Summary

Summary Assignment-- Diagnostic Writing
Summary Group Exercise

Remember the basic features of summarizing:

A summary includes only the main points of a text
A summary cannot repeat everything from the text. Thus, you must determine which points are secondary and can be left out.
Your decisions about what is primary (of value to the summary) and what is secondary (can be left out of the summary) are part of your authorial position-- your stance, voice, and direction as a writer.
Summaries generalize and abstract-- they include less detail and more broad concepts than more in-depth writing.

You may want to begin this writing exercise by reviewing your notes for this reading. Either in your reading notebook or in the pages of you book, you might decide which points you think are primary. It is often easiest to do this if you have already determined the thesis and can clearly see which points are essential to developing the thesis. As you deicide this, you will also want to pay close attention to the text's subheadings. Which points are most important, and in what order should you address them in your summary?

This is a 1 1/2 to 2 page short writing. Clearly, you cannot include every point from the text in your summary. Selection, then, is crucial: what to include, what to leave out. So, even though your specific thesis will closely follow the text's, it may be somewhat different than other class members' as each of you will have a slightly different "reading" of the text. This is an important distinction: in summary, you are in one sense "objectively" reporting what the author says, but, in another, "subjectively" deciding what is important to report. Though there is a personal/subjective aspect to all writing, no matter how "objective" the task, we do want to be careful in summary to distinguish between our own perspective and that of the author's. For instance, if I don't like what I have read, my summary can still not begin with "this writing was completely wrong."

Summarizing also requires the ability to paraphrase without plagiarizing. Since your job is to tell me what the author's points are, you are clearly going to have to use many of her words to explain the argument she presents. You have to be extremely careful to distinguish your voice from the authors; you can do this by using signal phrases such as "As Lord says," "Lord repeatedly points out," "In Harkins' terms." You should also use a few appropriate appropriate quotations to make the most important points; you can differentiate your voice from hers as you elaborate on and explain her argument in your own words.