Crucially, theExact Word® helps the student to visualize text and subtext in subject matter across the curriculum. Equalizing higher standards throughout all regions and across all subject areas and grade levels allows teachers to create equally accessible methods for all students to reach mastery.
Analysis and synthesis lie at the heart of all thinking. In every discipline, taking an idea apart in analysis builds pathways to new thought. Idealists have long hoped for a central methodology to activate at the core of academic thought. As such, the deductive thinker can spot trends, or identify patterns which apply to behavior. Extracting principles and guidelines from history, understanding human behavior, the connection of thought from one society to another have fascinated linguists, historians, scientists, and artists from the beginning of recorded history. When Francis Bacon created the methodology of the scientific method, he captured inductive processes, the balance to deductive thinking.
To the pairs of analysis-synthesis processes and the deductive-inductive approaches, add the language tools that connect and reconstruct thought. Data becomes information by link and connection. I can make two statements that I leave you to tie together. Willy nilly, you will make them relate.
The system failed.
The customer complained.
To prevent misunderstanding, I have an obligation to connect these two statements so that you cannot misconstrue my intent. And, by doing so in more than one way, I can offer you completely different information.
Whenever the client complained, the system failed.
The system failed; consequently, the client complained.
Unless the system failed, the client complained.
The meaning changes. In one or two of the examples, the writer would be obligated to continue with an explanation for the unlikely logic of the sentence. Nonetheless, "whenever," "consequently," and "unless" entirely reconfigure the meaning of the "data events" in the two unconnected sentences. As first written, bulleted and separated, they imply a sequence. They allow assumption. Good writing and rigor in thinking never accidentally permit assumption. By design, the writer may intend for a reader to jump to a conclusion. But, if the conclusion occurs by accident, then the communication has failed.
Connection creates meaning. Good writing never depends upon "you know what I mean," unless an experience, deliberately created by the writer, evokes a common human thread through well-crafted leaps of assumption. An artist creates such experience.
Across the curriculum, discourse matters. A logic of comparison, parallel, contrast, likeness should lead to insight and reflection. Building perspective and debate depend upon the logic of language to synthesize analysis, to build from deductive hypothesis or toward new hypotheses inductively.
theExact Word® provides for the tool of relatedness. Across the curriculum, as analysis and synthesis apply to the tearing down and rebuilding of thought, language embodies the thinking of the student. The context colors teach relatedness and unity, flow and perspective. As students design the framework of thought, the core tool, language, unites disciplines into exercises which mentally form and reform insights into educated thinking, no matter the forum. Language provides the ordering; theExact Word® provides the access. Teachers provide the experience. Students provide results.
Return to the School System Intro Page