Summary work cite

Summary Definition

In each writing situation, a writer takes into consideration the “who” of rhetorical analysis: who is your audience? What does your audience need to know in order to understand what you are saying? And the “how” of rhetorical analysis: how will you get this information across to your audience? For example: when writing to a general academic audience, likely they will not have read or thought about the same texts or ideas as you have. Thus, you have to summarize these texts in order to clue your reader into the how your thinking has developed and what your argument entails.

A summary is an objective, condensed description of an original work (an article, text chapter, story, etc). Summarizing involves using your own words to describe the main ideas of a piece of writing. It is usually a short presentation of the concepts of the original piece, and rarely uses direct quotations. The purpose of a summary is to provide a brief description of a longer work and it should include the author’s main ideas and the most prominent support for those ideas. Add no analysis or personal reaction to the summary portion of your essay. The reader has to be able to distinguish between what the text is saying and what you are saying about that text.

Summary Structure

· Summaries begin by introducing the text, the author, and the publication date, and stating the overall topic and/or argument of the work.

· The rest of the summary provides details about the main arguments and main ideas of the work.

· The summary represents the author’s ideas accurately, without your own opinion about those ideas

· The focus of the summary will depend on the purpose of the summary for the rest of the paper. Not all summaries look the same.

· Summaries paraphrase what the text is saying: that means, you are using YOUR OWN WORDS to represent the main ideas from the text.

· Copying and pasting the same words without citing them = plagiarism

· Using just a few of the same words without citing them = plagiarism

· Changing a few words and keeping the sentence structure in tact = plagiarism

· Changing every other word by replacing them with synonyms = plagiarism

· Summary vs. analysis: A summary describes what the author is arguing; an analysis explains what that argument means and how that is significant or important for the paper as a whole.

· Before analyzing or interpreting the author’s work, you must present it through summary. However, since the summary is meant to set up the rest of an analysis in your paper, you are still making strategic decisions about what to summarize.

How to Write a Summary

Step 1: Read slowly and carefully, annotating as you read.

· Take note of the main arguments, main pieces of evidence, and main analyses of the text.

· Keep track of how the writer develops their argument: how do they move from one point to the next?

· Pay attention to the stakes of the argument: what does this writer want you, the reader, to gain from their text?

· Identify the keywords in the text: the words or phrases that are specialized, that are unique to this piece of writing specifically

Step 2: Outline the text in a short, bullet-point list.

· USE YOUR OWN WORDS in the outline to prevent plagiarism

· Outline in chronological order: write out the main ideas in each paragraph, going in the order they were written

· Only write out the main, major, or central ideas, arguments, analyses, and pieces of evidence

· Make decisions about what’s most important to get across to your reader

Step 3: Turn your outline into a narrative summary

· Write a first draft from your outline, without looking back at the text: this will help you USE YOUR OWN WORDS

· After writing the first draft, go back to the text and fact check: make sure you are accurately and precisely representing the author’s ideas, without your own opinion

Framing Your Summary

The beginning of the summary frames – sets the tone -- for the entire summary, so you want to make sure to start with a strong claim about the central purpose/argument/effect of the text (depending on where you want your summary to go). This sentence is not merely describing that a text exists, but what major thing that text is saying/doing.

Standard beginning sentence:

In her/his _________________________ “________________________” ______, _____________________                  (type of text: article, speech, etc) (title, capitalized)      (date) (author’s full name) _______________________________________ ____________________________. (active verb: argues, demonstrates, critiques, etc)              (main idea/argument)

In her article “Birth, Belonging and Migrant Mothers: Narratives of Reproduction in Feminist Studies” (2009), Irene Gedalof argues that transnational and migration studies could benefit from feminist scholarship on motherhood and reproduction.

Examples of other beginning sentences. Note that it may take more than one sentence to introduce the text, the author, and the publication date:

1. According to ___________________ (year), ________________________________________.             (author’s name)                      (main argument) 2. In her article “________________,” _________________, argues that _____________________. (title of article)      (author’s last name)                       (supporting argument)

3. _______________’s  article on ______________ (year) argues ____________________.

(author’s name)                      (main topic) (main argument)

Active Verbs

Summarizing involves presenting information accurately, which means using a diverse set of specific active verbs to demonstrate what the text is saying and doing. AVOID “she says” or “she goes on to say” or “she tells” because these statement don’t tell your reader anything about what the author is specifically doing, just that they are doing something with words. Diversify your active verb vocabulary. Use active verbs to show what the author is doing and how they move from one idea to the next.

