Thinking Syntactically takes a new approach to teaching introductory students the skills of relating data to theory and theory to data. The main goal of the book is to create a mindset for scientific thinking and gives students a heightened sensitivity to language that empowers them to go beyond the material taught in class. Though generative in spirit, this textbook does not focus on teaching the details of a specific theoretical approach, but rather enables students to understand and evaluate different approaches more easily.

The book is structured around a wide range of exercises that use clear and compelling logic to build arguments and lead up to theoretical proposals. Each step is conceptually and empirically motivated to cultivate the argumentation skills of the reader. Using data drawn from current media sources including newspapers and novels, Liliane Haegeman helps students formulate and test hypotheses.