Assignment:
Write a 300-500 word summary of the article. This summary will consist of a few paragraphs that summarize the main and supporting points of the article.
Objectives
- Master pre-reading and reading strategies for different texts
- Understand how genre and intended audience shapes reading and writing
- Determine the logic to the ordering of ideas in a text and identify transitions as signposts to the different parts of texts
- Annotate a reading by identifying main ideas and supporting evidence
- Recognize the effect of perspective and purpose on tone, organization, and vocabulary choice
- Summarize accurately
To complete this assignment successfully
- Read and annotate the article, noting in the margins the main purpose of each paragraph
- Underline the main points of the article and number the evidence that supports it
- Try making an outline of the article
- Determine the article's thesis (implicit or explicit)
- Make a list of what to include in your summary.
- Draft, paying careful attention to attribution of ideas and/or citations
- Review paraphrases
- Revise
Checklist
Content:
o Do you correctly surmise the thesis of the article?
o Do you accurately report all the main and supporting points for this thesis?
o Have you represented the author's ideas clearly without distortion?
o Have you represented the authors ides concisely without including unnecessary detail?
o Have you used attributive tags to discuss the author's arguments?
o Have you used your own words with few quotes and adequate paraphrase?
o Have you followed summary conventions mentioning the title and the author of the article?
o Have you included a works cited page?
Organization:
o Is your summary organized logically so as to clearly present the argument of the article (without necessarily mirroring the original order of the article)?
o Have you used transitions to smoothly link the supporting points to the main points?
o Do you differentiate (if necessary) between more important and less important reasons through transitional words?
Style:
o Is the summary typed and double spaced?
o Is the essay clean stylistically, using concise and clear sentences, strong verbs and active voice, and sentence variety?
o Is the essay grammatically correct?
Summary Grading Criteria (for students)
A Sophisticated summary
- Correctly surmises the thesis and includes all of the major supporting points
- Likely does not mirror the original order of the article
- Contains no misreadings; represents the authors arguments fairly and accurately
- Contains no opinion or information not mentioned in the article
- Uses attributive tags and/or citations consistently and correctly
- Summarizes using own words and adequate paraphrases
- Quotes sparingly but when done, quotes are smoothly integrated
- Smoothly transitions between ideas, differentiating between more important and less important points
- Contains fluid sentence-level prose
B Clear and coherent summary
- Summary contains the thesis and most of the main points
- Contains few, if any, misreadings of article
- Attributive tags and/or citations are used somewhat consistently and correctly
- Quotes may not be integrated but they are explained
- Paraphrases adequately
- Uses competent transitions
- Contains clear and concise sentence-level prose with some lapses
C Competent summary
- Correctly, or nearly correctly, surmises the thesis and some of the main points.
- Summary may place too much emphasis on one main point or focus too much on minor points
- Summary contains some misreadings but these misreadings don't extend to the thesis of the article
- Summary may too closely follow the organization of the article itself (a blow-by-blow paraphrase is not a successful summary)
- Attributive tags and/or citations are used, but are used inconsistently and/or incorrectly
- Quotes are unexplained and there may be too many quotes
- Paraphrases may come too close to original though much of the original sentence is changed
- Transitions exist but may be inappropriate or confusing
- Sentences are mostly correct (the occasional fragment or run on) but may be awkward
D Inadequate summary
- Misreads purpose/thesis of article; may invent too different a thesis for the article; may read so much into the article that it is somewhat unrecognizable
- Personal opinion may exist throughout
- Fails to use attributive tags and/or citations to indicate the information presented is the author's and not the student's
- Quotes are mostly unexplained
- Paraphrases are too close to original
- Transitions may be nonexistent
- Sentences contain many errors and boundary issues though they are readable
F Failing summary
- May fail for any number of reasons: the writer responds to the ideas in the article rather than summarizes; the writer grossly misunderstands or misreads the article; the writer copies sentences without quoting or citing; sentences may be impossible to follow