How to arrive at a general interpretation of a source? In general, the electing of significance from primary sources, no matter how long, follows a three-step technique:

1. Bring to your analysis of the source text as much knowledge of the period as possible. This requires a continuous reading of histories.
2. Suspend your hypothesis. Read the text carefully from beginning to end until a pattern of meaning and significance appears.
3. Use the general pattern of meaning that you have established as a key to interpreting every detail of the source. Every idea and reference in the text must be related in some way to the general pattern of significance you perceived.

WRITTEN TEXT EXPLICATION

People who think critically use writing as a tool for both communicating important ideas and for learning. Writing deepens our understanding of concepts and helps clarify relationships among ideas. Skilled thinkers consistently write in such a way that is clear, precise, accurate, relevant, deep, broad, logical and significant. We consistently learn to write and write to learn. George Orwell famously argued that clear writing signifies clear thinking. You won’t have one without the other. Writing, quite frankly, is an important tool for learning ideas deeply and permanently. This is why you are encouraged to keep a reading (writing) journal of some sort in order to reflect upon the significant texts you read. I still keep multiple reading journals and often write brief reviews of the books that I read, either in a moleskine or on an e-platform. In reviews you organize your thoughts about what you read, work out questions, and relate the ideas in the text to your own life. Essentially, you EXPLICATE the text.

When you explicate a text, you unfold its meaning, elaborate the thesis, provide relevant examples for what the author means, and create metaphors and analogies to help in the explanation of the author’s idea. Let’s start with four imperatives for explicating a text well, each of which requires substantial writing skills to answer effectively:

• State the basic point of the author in a simple sentence.
• Restate the essential point more fully. (In other words…)
• Clarify and expand upon the author’s ideas. What does the author make explicit? What is implicit?
  •  Ground the ideas and the text in historical context. This is especially important for historical documents. Explain what provoked the writing of the document. WHat perspective does the author bring? What is happening during the period of the text’s production? Why does that matter for understanding the text?
  • Provide implications and examples of the author’s ideas. What were the consequences of the idea(s) under scrutiny? Did the text or it’s ideas lead to change? Do they givee us insight into more recent events?
• Create an analogy or metaphor to help clarify the author’s meaning. This takes some thought but coming up with an instructive metaphor can distinguish excellent from merely good.

Textual analysis looks at STRUCTURE, CONTENT, and CONTEXT of a text to reveal underlying meaning, themes, and patters. You look for key ideas, rhetorical strategies, and consider the historical, cultural, and social context off the document.

Proficiency hangs upon accurately translating an author’s thoughts into our own words. An explication is in many ways like extended paraphrasing. A successful paraphrase captures the essential meaning of the original text, it must make intelligible the meaning of the original text. When you are explicating, you MUST bring to the fore the core meaning of the text with which you are working.

EXAMPLES

• “[An explication is an] attempt to reveal the meaning by calling attention to implications, such as the connotations of words and the tone conveyed by the brevity or length of a sentence. Unlike a paraphrase, which is a rewording or rephrasing in order to set forth the gist of the meaning, an explication is a commentary that makes explicit what is implicit. If we paraphrased the beginning of the Gettysburg Address, we might turn ‘Four score and seven years ago our fathers brought forth’ into ‘Eighty-seven years ago our ancestors established,’ or some such statement. In an explication, however, we would mention that four score evokes the language of the Bible, and that the biblical echo helps to establish the solemnity and holiness of the occasion. In an explication, we would also mention that fathers initiates a chain of images of birth, continued in conceived in liberty, any nation so conceived, and a new birth.”
  (_{Marcia Stubbs and Sylvan Barnet, The Little, Brown Reader, 8th ed. Addison-Wesley, 2000})