Technical writing/ summary

Summarizing and evaluating are essential to research and critical thinking. I want you to recognize that they are different processes that work together in important ways. However, they are best managed separately so as to avoid incompleteness or inefficiency. Like stages in the writing process, if you try to do both at once, you might do both badly.

In some academic settings, students are encouraged to give their views about a topic or idea and are discouraged from rehashing background information. The best example is a book report. Many teachers prefer to hear what students think about the book and don't want simple plot summaries. What you think is more important than the touchstone used to get you talking about what you think.

By contrast, in technical and business situations, you must summarize data completely and fairly before making any judgments or recommendations. Readers want to know that the recommendations you reach are not merely biased opinions. Do the facts compel a fair-minded reader to reach the same conclusions? Only by demonstrating that you fully understand the information you are manipulating can you gain this persuasive advantage. Summarizing accomplishes this goal.

Summarizing

Summarizing is a step in the "brainstorming" stage of the writing process where you discover the details and examples that will help you support or illustrate your argument. Rather than identifying these details and examples from first-hand research, technical writers often must extract them from a written source. Summarizing is crucial to this enterprise. Summarizing also allows you to view your own work more objectively when revising. Think of summarizing as a three-part process: reading, rephrasing, and organizing.

Reading. Read carefully, marking and underlining key passages. Look for the THESIS of the text you are summarizing. Usually the thesis will be given early in the text. If you're several paragraphs into the document and have no idea what it's about, make sure you haven't missed the thesis. Next, identify the MAIN POINTS that the author uses to support or illustrate the thesis, as well as the author's CONCLUSIONS. You can find these supporting ideas in paragraphs within the document. Try to generate a mini-summary of each paragraph--condensing the ideas into as few sentences as necessary--in order to capture the author's thesis, main points, and conclusions.

Rephrasing. Rephrase or translate the author's ideas into your own words. Do not quote the author. This is a valuable exercise that gives you ownership of the idea. Anyone can mimic behavior. Any writer can repeat word-for-word what someone else has written. But does that repetition ensure that the copy-cat actually understands the points being made? By putting the ideas into your own words, you gain control.

Organizing. It's best to follow the author's organizational structure. Simply give your translation of the author's ideas in the order in which they were presented.

The essential goal of summarizing is to condense the reading selection while preserving content. Summarizing saves your reader the time it would take to read the original. This is a valuable saving. No wonder the executive summary that precedes most important technical reports is so important--it often is the only part of the report that gets careful attention from the majority of readers!

Because the point of summarizing is to condense the original text, something must be omitted. When summarizing, you should omit the following:

· The author's examples. Summarize the prevailing argument but do not include examples used to illustrate it. (Note that you will use personal examples in the evaluation portion of the memo, but not here. Remember, you're summarizing, not evaluating.)

· Irrelevant details.

· Background or biographical information about the author or text.

· Jargon. Use terminology that everyone can understand.

· Remarks indicating that you're writing a summary.

· References to the article or author.

· Personal opinion. This point is the most important. Remember our discussion above. If you introduce judgment into a discussion of facts before presenting them completely, your reader may suspect bias. When summarizing, do not make a judgment about the material. You will save that judgment for the "evaluation" portion of your summary/evaluation memo.

Evaluating

Evaluating information leads to judgments and recommendations. Once the material is fully summarized, complete and efficient evaluation can take place. Again, don't worry about evaluating information until you're sure you have all the information available.

This relationship between evaluating and summarizing is crucial to the judicial system, which provides a good example of the process of persuasive argumentation. If you have ever served on a jury, you'll remember a basic instruction: don't make up your mind about the case until the facts are all in. Then and only then should you strive to reach a conclusion. Why? If you're too busy thinking about exhibit A, you might miss an important point made in exhibit B.

This basic process of argumentation deserves emphasis here. Persuading someone to follow your recommendations is a three-step dance. First, you present that facts completely. Summarizing helps you do this. Second, you make conclusions based on the facts. Evaluating helps you do this. Third, you make recommendations based on your conclusions. Often, the organization of documents reflects this important progression: a section called "Background" or "History" or even "Summary of the Data" is followed by a section called "Conclusions" that in turn is followed by a section called "Recommendations." It's vital that you do not introduce recommendations before leading the reader to accept those recommendations as logical next steps that follow from the conclusions.

Here's an example from a notorious murder trial that took place in recent years. The police found evidence implicating the accused when they entered his home shortly after two murders took place. The defense argued that the evidence could not be admitted because the police did not have a warrant. In fact, the gate to the property had been locked, and an officer actually climbed the fence and jumped over a wall to enter the property. The officer did so because he noticed blood on the walkway. The prosecution overcame the objection by carefully crafting a Summary-Conclusions-Recommendation scenario:

Summary: The officer looked through the fence and saw the blood. This summary of the facts that any person looking on would have agreed existed led to a conclusion, an evaluation of what the facts might mean.

Conclusion: The officer assumed someone inside the property might be injured.

Recommendation: The officer jumped the fence. After all, the conclusions he drew based on the facts he summarized led him logically to recommend taking this action.

Once in, evidence was fair game. Note how another arrangement of the argument might have failed to persuade the court to admit that evidence. Arguing that the officer saw blood (summary), thought the accused must be the murder because of the blood stains (conclusion), and jumped the fence to arrest the accused (recommendation) might have led the court to conclude that the accused's rights had been violated.

Summarizing and evaluating thus are pivotal mental processes that you will use to craft persuasive arguments. You will get plenty of practice summarizing and evaluating in this course.