A synthesis essay is an essay that explains a theory or answers a question in detail about a specific topic, theme, or idea and provides supporting evidence with a combination of multiple sources and. The process has four key parts: Finding and gathering sources, creating and forming a thesis, and finally, putting all of the pieces to gather by writing the essay!
Now, you may be wondering why I just informed you about what a synthesis essay is. Here is my answer.
Just recently in humanities, we finished a course titled “Punctiation Saves Lives”. In this course we dove deeper onto the topic of essays. In particular, synthesis essay’s. At first we were confused as to why we were doing all of these worksheets to help us learn how to form thesis’s and create supporting paragraphs but after our teacher explained to us the point of this course we finally understood. Our objective was to read two books and watch two movies that we could draw supporting evidence from to answer our question for the unit. “How do authors use text to teach us more about ourselves?” Now at first this question confused a lot of people. What does she mean by text? Literacy? Literal Text? Poetry? We soon realized that we could chose any topic on text that we wanted. We had total freedom kkwhen it came to writing this essay, we could write about whatever we wanted. As long as we answered the inquiry question in depth.
The first step was to read our assigned book. As you probably already know, the last books our class read we read in groups but for this book, the whole class would be reading one. You might be wondering “What book is it?”. The book we were assigned to read was called Persepolis, It was a graphic novel written by Marjane Satrapi. The story was about her life in Iran and Europe and her journey from childhood to adulthood. The book takes place during the Iranian revolution and is a very powerful and moving story. I don’t want to give you too many spoilers so I will move on the the next book. Well, this isn’t really a book but it is for sure a story. It’s the breakfast club! You have probably already seen this movie so I will move on. The last book we would be drawing from for our essay’s was our very first book we read this year. Don’t Get Caught of course! You can read more about this book by clicking here.
After completing a series of worksheets teaching us the basics on forming a thesis and writing an essay, we were given the date on which we would be given am hour and twenty minutes to write our essay. The essay had to include an introductory paragraph, the main thesis, three supporting paragraphs, and a concluding paragraph. Seemed like a piece of cake, right? I think not!
After we handed in our essay and arrived a school the following Monday we were presented with all of our essay’s printed on paper. I know! Real paper! Anyways, we sat down at our essays and were asked to pass them to the person to our right. At this moment I knew we would be critiquing our essay’s! I was nervous and also excited because I knew this would help me create the most killer essay ever!
Click here to view the completed essay!
After we had finished critiquing each others essay’s all we needed to do was make the corrections and changes and hand it in and then everything would be finished! What a positive way to end a what seemed like extremely long unit. I came out of this unit with so much more knowledge about writing essay’s and forming thesis’s. I also know that there will be another essay assigned to us very soon! I’ll see you there!