Control Trials in Advanced Cancer Patients: A Qualitative Study

Go through the first essay you’re analyzing for A1 from beginning to end. Write down a short quotation when you notice the author making an important claim, explicitly or implicitly. Make a numbered list of them, in chronological order, throughout the essay. You won’t be able to get every single one. Focus on those you think are most significant.

Do the same for the second essay you’ve chosen.

Go through both sections of numbered quotations you’ve just made. For each quotation you’ve listed, follow it with an explanation/paraphrase of the evidence the author builds this claim from. Sometimes authors present claims without evidence, or without fully developed evidence. Sometimes a claim and its evidence aren’t right next to each other, but are presented in different parts of the text. Sometimes authors present evidence without making explicit claims, leaving the actual argument as implicit, unstated, suggested. How does each author connect evidence to claims (see: warrant)? For each item on this list, make careful notes of the relationship the author draws between the evidence and claims they present.

Each number on your list should now have a quotation and a description of the evidence and claims at stake in it. Next, for the first essay you’ve chosen, write a couple of healthy paragraphs exploring how all of these smaller pieces of evidence and claims work together toward the same purpose. How does all of this come together in a pattern? What are the central concerns? What does the author point our attention towards, how, and to what effect? What does tensions does the author emphasize: what doesn’t align with what? What questions and ideas are we invited to adopt or to distance ourselves from?

Repeat step 4 for the second source you’ve chosen.