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The
BCC Writing Lab Series
presents
What
Is a Synthesis?
A
synthesis paper is a certain kind of essay.
According
to the Little, Brown Handbook, (Aaron & Fowler, 2001, p. 133) a
synthesis is a way to “make connections among parts or among wholes.
You can create a new whole by drawing conclusions about relationships and
implications.” What this means is, in order to write a successful
synthesis paper, you must conduct research on your chosen topic, contemplate
what this unique collection of knowledge may mean to you and the world, and
develop an argument about it. Specifically, this means discussing the
implications of the knowledge you have gathered. You have amassed a collection
of information on a certain topic, and now you must say something unique and
interesting about it.
A
synthesis is not:
A
summary
A
synthesis is:
An
opportunity for you to create new knowledge out of already existing knowledge,
i.e. other sources. You develop an argument, or perhaps a unique perspective
on something in the world (a political issue, how something works, etc), and
use your sources as evidence, in order to make your claim (thesis statement)
more believable.
From
the text Reading and Writing across the Curriculum (1991, pp. 89-91),
Behrens & Rosen suggest five potential steps to developing
an argument synthesis:
(1)
Consider your purpose
Your
purpose will fall under some general topic, and eventually a specific point
within that topic. For example, your topic may be environmental degradation,
but that would need to be narrowed down to something more specific, like the
effects that automobile exhaust fumes have on an ecosystem.
(2)
Formulate a thesis
As
you will see in the example on the following page, a thesis sentence is a
statement of your purpose or intent, usually located at the end of the first
paragraph.
(3)
Decide how you will use your source material
Once
you have settled on a topic and thesis, you will gather a collection of data,
your sources. However, a large body of information on any topic may
seem overwhelming. Thankfully, the purpose of a synthesis paper is to use
only the most useful parts of your research, the ones that will best
support your claim. So one of the most important steps in developing your
synthesis is deciding which sources, and which parts of those sources, you
will use.
(4)
Develop an organized plan
In
which order will you present your evidence, and the various arguments you
employ, to make it all sound convincing to your readers?
(5)
Write your synthesis
The
Following synthesis essay is from Reading and Writing across the Curriculum
(pp. 91-97). While reading, take note of how the author found various
sources on the same topic (purposes of U.S.
forces in Vietnam), and used certain
parts of those sources to support the thesis statement. The guiding ideas
of the paper-the thesis at the end of the first paragraph and the corresponding
topic sentences-are highlighted in gray.
The
increasing American involvement in Vietnam can be traced to at least three
flawed attitudes. The first was a belief that the United States was on the side of right and
justice and that the communists were the aggressors. The second was the assumption
that Ho Chi Minh and the Viet Cong had little grass-roots support in the South
and that the people of South Vietnam welcomed American protection.
The third was the unshakable confidence in the military’s ability to accomplish
anything it wanted owing to the superiority of the American fighting man and
his technology-a belief instilled by a long history of wars fought and won
by U.S. troops. This combination of self-righteousness and arrogance
blinded America to the realities
of the situation in Vietnam.
America was sure
that its military intervention in South Vietnam was morally
right. Defenders of the war saw the conflict in terms of the forces of
evil (communism) against the forces of good (freedom). Supporters of intervention
believed that to refuse aid was to abandon the peaceful and democratic nation
of South Vietnam to “communist enslavement”
(“Public Hearings” 977). President Johnson painted a picture of a “small and
brave” nation beleaguered by communist aggression. The president asked “only
that the people of South Vietnam be allowed to guide their country
in their own way” (Johnson,”War Aims” 976). Congress
had already agreed; in its Gulf of Tonkin resolution in 1964, it accused the
communists of carrying out an unprovoked attack on American naval vessels
and said that this attack was only part of a larger attack on the “freedom”
of the South (971). Some of the fighting men tended to see the war in black-and-white
terms, with the communists as evil and Americans as good. After witnessing
some brutalities committed by the Viet Cong, one soldier wrote: “I wanted
to go down and kill all those…bastards…Those slobs have to be stopped, even
if it takes every last believer in a democracy and a free way of life to do
it” (“War of Atrocities” 974).
