Summary Exercise- 2 pages or 500 words- No Plgiarism

Summary Exercise

This writing assignment involves writing the Summary Exercise. Once you draft your paragraph

and revise, you may submit it for feedback. The feedback will help you polish your writing skills.

This assignment is required, but not graded.

Option #1: Investigate and Interview

You have already chosen a topic and created a working thesis statement for your research

paper topic. Find a non-profit organization (e.g., one that provides literacy instruction, a

support group for cancer patients, a shelter that provides refuge for battered women) in

your city that is connected to your topic. For example, if you are researching services for

blind people, you might interview someone at the National Federation of the Blind.

Explain your assignment and request an interview with a staff member who is considered an

expert in the field. Create 10 to 20 questions related to your thesis statement to ask the

interviewee. For the writing assignment:1

• Create an introduction that includes the interviewee’s background. What is his/ her

name? What is his/her position? How long has your interviewee worked at this

organization, and what is his/her role there? These are just some of the questions

that you can ask to help you build your introductory paragraph.

• Summarize the interviewee's responses in approximately three cohesive body

paragraphs.

• Finish with a concluding paragraph that explains how this interview helped you better

understand your chosen research paper topic.

Option #2: Getting What you Need from Periodicals

Locate credible sources for your chosen topic of the research paper project. Find at least five

relevant sources from periodicals.2 From the sources that you find, choose one to

summarize. The source you choose should be a credible periodical and not merely a random

website. Also keep in mind that your chosen source should be research-based and non-

fiction. For example, you should not summarize a short story for this assignment. Choose a

source such as a journal article, an essay in an anthology, a magazine article, or a newspaper

article.

For this option, you might use this as a guideline for crafting your thesis statement: John

Smith’s book The Guiding Light explained (add first paragraph focus), (add second paragraph

focus), and (add third paragraph focus).

1 Note that you should be conducting this interview yourself. You should not be summarizing an interview that

someone else conducted. 2 Please do not use basic informative website such as ehow or Wikipedia. The source you choose will ideally be an

academic or research-based article.

Here are some possible places to search for good sources:

• Internet Public Library: http://www.ipl.org/

• Google Scholar: http://scholar.google.com/ (note that this is different from regular Google)

• Microsoft Academic Search: http://academic.research.microsoft.com/

• Cornell University’s arXiv (open access sources in math, biology, physics, and other fields):

http://arxiv.org/

• Bielefeld Academic Search Engine (BASE): http://www.base-search.net/

• Your local library

With this summary, you should include:

• An introduction that provides the source information (book, journal, article, etc.) and

offers the main idea of the information in the source.

• Approximately three body paragraphs to summarize the beginning, the middle, and

the ending of the piece.

• A conclusion that explains how this source helped you better understand your chosen

research paper topic.

The guidelines for this assignment are as follows:

Length: This piece should be approximately 1-2 double-spaced pages or 500 words.

Header: Include a header in the upper left-hand corner of your writing assignment with the

following information:

• Your first and last name

• Course Title (Composition I)

• Assignment name (Summary Exercise)

• Current Date

Format:

• Standard 12 point font (Arial, TimesNewRoman, Calibri)

• Title, centered after heading

• 1” margins on all sides

• Save the file using one of the following extensions: .docx, .doc, .rtf, or .txt

Underline your thesis statement in the introductory paragraph.