Help on Step 1: finding the thesis: 

Secondary Sources: Sometimes, the author is so helpful as to state the thesis up front in the introduction or first chapter. Others wait until the last chapter to bring all the seemingly loose ends together into one comprehensible point. The biggest mistake students make with secondary sources is that they get mired in detail without remembering the big picture. Before you start reading from page one to the end, thumb through the book and try to write in two sentences the book's thesis. You'll need to return to these sentences when you finish reading, but thinking about the big picture beforehand will help you select the key points as you read. Ask yourself these questions: 
 

• Why was this work produced?  In other words, what does the author believe he is adding to the intellectual conversation on this topic?  What question in the author's mind demanded a book or article?
• What overarching statement can you write about the major change chronicled in the book and why it took place?

Primary Sources: 
Try to determine if there was a reason or an agenda in producing the work.  Is the source an actual participant in the event, or merely an observer or commentator? 

Some of these questions that may help you understand how and why the work was produced: 
 

• Where was it produced and when?
• What was accomplished or imparted by the works' creation?
• What technology did artists need to produce this kind of work?  Could they have created the same work twenty years earlier?  Fifty years earlier?
• What was going on in the world when the artist created this work?
• What issues and influences were important to the author in developing the thoughts or arguments?  Was the author conscious of all of these influences -- or were the symbols that the author draws on just "in the air?"

More Specifically, 
 

• Why did the author compose this novel?
• Why did a New England farm midwife keep this diary?
• Why did a photographer choose to take snapshots of San Francisco's Chinatown at the turn of the century?

Back. 

Help on Step 2: Marking the Trail 

Secondary Sources: 

To understand how the writer or filmmaker tries to prove his argument, ask these questions: 

• What "proof" does the scholar offer for his thesis? 
• What kind of detail does he offer for those points? Does he look at many people over a long time, or does he intensively examine only a few people in one place for a short time? Would a different choice on these issues create a thesis different from what he ended up with? 
• What is the quality of the detail in his "proof"? 
• How and why is each major supporting point significant to the overall thesis? (Or not?)

Primary Sources 

• How is the information conveyed? 
• With a book, is it in a narrative fashion -- told from beginning to end through time? If it is not a narrative, what form is it? 
• Who is telling the story? 
• Can you trust the storyteller? 
• What are some of the ideas or people or experiences that are central to the thesis? 
• How did the author use characters, metaphors or scenes to make her point? 
• Why was the work structured this way?

Back. 

Help on Step 3: Angles of Analysis: 

Both Primary and Secondary Sources 

• Do the author's scenes and examples support or detract from the argument being made in the work as a whole? 
• Does the author omit any key analytical factor? 
• Can you pair characters or scenes in which the similarities or differences between them make them stand out more forcefully? Do these patterns say something about the artist's message? 
• Were there ideas that needed more example or explanation? 
• What was the writer's agenda? Every writer has biases, and most try to hide them. One of your jobs is to discover where those biases are. Sometimes they appear not in the categories of analysis that the author uses, but rather in those categories that the author might have considered but did not. So ask: 
• What angles of analysis might the artist or scholar have used but neglected? 
• What do we learn about the author's world view by examining the way these events, characters or metaphors are sketched on the page?

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