The official position was that America was acting
out of purely altruistic means. Both Johnson and Congress insisted
that the United States had no “territorial, military
or political ambitions.” In addition to saving the grateful South Vietnamese,
a million of whom had “voted with their feet against communism” (Public Hearings”
977), America was reaffirming the world’s
faith in its resolve. The free peoples of the world were counting on America to defend South Vietnam, said Johnson (“War Aims” 975-76),
and to abandon Vietnam would be to shake their confidence
in America and her word. The price of
withdrawal would be the freedom of fourteen million people, the honor of our
own country and eventually, the security of the free world,” said a Young
Americans for Freedom representative in 1965 (“Public Hearings” 976).
In reality, the position of the United States was impractical
and doomed to failure. South Vietnam was not
the free state threatened
by communist “enslavement” that the U.S. government
described. It had been independent only since 1956; and Ho Chi Minh was not
trying to conquer new territory but to reunify the recently divided nation
of Vietnam. The American view of communist
“aggression” is given an interesting perspective by Arthur Schlesinger, Jr.,
who pointed out that to the Chinese the United States appeared to be the aggressor.
How would we feel, he asked, if the Chinese had 400,000 troops in Southern
Mexico and were busy putting down a pro-U.S. revolution there? The question
“of who the aggressor is depends a good deal on who looks through what glass
and how darkly, he argued (978). South Vietnam was no bastion of democracy,
either. The South Vietnamese government did not hold promised democratic elections
in 1956 because it knew that the communists had popular support in the country.
Even the U.S. government admitted that South Vietnam’s political situation was “deeply
serious” with “repressive actions” frequently being committed (“U.S. Policy
on Vietnam” 128). The American-supported
Diem government was so unpopular that widespread protests against it led to
a successful coup in 1963. The people of South Vietnam resented American troops and
resisted “Americanization,” even on the smallest scale. An American
Quaker in Vietnam wrote of a South Vietnamese
schoolteacher chastising the arrogance of an American soldier for throwing
candy to Vietnamese schoolchildren, just as if he were throwing bread crumbs
to pigeons. The schoolteacher charged that the Americans were “making beggars
of our children, prostitutes of our women, and communists of our men” (“Americanization”
978). The United States was defending South Vietnam against the will of much of
the population, and American motives were not as selfless or benevolent as
the government claimed. Despite Congress’s assertion that the United States
“has no territorial, military, or political ambitions in that area” (“Joint
Resolution” 971), the containment of communism is certainly a territorial
and political ambition of sorts, and Congress viewed the security of South
Vietnam as “vital” to American national interest. And when, in the course
defending the country, American troops committed actions such as the destruction
of the village of Ben Tre (the commanding officer
later explained, “We had to destroy the village to save it”) it became obvious
that the United States was not working on South Vietnam’s best interests (“Slaughter
Goes On” 13). Instead, it was concerned mainly with defeating the communists
at all costs, even if the country it was supposed to be defending was destroyed
in the process.
In 1963 the White House believed that all its military goals in Vietnam could be accomplished by the
end of 1965, predicting that only a few military advisors would be needed
by then (“U.S. Policy in Vietnam” 128). The military solution was seen as the correct one:
the White House statement, while conceding that “improvements are being energetically
sought,” asserted that the “military program in South Vietnam has made progress and is sound
in principle.” When the Congress was confronted with and apparently
unprovoked attack by North Vietnam on two of its destroyers, however,
it authorized the president to treat the situation as a war (even though it
never declared war) and to send in unlimited amounts of men and supplies.
