Introduction
This unit focuses on key academic skills that enable you first to comprehend complex texts and then use that knowledge to create new understanding for yourself and your readers. In Lesson 1, you will complete an academic skills portfolio in which you demonstrate several key skills: the ability to accurately analyze college level texts, the ability to engage a text to produce your own questions, and the ability to accurately paraphrase and summarize another’s work.
In Lessons 2 and 3, you’ll draw on the skills you demonstrated in your portfolio as you write a synthesis essay, an essay that requires you to identify common themes in the essays we’ve read for this unit and synthesize various ideas in the service of a question of interest to you. In its most basic form, a synthesis asks you to make sense of a wide variety of sources—to find the common threads that connect them to each other and that lead to a richer understanding of the whole.
Here is a brief overview of the work we’ll complete in this unit:
- Lesson One: Academic Skills Portfolio
- Lesson Two: Synthesis – Connections
- Lesson Three: Synthesis – Writing and Revision