ASSIGNMENT: PAPER SUMMARY

GOALS: To examine the language and content of a particular article, and develop the skill to objectively restate the main idea and main points.

DEFINITION: A summary is a brief restatement, in your own words, of the most important ideas of a passage or entire essay. Summary differs from paraphrase in that paraphrasing means an exact restatement of someone else's ideas. A summary still paraphrases by using your words, not the original author's, but it differs because it is a shorter version of the original. You'll find yourself frequently summarizing sources in your research paper, in future writing assignments, and in the workplace, so this assignment begins your practice of this valuable skill.

A standard summary is around ¼ the length of the original essay. A summary will indicate the main idea and the main points that support that idea. It might also include a few major details, primarily to provide transition or elaborate on a difficult concept. Brevity and clarity are the main goals.

AUDIENCE: assume your audience has NOT read the essay, and that you're summarizing it for their understanding.

Step One:

Write a summary of the following essay.

"Fake News vs Real News". By Lisa Crate in Education Digest, Sept. 2017, Vol. 83, Issue 2, found in Academic Search Complete.

Read it over carefully, noting the main idea (the thesis) and the main points supporting it. You might want to create a rough outline or underline key ideas.

Your summary must provide these main ideas in your own words, so your next step is to begin paraphrasing the major sentences you've chosen. Some writers prefer to work sentence by sentence; others feel more comfortable writing a summary holistically. Summarize the essay according to the "1/4 of the original" word count. This particular essay has approximately 1400 words, so your summary should be 350 - 400 words. (This does not include the additional opinion paragraph, which will be another 250 or so words.)

As you're writing, keep these conventions of summary-writing in mind:

1. Introduce the author and title immediately. The thesis should follow quickly and clearly on this opening sentence, or they may be combined into one sentence.

2. Accurately formulate the thesis and main points of the article. You can provide major details when you think they are important, but they should be abbreviated.

3. Condense the original with precision and directness. Unlike a traditional essay where you've been taught "only one main idea per paragraph," a paragraph of summary will combine several main ideas that are linked. Avoid disjointed short paragraphs of individual main ideas. Instead you'll find that your summary will be about 3-4 paragraphs.

4. Preserve the tone of the original; in other words, report the content of the essay objectively without providing your own opinion or reactions.

5. Severely limit the use of key words and phrases from the original, paraphrasing them in your own words. This is an exercise in paraphrasing, so you should not have more than 1 or 2 quotations throughout the entire summary. These quotations must be enclosed in quotation marks, even if they are only short phrases.

6. Maintain the order of the original essay. If you start moving points around to make the writing of your summary easier for you, you'll find that you run the danger of shifting the meaning, or taking ideas out of context.

7. Structure the paper with transitions so that it reads smoothly. This can be a challenge when you're combining main ideas. Again, it's a good writing exercise for you!

8. Organize the paper so that the principles of beginning and ending are apparent. Typically begin with the author, title and thesis, and provide some sense of closure at the end.

Step Two:

Following your summary, appraise the main point of the essay by writing a paragraph from one of two positions:

1. accepting the point of the essay and showing how that point relates to your experiences, by using any example from your experience to further support that point.

or

1. rejecting the point of the essay and formulating a hypothesis in contrast, based on your own experience.