I’ve written more lab reports than I care to admit. Somewhere between my second year of undergraduate chemistry and my current work in environmental science consulting, I’ve learned that most students approach lab reports the way they approach a root canal–with dread and minimal enthusiasm. The thing is, a lab report isn’t some arbitrary torture
I’ve spent the better part of a decade reading student essays, and I can tell you with absolute certainty that most people approach synthesis essays backward. They start writing before they’ve actually thought about what synthesis means. They grab sources, throw them together, and hope something sticks. It doesn’t work that way. A synthesis essay
I’ve read thousands of essays. Not an exaggeration. During my years teaching composition at a mid-sized university and later working with graduate students preparing applications for programs across the country, I developed an almost supernatural ability to predict where an essay was headed within the first three sentences. Most of the time, I was right.