Some of our in-class work will be devoted to crafting research memos that use the rhetorical précis as formulated by the historian Chad Black.
courtesy of Chad Black, quoted in full below with a few small friendly amendments
The Rhetorical Précis is a formula designed to help you move beyond simple summary to a more analytical synopsis of a work. As such, the précis, in a compact form, forces you to think about both the content and method of a piece of scholarship. This is very useful in developing an historiographical understanding of the work you are reading, of the connections between works. The formula for the précis is based on a few simple sentences:
- Sentence one gives the following information:
- name of the author, title of the work, date in parenthesis;
- an intentionally chosen active verb (argues, asserts, claims, denies, refutes, proves, disproves, explains, etc.);
- a that clause containing the major claim/idea (thesis) of the work.
- Sentence two gives an explanation of how the author develops and supports the major claim of the work identified in the first sentence.
- Sentence three states the author’s apparent purpose, followed by an “in order to” phrase.
Formula:
In Chapter 1 of One Dimensional Man (1964), Herbert Marcuse argues that […]. To build this argument, Marcuse […]. Marcuse makes this argument in order to […].
Here’s an example from Daniel Nemser’s Infrastructures of Race: Concentration and Biopolitics in Colonial Mexico (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2017):
In Infrastructures of Race (2017), Daniel Nemser argues that colonial Spanish America created modern racialization by spatializing race as an infrastructure of domination and accumulation. To build this argument, Nemser draws on Foucault’s biopolitical regime and Lefebvre’s production of space and territorializing of domination, and divides his analysis into four chapters that move through the colonial period through a succession of material, spatial practices: congregación (concentration), recogimiento (enclosure), seperación (segregated districts), and colección. Nemser does this in order to reorient the social construction of race away from bodily difference and to material space and domination, as a means of overcoming the naturalization of difference as a thing upon which race is projected.
Dr. Black notes that this particular précis uses a lot of scholarly jargon, but ‘jargon’ is just the specialized vocabularly of a particular field. It might look like ‘jargon’ in the pejorative sense to you or me, but for his purposes, it makes sense and builds on previous scholarhsip that he has read. Every field has its own specialized terms used to capture important ideas or complicated issues as a disciplinary short-hand. As he notes, ‘…When you write your own précis, they will likewise build [on] of your previous knowledge.’
The Memo Part
When we take notes as academics on scholarly literature, we are building up atomic units of thought, little atoms of ideas that can be recombined to make more substantial structures. Or you can think of them as lego bricks where these atomic units are little pieces that eventually you combine together to make something larger. Notice that your observation - your précis - is NOT copying out an idea or the verbatim words of the original author. Rather, it’s an act of thinking and contextualizing. THEN you expand it into what Black calls a ‘research memo’:
Following the introductory paragraph (ie, the précis), a research memo should highlight what you found significant in the reading. Identify a question or theme raised in class that the reading helps to answer or addresses. Then explain why you think this reading matters? How does it connect to the other readings of the week or previous weeks? How does it connect with work you’re reading outside of class assignments, etc?
Two paragraphs. 500 words tops. You need to keep your research memos succinct and on-point. Practice writing these.
But not all scholarship follows IMRAD
‘IMRAD’ stands for ‘Introduction’, ‘Methods’, ‘Results’, And, ‘Discussion’. That’s a very conventional framework used in a lot of social science or scientific writing, and my comments above are largely developed with that kind of literature in mind. But it’s not universal. We’ll therefore spend some time on a second approach that will be useful for you as a scholar