Examples of verbs that describe argumentation:

argues

claims

reveals

proposes

intervenes

Examples of verbs that describe evidence or examples:

demonstrates

illustrates

describes

details

lists

Examples of verbs that describe process:

examines

observes

underlines

studies

explains

investigates

Examples of verbs that describe rhetorical emphasis:

jokes

emphasizes

quips

intones

Examples of verbs that describe analysis:

critiques

questions

considers

implies

suggests

concludes

Summary Checklist

The first sentence of a summary provides the author’s full name, the name of the work being summarized, and the publication date, and then states the general topic and/or argument of the work.
Books, movies, magazines, and TV shows appear in italics; articles, chapters, essays, stories, TV episodes, advertisements and poems appear in quotation marks.
The summary demonstrates the main arguments, main ideas, and main details of the work.
The summary shows how the writer develops his or her argument.
The summary accurately relays the author’s main ideas, staying true to the original purpose of the text.
The summary addresses the analysis or main conclusions provided in the text.
The summary uses a diverse set of active verbs. For example, replace “she says” with: “she critiques” or “she demonstrates.” Avoid writing “she goes on to say.” Instead, show how the writer develops their claim.
The summary is focused and strategic: the purpose of the summary is clear in the greater context of the paper.
The summary uses direct quotations sparingly (just to identify a keyword or phrase; no long quotes)
The summary does not include your own opinion or your own analysis. The summary does not include your “I” voice.
The summary is written in your own words: the ideas are paraphrased and cited.
Your own analysis of the text is clearly distinguishable from the summary of the text.
The author and the work are referred to in the third person.
The author is always referred to by their full name or last name.
The text should be referred to in the present tense.
The summary is edited for spelling, punctuation and grammar.

Sample Summary#1:

In Irene Gedalof’s “Birth, Belonging and Migrant Mothers: Narratives of Reproduction in Feminist Studies” (2009), she argues that transnational and migration studies could benefit from feminist scholarship on motherhood and reproduction; she recounts how migration studies often privileges the male/masculine experience of movement, change, renewal, and rootlessness, and thereby problematically frames the domestic experience as a fixed, “mere” passive repetition of inherited cultural values. Migration studies theorizes these passive spaces of migrant motherhood as hinging on a juggling act between a supposed “here” and “there,” which problematically stratifies sites of identity formation and belonging as fixed and stable. The language of “juggling” obscures the power relationships between different cultural sites, and ignores how the preservation of one culture and assimilation into another are not experienced on equal footing. Gedalof thus calls for a reframing of migrant women’s agency: when we theorize spaces of motherhood as fixed and static (as opposed to the dynamism of masculine movement), we risk reifying traditional Western modes of thought. According to Gedalof, this kind of thinking even pervades White feminist work on motherhood as well, wherein the domestic space passively preserves and maintains cultural meaning through reproduction. Therefore migration studies could also benefit from the work of Black feminists, for example, for whom reproduction is always about active reinvention and struggle within and beyond sexist and racist social structures.

Sample Summary#2:

In “Homeless in America, Homeless in California” (2001), John M. Quigley argues that the cost and availability, or lack thereof, of low-income housing plays a significant role in the variation of homelessness rates in different metropolitan areas. Quigley begins by showing that homelessness in the US increased in the 1970s and 1980s, and has not since gone back down. The common sense view, even accepted by many scholars, is that mental illness and increased drug abuse is the primary cause for this change. Quigley offers an additional explanation: in the article, he compiles and analyzes data from a variety of sources and finds that there is actually a relationship between the housing market and income distribution with homelessness. The data shows that the higher the housing vacancy rate (an indicator of how available new homes are), the lower homelessness is. Homelessness is also positively associated with median rents and rent-to-income ratios. Quigley concludes by arguing that small reductions in median rent/rent-to-income ratios in addition to an increase in the housing vacancy rate can significantly reduce homelessness.

Sample Summary #3:

In groups, make revision suggestions for this summary. Use the checklist as a guide.

In the Article Sexual Orientation and Psychological Distress in adolescence: Examining Interpersonal Stressors and Social Support Processes the author Koji Ueno says that sexual minorities experience greater exposure to stressors then heterosexuals. In his argument Koji says that victimization is the most visible of the stressors faced in schools. Ueno also reveals that social isolation is a frequent stressor that sexual minorities face due to constantly having to hide their sexual orientation. Ueno discusses that friendships in schools help sexual minorities more than outside friendships. Koji gives details on his experiment of exposing sexual minorities to stressors in which he illustrates the differences between Sexual majorities and sexual Minorities such as number of friends. based on the results of his test Ueno concludes that sexual minorities do in fact experience higher levels of psychological stress then sexual minorities and are emotionally less attached.

Sample Summary #4:

In groups, make revision suggestions for this summary. Use the checklist as a guide.

A Smuggled Girl’s Odyssey of False Promises and Fear by Damien Cave and Frances Robles explains the life of sixteen year old Cecilia. Cave and Robles demonstrate how her aunt felt when paying for smugglers to take Cecilia, and the road it took for her to get to the United States. They also suggest that the market is a billion dollar market and is a more cruel and ruthless. The authors also highlight on the fact that when family members take the trip to freedom they leave their families in debt and in harm’s way when they cannot pay the amount. In the article they also reveal the fact that if the money was not paid they would force them in to the sex trafficking ring. That’s the risk they take when trying to get smuggled in and the debt is not paid they are sold and put in to the sex ring, forced to have sex to pay their families bill.