[MUSIC PLAYING] NARRATOR: Synthesis is a lot like, I like to say, analysis on steroids. It's a lot like analysis where analysis is you're commenting or interpreting one piece of evidence or one idea, one paraphrase or one quote. Synthesis is where you take multiple pieces of evidence or multiple sources and their ideas, and you talk about the connections between those ideas or those sources. And you talk about where they intersect or where they have commonalities or where they differ. And that's what synthesis is. But really, in synthesis, when we have synthesis, it really means we're working with multiple pieces of evidence, and we're analyzing them. So here's a sample for you. And in this example, we have Ang, 2016. That's source number one, right? Then Sonfield, 2015, that's source number two. They both are using this theory and found that it reduced costs by both 12% and 17% So this is my evidence. I have one sentence, but it has two pieces of evidence because we're working with two different sources, Ang and Sonfield, one and two. In my next sentence, my last sentence here, we have my piece of synthesis, because I'm taking these two sources, and I'm saying they both found something very similar. They confirmed that adopting the theory of financial management reduces costs for small businesses. So I'm showing the commonality between these two sources. So it's a very not simple, but a very clean approach to synthesis. It's a very direct approach to showing the similarities between these two sources. So that's an example of synthesis. Another example here. So Sharpe found that one thing helps students. Barnes found that another thing helps students focus. Two different sources, two different ideas. In the bold sense of synthesis, I'm taking these two ideas together and talking about how they both have worked well in my classroom. The synthesis that we have here took two different approaches. The first example is more about how these studies confirm something. The second example is about how these two ideas can be useful in my own practice. I'm applying it to my own practice, or the author is applying it to their own practice in the classroom. But they're both examples of synthesis, taking different pieces of evidence and kind of showing how they work together or how they relate. I like to think of synthesis as taking two pieces of a puzzle. So each piece of evidence is a piece of the puzzle. And you're putting together those pieces for the reader and saying, look, this is the overall picture. This is what we can see when these two pieces or these three pieces of the puzzle are put together. So it's kind of like putting together a puzzle.