Too little
Selective neatness
“More buses for everyone.”
The upbeat summary leaves out the consequential loss.
Syntharity
Keep the inconvenient fact that prevents your account from becoming a misleadingly neat story.
Readiness to seek a whole account faithful to its relevant evidence, without selective omission or forced coherence.
Syntharity is the project’s coined term for seeking a whole account faithful to relevant evidence without selective omission or forced coherence. It matters when individually accurate statements combine into a misleading impression. Here, the work is to show how more daytime buses and the loss of the evening service affect different journeys.
Syntharity gives a whole account with its inconvenient parts intact
The bus timetable looks splendid folded in half. Every daytime service in your story is more frequent. Open the last panel and the evening column is empty: the final bus has been removed. You stand at the stop and unfold the paper. The improvement is real. So is the journey home that it no longer covers.
Finding the balance in Syntharity
A transport change improves daytime frequency and removes the last evening service. Your draft calls it an unqualified expansion.
A fitting response
Connected account
“Daytime buses increase; the final evening service ends.”
Readers can understand the relation between benefit and cost.
Pursued too far
A heap without structure
“Print every timetable entry and let readers work it out.”
The relevant change disappears in a mass of accurate but unexplained details.
A whole account is organized around what makes the difference, not around a compulsory equal number of positives and negatives. If a later service is restored, remove the obsolete contrast and explain the actual change.
What Syntharity makes possible
Readers can judge a proposal in relation to their lives. The reporter’s work connects records, testimony, and consequences so that a useful pattern appears without smoothing away the fact that disrupts it.
Syntharity in ordinary life
The family plan
When summarizing a cheaper outing, include the extra journey that makes it difficult for one participant.
The product review
Keep the excellent daytime performance and the poor low-light result together if both matter to the recommendation.
Nearby virtues, different work
Exactitude
Exactitude preserves each fact’s particulars. Syntharity asks whether their arrangement and omissions make the whole account faithful.
Justice
Justice notices legitimate interests. Syntharity carries relevant evidence about those interests into a coherent explanation.
Syntharity and its counterfeits
The perfect narrative
A perfect narrative becomes a counterfeit of Syntharity when the evening service disappears because it spoils the success story. A faithful whole keeps the material conflict visible.
Compulsive connection
Inventing a hidden cause for unrelated details is compulsive connection, a counterfeit of Syntharity. Genuine synthesis can state where no connection has been established.
How to cultivate Syntharity
Write the account’s main impression in one sentence, then compare it with the evidence left outside.
Ask which omitted fact would most change an affected reader’s understanding.
Organize a material conflict explicitly rather than forcing one side to disappear.
Try it today
Revisit an ordinary summary you have written. Add one relevant qualification or relation that a reader would otherwise miss; remove an unrelated detail if it distracts from that understanding.
Questions worth returning to
- Is every sentence true while the overall impression is false?
- What relation between the facts have I left the reader to guess?
Quotations and further reading
Seven selections to return to through the week. Follow a source link to read the surrounding passage.
There are two parties to the work of observation on Morals and Manners—the observer and the observed.
Harriet Martineau · How to Observe: Morals and Manners · Part I, chapter I, Philosophical Requisites
Martineau immediately examines the observer as the instrument of the account. A whole story includes how facts were selected and interpreted, rather than pretending that the narrator stands outside the process.
To make our judgments, we must have reports from other parts of the social body; we must know what our fellow-men, in all classes of society, in all parts of the world, are suffering, planning, doing.
Upton Sinclair · The Brass Check · Introductory
Sinclair’s opening treats reporting as a connection among people who cannot observe one another directly. Its social-body metaphor explains why an account that omits affected groups can mislead even when its included details are true.
What the traveller has to look to is, that he does not take one aspect of the popular mind for the whole, or a temporary state of the popular mind for a permanent one,—though, from the powerful action of national song, this temporary state is likely to become a permanent one by its means.
Martineau treats songs as evidence that expresses only part of a society and can also influence it. An account must place that partial evidence in its setting; a daytime timetable likewise cannot stand for the whole service.
The members of her assigned family may have other charms and virtues—they may possibly be kind and considerate of each other, generous to their friends, but it is her business to stick to the industrial side.
Jane Addams · Democracy and Social Ethics · Chapter II, Charitable Effort
Addams describes the narrowing effect of a visitor's assigned criteria. The sentence is a criticism of that limitation: a report can be accurate about one measure and impoverished as an account of the whole situation.
These attributes of Coketown were in the main inseparable from the work by which it was sustained; against them were to be set off, comforts of life which found their way all over the world,
Charles Dickens, narrator · Charles Dickens · Hard Times · Book I, chapter V, The Keynote
The sentence connects Coketown's industrial conditions to comforts enjoyed elsewhere. This excerpt keeps the relationship between a reported benefit and the place bearing its costs in view.
Secondly, though the silenced opinion be an error, it may, and very commonly does, contain a portion of truth; and since the general or prevailing opinion on any subject is rarely or never the whole truth, it is only by the collision of adverse opinions, that the remainder of the truth has any chance of being supplied.
John Stuart Mill · On Liberty · Chapter II, Of the Liberty of Thought and Discussion
The second ground in Mill's recap concerns partial truths in opposed accounts. Reporting can retain the improved daytime service and the loss at night without averaging them into a bland verdict.
For there is no creature whose inward being is so strong that it is not greatly determined by what lies outside it.
George Eliot, narrator · George Eliot · Middlemarch · Finale
The narrator places Dorothea's choices within an imperfect social world. The line joins personal agency with surrounding conditions, just as a useful service report connects a timetable with the lives organized around it.
Continue through the catalog
Practice this collection
Choose this approved collection as an optional workbook program, or select individual virtues in My Virtues.