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Analysis Notes
What is Analysis?
The search for meaning.
1) Analysis encourages thinking and discussion
2) Seeks to discover what something means (makes claims for understanding in certain
contexts)
3) Deliberately delays evaluation and judgement
4) Begins in and values uncertainty
Remember that analysis is the search for meaningful patterns. It finds questions where there
seemed not to be any and it makes connections that might not have been evident at first. It is a
habit of thinking.
Counterproductive Habits of Mind
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The Judgement Reflex
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Naturalizing our Assumptions (Overpersonalizing)
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Generalizing
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The Slot Filler Mentality
Habit: The Judgment Reflex
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Rather than thinking about what X is or how X operates, we lock ourselves prematurely into proving that we
were right to think that X should be banned or supported.
 Cure for the Judgment Reflex:

Avoid the like/dislike switch in your thinking
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Be able to repeat the other person’s position fairly before judgement
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Eliminate the word “should” from your vocabulary
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Eliminate evaluative adjectives
Habit: Overpersonalizing (naturalizing our assumptions)
Treating our own point of view as self-evidently true for everyone.
 Cure for Overpersonalizing:
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Remember that just because you have experienced or believe X, it doesn’t mean everyone else has or
does too.
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Don’t make your personal experiences and prejudices an unquestioned standard of value.
Habit: Generalizing
It removes the mind from the data that produced the generalization, omitting supporting details.
 Cure for Generalizing:
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Press yourself to trace your general impressions back to the particulars that caused them.
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Think of the words you use and consciously climb down from abstract generalization to concrete detail.
Habit: The Slot-Filler Mentality
Staying stuck in the five-paragraph structure, causing you to reject “complications”
 Cure for The Slot-Filler Mentality:
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Now that you know the rules you can strategically break them
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Remember you are not listing the evidence; you are analyzing it.
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Get Comfortable with Uncertainty
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Try to accept that uncertainty—even in its more extreme version, confusion—is a productive state of
mind, a precondition to having ideas.
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Actively search out alternative interpretations.
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Look for ambiguity.
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Tell yourself that you don’t understand, even if you think you do.
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You will begin to see a range of meanings where you had thought there was only one.
The 5 Analytical Moves
Move 1: Suspend Judgement
“Judgments usually say more about the person doing the judging than they do about the subject” (43).
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Delay judgement, especially of the agree-disagree, like-dislike kind.
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The goal is always to understand before you judge.
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Be sure to trace the impression back to the cause – what made you develop that viewpoint in the first
place?
Move 2: Define Significant Parts and How They are Related
Be sure to pay attention to detail, and remember that in order to analyze, you ask what something is made of
and how the parts contribute to the entire meaning
Steps In Analysis
1) Divide the subject into main elements
2) Ask and determine how those parts are related and determine meaning.
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Move 2 Strategies

Notice and Focus
o Start not with “What do I think?” or “What do I like/dislike?” but with “What do I notice?”
o This should produce an extended and unordered list of details that call attention to themselves.
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Rank
o Rank in order of importance.
o What three details are the most interesting, revealing, significant or strange? Why?
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Freewriting
o Freewriting opens up space for thinking by enabling us to catch different thoughts as they occur
to us, without worrying prematurely about how to communicate these to a reader.
o Freewriting gives you the freedom to make sudden, often unanticipated leaps. These frequently
take you from a bland, predictable statement to an insight.
Move 3: Make the Implicit Explicit:
Push Observations to Implications by Asking “So What”?
One of the central activities and goals of analysis is to make explicit (overtly stated) what is implicit
(suggested).
Your OBSERVATIONS (search for images, repetition, and so forth) lead to IMPLICATIONS (or ideas) that
lead to CONCLUSIONS (to answer the So What?! question).
Only after all of these steps have been followed, may a true analysis be formed.
OBSERVATIONS
SO WHAT
CONCLUSIONS
IMPLICATIONS
SO WHAT
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Implicit vs Explicit
Implicit: The word “implication” comes from the Latin implicare, which means “to fold in.”
Explicit: The word “explicit” is the opposite of the idea of implication. It means “folded out.”
Infers vs Implies
In short, you infer what the subject implies.
SO WHAT???
(shorthand for)
o What does the observation imply?
o Why does this observation matter?
o Where does this observation get us?
o How can we begin to theorize the significance of the observation?
Move 4: Look for Patterns of Repetition and Contrast and for Anomalies
Uncovers significant patterns by using: THE METHOD
Questions from The Method:
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What repeats?
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What goes with what?
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What is opposed to what?
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What doesn’t fit?
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SO WHAT???
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The Method
1) Repetition: List exact repetitions of a phrase, word, or detail, and record how
many times it is found
2) Strands: List repetitions of the same or similar kinds of details.
3) Binaries: List binary oppositions
4) Ranking: After you have identified repetition, strands, and contrasts, identify
the two most important examples of each category.
5) Anomalies: Identify items that simply do not seem to fit together
Move 5: Keep Reformulating Questions & Explanations
Be sure to keep asking questions. The best writing emerges after the reader has asked many questions.
Questions:
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Which details seem significant? Why?
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What does each detail mean?
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What else might it mean?
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How do the details fit together?
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What do they have in common?
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What does this pattern of details mean?
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What else might this pattern mean?
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How else could it be explained?
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What details don’t seem to fit?
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How might they be connected with other details to form a different pattern?
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What does this new pattern mean?
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How might it cause me to read the meaning of individual details differently?
Types of Interpretive Contexts:
To be accepted as plausible you must argue for the appropriateness of the interpretive context you use, not
just the interpretation it takes you to. An interpretive context is a lens. Depending on the context you
choose—preferably a context suggested by the evidence itself—you will see different things.
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Social contexts—is the source critiquing social norms in some way? Is that interesting or strange? Does
that matter? Does the source’s critique lead us to new insights about society or self?
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Cultural contexts—is the source questioning cultural views of gender, race, religion, etc.
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Political contexts—is the source questioning or critiquing political methods, ideologies, norms, etc.
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Religious contexts—is the source making arguments about or questioning religious ideas or images?
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Psychological contexts—is the source making arguments about thoughts and feelings?
In Visual Analysis:
1. Examine distance: close-up, medium, or distant perspective? Does perspective change? Why?
2. Look at where the eyes gaze: Which people in the image, if any, gaze directly at the artist or look
away.
3. Consider point of view: objective or subjective effect? Why?
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4. Consider social meanings of objects: what signals values, class, life choices?
5. Consider characters, roles, and actions: real/ideal, feminine/masculine, public/private, inside/outside
6. Observe the relationships among characters and objects: what signals positions of importance or
dominance?
7. In the last sentence of each body paragraph, analyze other rhetorical contexts of the
imagery: Social critique, Economic implications, Political implications, Religious
implications, Aesthetic implications, or Cultural critique