"Thinking about SUMMARY Assignment" for Amanda Smith

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Figure 1: From Atlas of Public Management

Thinking about Summary Prof Mitchell-Lambert

Goal: To condense a text so that you can use it to help you write your essays.

Overview: Writing summaries are actually more interesting than I ever thought they could be. In my head, they are simply a paraphrase of what has been read. That is true, but when I have written them and then compared them with others, I have begun to notice the interesting choices that others have made that are so different than mine. It doesn’t mean that we don’t get some similarities, but how our brains take the info in and decide which details to include and how best to determine what the main ideas of a text are can be so different, which can lead to some terrific discussions which unpack the meaning of text so much more than one can do on his/her own. This is what I like about summary. So, I am going to ask you to do various lengths of summaries to help get you to think about texts in a variety of ways:

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1-page summary: What details are crucial to include here, and what should be taken out? 6-sentence summary: How can you take an entire reading and simmer it down to 6 sentences where you really synthesize the most important ideas? 6-word summary: If you ONLY have 6 words, what will you choose?

Writing a 1+ Page Textual Summary:

1. Read the text to be summarized. Using your annotation key, annotate while you read:

2. Write your one page summary (approximately 250 words): a. Start your summary with one topic sentence t hat presents all of the

ESSENTIAL INFORMATION. Identify the type of work, title, author, date, and publication (if relevant) and state the writer’s overall claim in your own words.

Example: In the article “The New Literacy” published in Wired in 2009, Clive Thompson explains that scholars think modern network socializing has lowered young people’s ability to write.

b. Pretend the reader has not read the article or book. Prove to the reader that you have read the original text, in its entirety. Do not evaluate the text. You are summarizing, not stating an opinion or arguing a claim.

c. Describe the author's key claims, select examples to illustrate the author's argument, present the gist of the author's argument, integrate quotations correctly using MLA in-text citation rules, and contextualize what you summarize.

d. Use your own words (no more than two quotations).

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Writing a 6-Sentence Summary:

1. Keep the FIRST sentence from your 1-page. 2. Reread your summary, think about if you had to tell a friend about the

reading, but only had one minute, what would you take out? How might you boil down the gist of the text? Cut, cut, cut. Rewrite to shorten if need be. Maybe there are two really good sentences that are important. Combine and shorten.

3. Do not use quotations.

Writing a 6-Word Summary:

1. Look at your 6-sentence summary. Ignore the first sentence. 2. One way to do it is to boil each sentence down to one word. You will have

one word to spare--think about what word you should add. OR you can just ask yourself what is the MAIN thing that the author is trying to say?

3. You don’t need to write a sentence--it can be a phrase or a string of the most important words.

Why is writing a summary important? Writing an accurate summary means that you understand the text that you are reading. It also allows you to think about what you may choose to include in your writing projects as evidence. Academic writers are often (if not always) required to use textual evidence to support their claims. You can USE the first sentence from the 1-page summary to introduce the text and then find quotations OR use paraphrases OR use details from the text as your evidence.

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Figure 2: From Stock Photo