading and 2.) you need to find those
moments where you believe the author is establishing connections between
these central ideas, concepts, or pivotal terms.
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