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Explanatory Reasoning / Writing

-- Valerie Ross In middle and high school, your teachers may have prohibited you from writing explanatory essays. Typically, high school students are asked to engage in a form of justificatory reasoning, which is to take a position and defend it. However, most of the work you will do in college and beyond will demand explanatory rather than justificatory reasoning. Explanatory reasoning addresses the question of who, what, when, where, why, or how, basic to the creation and communication of academic and professional knowledge. From the WebMD site that explains how to identify the symptoms of pneumonia to the paper you have been assigned on the causes of an economic downturn or the symbolism of the letter A in Hawthornes novel, explanatory reasoning is the workhorse. Explanatory reasoning requires the writer to be more than a detecting mechanism, listing points of observation in random order. Explanatory reasoning demands a highly observant, analytic writer who not only observes but also makes sense of data by putting these into words, summarizing, classifying, analyzing, and ordering it in a fashion that allows it to be comprehended by ones reader. Some writing calls only for explanatory reasoning, in which case the formal constraints are typically simple: a proposition and a set of reasons. As we will discuss in the next exercise, justificatory (argumentative and persuasive writing, for example) usually calls for some explanatory reasoning a summary or definition as part of its means of persuasion. Thus it is important for all critical and professional writers to become fluent in explanatory reasoning and how to express it in writing. When to Use Explanatory Reasoning In college, explanatory reasoning is required when a professor asks you to explain, explore, discuss, describe, observe, classify, compare and contrast, interpret, or analyze something. Explanatory writing is called upon for lab and business reports, literary and historical analyses. Case studies analysis in the fields of medicine, law, business, and history are acts of explanatory reasoning. Indeed, all academic and professional writers use explanatory reasoning. The Elements of Explanatory Writing While it may be extremely challenging to write a lucid explanation, the form that explanatory reasoning takes is quite straightforward and easy to organize. The writer provides: a proposition (conclusion/overarching statement that summarizes the explanation) one or more explanatory reasons (generalizations that led to, derive from, and support the proposition).

evidence that illustrates, explains, or exemplifies the explanatory reasons (descriptions, observations, examples, and other devices that illuminate the reason)

Simple Examples of Explanatory Reasoning Proposition: Sentence length affects tone. Explanatory Reasons: 1) short sentences may create a childish tone 2) long sentences may create an academic or pretentious tone Proposition: Scholars imagine ideal audiences Explanatory Reasons: 1) participants are addressed as rational 2) participants are addressed as sincere, not deceitful Whether the writer needs to provide evidence for any of these reasons will depend on the intended audience. An audience unfamiliar with tone will need further explanation and examples. An audience versed in the production of tone will not need examples. Instead, these readers may need assurance that the writer knows that sentence length can have varied tonal effects, depending on meaning and context. Professional Example of Explanatory Writing Source: The Oxford History of World Cinema Proposition: This book is a history of cinema. Explanatory reasons: [This book] does not deal with every use of the film medium but focuses on those which have concurred to turn the original invention of moving images on celluloid into the great institution known as the cinema, or the movies. The boundaries of cinema in this sense are wider than just the films that the institution produces and puts into circulation. They include the audience, the industry, and the people who work in itfrom stars to technicians to usherettesand the mechanisms of regulation and control which determine which film audiences are encouraged to see and which they are not. Meanwhile, outside the institution, but constantly pressing in on it, is history in the broader sense, the world of wars and revolution, of changes in culture, demography, and life-style, of geopolitics and the global economy. Secondly, this is a history of cinema as, both in its origins and in its subsequent development, above all popular art. It is popular art not in the old-fashioned sense of art emanating from the people rather than from the cultured elites, but in the distinctively twentieth-century sense of an art transmitted by mechanical means of mass diffusion and drawing its strength from an ability to connect to the needs, interests, and desires of a large, massified public. To talk about the cinema at the level at which it engages with this large public is once again to raise, in an acute form, the question of cinema as art and industryPaul Rothas great unresolved equation. Cinema is industrial almost by definition, by virtue of its use of industrial technologies for both the making and the showing of films. But it is also

industrial in a stronger sense, in that, in order to reach large audiences, the successive processes of production, distribution, and exhibition have been industrially (and generally capitalistically) organized into a powerful and efficient machine. Note how the two reasons (the two underlined generalizations) are subpropositions (reasons) that explain the proposition: This is a history of cinema. They are general statements that describe, define, and exemplify the proposition. They answer at least two questions: What does the writer mean by a history of cinema, and How is this book a history of cinema?

What Is an Explanatory Proposition? An explanatory proposition is actually a conclusion that one draws from engaging in the process of explanatory reasoning. A writer seldom begins the process of explanatory reasoning with a conclusion. More typically, one begins with careful observation and analysis of that which s/he sets out to explain. Take, for example, the proposition that scholars imagine an ideal audience. Such a statement is a conclusion arrived at through observation and analysis of how scholars address and discuss their audiences. Through careful attention, analysis, classification, and accumulation of examples, an explanatory reasoner notices how scholars audiences are generally addressed as reasonable, sane, sincere; people who wish to advance knowledge rather than intimidate or trick their readers into capitulation. Contemplation of these qualities leads one to concludeto proposethat scholars write to an idealized readership. In the exercise below, you will be asked to use explanatory reasoning derived from the reading, collaborative exercises, or discussions you are having about your course topic. This demands that you come up with a proposition a conclusion, not an argument about this material that you consider worthy of explanation. Your proposition will summarize, classify, define, or otherwise explain something you have observed. To generate ideas, you may wish to free-write or make a list of ideas or observations that have struck you about the topic. You might also consider what aspects of the topic you find yourself explaining to friends or family members or that you can envision yourself explaining to others, perhaps even in your writing seminar. Once you happen upon such a topic, you will find yourself making generalizations (reasons/propositions) and from there it is easy to unpack the data that led you to them: Scholars assume that their audiences are reasonable. For example, the authors of The Oxford History of World Cinema write to readers whom they imagine will appreciate, perhaps even require, a reasoned account of how and why their book is a history of cinema. Similarly, the author of The Rhetoric of Inquiry asserts that reasoned discourse is what scholars find most persuasive. Most of us are accustomed to generalizing about things. The job of the critical writer is to be scrupulous about how s/he arrives at these generalizations, as well as to provide whatever her audience requires sufficiently to comprehend them.

Organizing Explanatory Reasoning Organizing explanatory reasoning can be very challenging without a grasp of the form it typically takes. Note that in the scholarly example of explanatory reasoning about the cinema, each paragraph opens with an explanatory reason (a generalization supporting the proposition) that is then developed throughout the paragraph. While not a law of good critical writing, this is a good, clear way of organizing explanatory writing. Unlike a story, which has a plot that moves the reader handily along, explanatory writing can easily lack a sense of direction and end up a chaos of statements and evidence. The writer must recognize that the goal is to explain, and therefore the approach is to make the writing as straightforward and easy to follow as possible. Most often its wise to foreground the explanations logic with such markers as secondly or therefore. When trying to explain complex, sophisticated ideas, simplicity, clear organization structure, and ease of comprehension are high priorities.

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