Now is the time of summer you may be thinking about explaining to your first-year law clerks how they can take their analysis and writing to the next level.  Or perhaps you are thinking about how to better explain case synthesis to next summer's law clerks.  One helpful recent article is Jane Kent Gionfriddo's, Thinking Like a Lawyer:  The Heuristics of Case Synthesis, 40 Tex. Tech L. Rev. 1 (2007).

It's always helpful to see how someone else uses different terms to explain a process--terms that might click with a law clerk who thinks differently than oneself.  And Part IV of the article which uses "a group of hypothetical cases that have been carefully designed to demonstrate the complex permutations of synthesizing cases in an actual problem-solving context" might be a useful exercise for initial training of law clerks, even if you don't find the article's terminology helpful.