From a few military advisors sent to Vietnam in 1961, the American troop
commitment was to escalate to more than 500,000 in 1969. But even with such
vast manpower, the United States was unable to inflict “permanent
setbacks” against the Viet Cong and North Vietnamese. Washington decided that
this was due to North Vietnamese infiltration of the South, and so it increased
the bombing of suspected supply routes from the North. During the three years
preceding the Tet Offensive, the U.S. Air Force dropped almost as much bomb
tonnage on Vietnam as had been dropped by American
forces during World War II (Slaughter Goes On” 13). In 1967, President Johnson
claimed that the bombing was creating “very serious problems” for North Vietnam (Johnson, “Bombing” 972). But
the next year the Rand Corporation warned that the infiltration had not been
reduced significantly and that it could not see a “decisive” American victory
in the “foreseeable future” (“Slaughter Goes On” 13). In spite of this, the
bombing was escalated for years, increasing civilian casualties. The United States was forgetting the lesson Hitler
learned in World War II with his bombing of Britain: bombing does not break the
resolve of the population; it strengthens it. The North Vietnamese newspaper
Nhan Dan pointed out that the bombings only
served to “further incense” the population of North Vietnam (“Slaughter Goes
On” 13). In spite of all this, the American public was ready to believe the
government’s assurance of impending victory that it took the “devastating”
Tet Offensive of 1968 (a coordinated attack by the North
Vietnamese and the Viet Cong on more than one hundred towns and cities in
the South) to impress upon it the reality of just how costly and difficult
it would be for the United States to win the war.
In the End, it was two misguided assumptions that embroiled the United
States in the military and political chaos of the Vietnam War: the self-righteous
belief that the political system that worked for Americans would work for
everyone else and that the South Vietnamese welcomed American military intervention;
and the arrogant assumption that sheer numbers and firepower would subdue
a popularly supported insurrection. When we emerged, ten years later, these
attitudes had been severely shaken. It would take many years for the United States to begin regaining its self-confidence.
Works Cited
Johnson, Lyndon. Public Papers
of the Presidents of the United States: Lyndon B. Johnson (1966), 395. Rpt. As “President
Johnson States his War Aims (1965).”
The American Spirit: United States History as Seen by Contemporaries.
Ed. Thomas A. Bailey. 4th ed. Vol. 2 Lexington: Heath, 1978. 975-76.
---Weekly Compilation of Presidential
Documents. Vol.3. 476 (20 March 1967) [reporting speech of 15 Mar. 1967].
Rpt. As “President Johnson Defends the Bombing (1967)” in Bailey 972-973.
“Joint Resolution.” Department
of State Bulletin 51 (24 Aug. 1964): 268. Rpt. In Bailey 970-72.
Kastenmeier, ed. Vietnam Hearings: Voices from the Grass
Roots. Garden
City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1966. 38-40. Rpt. As “Public Hearings in Wisconsin”
in Bailey 976-77.
Munson, Glenn, ed. Letters
from Vietnam. New York: Parallax, 1966.
104, 118. Rpt. As “War of Atrocities” in Bailey 974-75.
Peace in Vietnam: A New Approach in Southeast
Asia. A Report Prepared for the American
Friends Service Committee. New York: Hill and Wang, 1966. 1 Rpt. As “Americanization
of South Vietnam” in Bailey 977-78.
Schlesinger, Arthur. The
bitter Heritage. New York: Houghton, 1967. 36-37. Rpt.
As “The Americanization of South Vietnam” in Bailey 978-79.
“Slaughter Goes On.” The
New Republic 24 Feb. 1968: 13.
“U.S. Policy on Vietnam.” White House Statement, 2
Oct. 1963. Department of State Bulletin 44 (21 Oct. 1963): 624. Rpt.
In The Viet-Nam Reader: Articles, and Documents on American Foreign Policy
and the Viet-Nam Crisis. Ed. Marcus G. Raskin
and Bernard B. Fall. Rev. ed. New York: Vintage, 1967. 128-29.
Works
Cited
Behrens,
L. & Rosen, L. (1991). Writing and Reading across the Curriculum. New
York: Harper Collins.
Fowler,
H. R. & Aaron, J.E. (Eds.). (2001). The Little, Brown Handbook. Chapel
Hill: Longman.