Please read the attachments so carefully and make sure you can get an A

Your article summary will be one to two pages long (single-spaced), and may involve a fair bit of mathematical analysis. You will give the article’s main points (in plain English), and demonstrate that you understand (and can replicate) the theory used to make these points. Notice that this does not mean you simply reproduce the article in different words. The successful summary will demonstrate an understanding of the article, including its strengths and weaknesses, and will point out sources that extend the work. There are two objectives of this exercise. First, useful summaries are designed to allow you to quickly recall an article’s main point. This will enable you to consider several articles at the same time, and should help you compare and contrast various points of view in the literature. Summaries provide an important first step in entering the (generally interesting) conversation that takes place in scholarly journals.

Second, useful summaries allow you to develop your own intellectual confidence, curiosity and courage. In order to succinctly state an article’s main point, you will need to understand both what the article accomplishes and where it falls short. Every piece of writing is incomplete in some way, and the successful summary will note the ways the article could be extended or changed to address different questions. In order to complete this part of your summary, you will need the confidence to think that your questions about what the article is missing are important, the curiosity to search for other sources that address your questions, and the courage to explain your questions clearly and succinctly and point to these sources. I will grade your papers for both grammar and content, looking to see that your ideas are well thought out and presented (eg that they demonstrate intellectual courage), and that you have related the material from the article to what we’ve been learning in class (eg that your summary demonstrate intellectual confidence and curiosity). The goal is for you to be able to refer back to the summary to figure out what the article is about and some related questions the article does not consider. Thus, while I am grading, I will be thinking about whether or not I am able to understand the article’s main point based only on what you’ve written. You will lose credit if I am forced to turn to the article to make sense of your summary. I will also be looking to see that you’ve come up with questions the article doesn’t address, and found a couple of sources that might be useful in thinking about these questions. Finally, when the article contains a theoretical model, you will lose credit if your summary does not demonstrate that you have figured out how it works.