2.5 Pause and Reflect: The Observational Paragraph
Now that you’ve identified 7-10 interesting words, 7-10 definitions of new words, 7-10 lists of synonyms and/or patterns, 7-10 contrasts, watch the video below entitled “The Analysis of “The Ultimate Communications App” by Charles Justice and compare your list of evidence to the ones gathered in the video.
Video: “Chapter 1 Video 2” by Toronto Metropolitan University [2:44] is licensed under the Standard Youtube License. Captions and transcripts are available on YouTube.
Identifying Key Words
| Interesting words | New words |
| Indispensable, Creativity, Cooperation, Property, Process, Human development, Occupied | Proto-language, Commons, Domestication, Tower of Babel, Biosphere, Manifest Destiny |
| Synonyms/repetitions | Contrasts |
| Battery, Plugged in, Download, Internet, Network, App, Commons, Cooperation, Download, Language, New, Invented, Sunlight, Fish, Whales, Plants, Animals, Evolution, Growth, Cooperation, Humanity, Everyone | Property v. free, New v. original, Information v. language, Private v. public spaces, Human v. nature, Present v. past, Common v. private space, Collective v. individual |
Pause and Reflect
Have a long look over your list of observations and narrow it down to the best two. Review the information you have collected.
- What’s connected?
- What are your two best pieces of evidence?
The Observational Paragraph
The next step is to carefully consider your observations list and narrow it down to the best two. Review the information you have collected. What’s connected? Group similar observations together and consider which observations are the strongest and most interesting and which are the most complex. Your small and focused pieces of evidence or observations should be something you can literally put your finger on. Your observations must be one to three-word phrases (ex. “Age of citizen”). Also, consider whether your two best key observations support different elements of the author’s complex argument. Evidence that is too similar will build a repetitive argument that likely will not develop the level of complexity required to write at a university level.
Your goal is to look at the long list of evidence you just gathered and choose the best two pieces. Look at your entire list of evidence and ask yourself:
- Which of these pieces of evidence points most clearly to the author’s argument?
- Which of these pieces of evidence has the most interesting or complex language?
- Which of these pieces of evidence would I be interested in discussing?
- Which pieces of evidence overlap? Can I make groups out of certain pieces of evidence?
Look at your entire list of potential evidence, and, using these basic questions as your guide, focus on two key pieces of evidence. Going back to “The Plot to Privatize Common Knowledge” by David Bollier from Section 2.3 of this text and the evidence we gathered in Video 1.2, we went through the list and, with the above questions in mind, decided that the two pieces of evidence we wanted to focus on were:
- The binary between corporations and the public is because Bollier wants to establish that the corporations are greedy in their rush to privatize knowledge of many forms, whereas the public, he argues, has a fundamental right to the “common good” of that knowledge.
- The description of the copyrights and patterns as “anti-social instruments of control” because the author wants to ensure that the readers understand that copyrights and patents, when abused, are negative capitalist systems built around restricting, controlling and owning ideas and knowledge and treating those ideas and that knowledge as property.
