7,8,9,10

SOSC 1520 9.0 Markets & Democracy

Assignment 8

Reading: Ted Nace (2003). Gangs of America: The Rise of Corporate Power and the Disabling of Democracy (Oakland, California: Berrett-Koehler Publishers), chapter 16: “Global rule”, pp. 221-231.

Weight: 5% of course grade

Assignment due: Friday, 19th November

Note to students: this week's assignment asks you to summarise part of a text. This is something on which you should spend much time, and your answer should go through many revisions and editing processes before you submit it. Summarising clearly and succinctly is a talent which you will have to master if you wish for good grades on next term's assignments. When you summarise, you are not evaluating the text; rather, you are presenting the meaning of the text as clearly as possible and in a compressed form, so do not tell the reader whether you think Nace's text is good or bad in this assignment. Your task is to tell the reader what Nace says.

My step-by-step advice on writing this assignment is as follows:

(a) read the question carefully

(b) read Nace's chapter and identify exactly those parts of it which are relevant to this assignment.

(c) Go through those relevant parts and highlight bits which are essential to summarising the text and leave the other, non-essential, parts unmarked.

(d) Start to write a few very rough notes in which you connect the parts you have selected together.

(e) From those notes, start to write complete sentences. Perhaps you will find some parts of Nace's text, which you first thought were essential, to be non-essential, so be prepared to re-think your selection from part (c) of these instructions.

(f) After a lot of adjustment, frustration, swearing, etc. you will have something which approaches a first draft. Don't worry is it goes far beyond the word limit at this stage, as you will reduce the number of words in subsequent steps. Neither should you worry if it is not very coherent, as you will be working on coherence in later stages.

(g) Now that you have a first draft, the revising and editing phases begin. This involves reading the draft with a preparedness to change just about everything including the structure of your sentences and the order in which they appear. A good attitude to editing is to say to yourself: “Everything about this draft might be useless and therefore I should be prepared to start again from scratch if need be”. Hopefully not everything in your draft will be useless, but think very hard before you decide to leave it as it is.

(h) When, after several read-throughs and revisions, you think that the summary is reasonable, the final edits should be made. In these phases, you should pay attention to grammar and style. Are there superfluous words or phrases? If so, delete them. To ascertain whether a word or phrase is superfluous, read the whole sentence aloud with the word/phrase in it, and then read it aloud again whilst you omit the word/phrase. Is anything important missing when you leave it out? If not, then delete it. If you do this thoroughly, you will be able to reduce the number of words in your summary by up to 50%, so if your first draft exceeded the word limit by a large margin, now is the time to reduce the word count.

(i) Whilst editing, make sure that the grammar is correct. Pay attention to apostrophes (are you using them at all and, if so, are you doing so correctly?); make sure you are using appropriate punctuation marks (full-stops, commas, colons, semi-colons) to divide phrases and sentences; be sure, too, that you are writing proper sentences (a sentence requires at least one finite verb).

(j) If you quote the text you are summarising, make sure that you do so properly, i.e., with quotations marks around the quoted material and citations in which you reveal the source. Likewise if you paraphrase the text, though when you paraphrase, you will not need quotations marks because you are putting the meaning of the text into your own words. Hint: I would not quote very much in a short summary like this one; paraphrasing allows you to convey the author's meaning with fewer words.

(k) Keep editing and then edit again, and then edit some more and at least once more after that.

Assignment task: Summarise Nace's account of compensation for regulatory takings as he describes it in chapter 16 of his book. (Word limit: 300)