Week Four: Making Connections

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Introduction: What’s to be gained by 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.

Making Connections: The power of AND, BUT, and OR

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:

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:

Connecting with OR:

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.

How to find connective thinking in the assigned readings

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:

Summary

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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