Contact Your Librarians
. Text 860.407.6081
Email to
Phone 860.932.4007
Library Hours
Fall Semester Hours for QV Danielson Campus Library
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Monday. 8am-8pm
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Tuesday. 8am-8pm
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Wednesday. 8am-8pm
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Thursday. 8am-8pm
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Friday. 8am-2pm
Fall Semester Hours for QV Willimantic Campus Library
- Monday. 11am-7:00pm
- Wednesday. 3pm-7pm
Synthesis: Bringing it Together
Synthesis is about gathering and combining ideas from different sources to create a deeper understanding of a topic. It involves finding relevant sources and combining sources to support your own point or purpose. Synthesis often starts with summarizing and paraphrasing sources - but also goes beyond these steps by showing how sources relate to each other and to your own thinking.
Professors want to see: that you can do more than collect information - they're looking for you to make connections, show patterns, and explain how ideas fit together.
You're using synthesis skills when you...
- Gather relevant and effective sources as evidence
- Pull ideas from different readings to support your argument
- Talk about how different authors agree or disagree
- Use sources to provide context about existing knowledge
Boost Your Synthesis Skills
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Keywords: Your Guide to Smarter SearchesSynthesis starts with searching for and identifying strong, relevant sources to your topic. Learning how to use keywords effectively will help make your research more efficient and effective.
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How to Read an Academic ArticleScholarly articles (also called academic or peer-reviewed articles) can be hard to get through if you try to read them like a book. This handout shows you how to approach each part of a research article with a strategy, so you can find the most useful information quickly. Learning how to read scholarly work effectively helps you gather, compare, and use sources with more confidence in your writing.
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Incorporating Sources into Your Writing: Quoting, Summarizing and ParaphrazingQuoting, summarizing, and paraphrasing are three key ways to include other people’s ideas in your writing. Using these strategies well shows that you’ve researched your topic, understand it fully, and can use sources to support your own points. In academic writing, we use other people’s ideas not to replace our own thinking, but to build on what others have said, engage with scholarly conversation, and create new understandings.