Write a 3 page paper. The paper is about hockey concussions.
Essay : Summary/Response (1000 words or 3 pages minimum)
Write a "summary/response" essay that incorporates a 250-word summary of an article.
In your response to the reading, speak back to its author from your own critical thinking, personal experience, values, and, perhaps, further reading or research. Consider the author's rhetorical strategies and your own agreement or disagreement with the author's ideas in your response. Think of your response as your analysis of how the text tries to influence its readers rhetorically and how your wrestling with the text has expanded and deepened your thinking about its ideas. As you work with ideas from the text, remember to use attributive tags, quotation marks for any quoted passages, and MLA documentation to distinguish your own points about the text from the author's ideas and language.
The finished product will look like one seamless essay, but it really has two parts: the summary and the response (see model below). After you have written your summary, which demonstrates your full understanding of the text, move into your response. You will not be able to discuss every feature of the text or every idea the text has evoked. Instead, focus on a small number of points that enable you to bring readers a new, enlarged, or deepened understanding of the text. You can take any number of approaches to writing your response:
a) praising, building on, or applying the text to a new context,
b) challenging, questioning, and refuting the text, or
c) a combination of "a" and "b," in which you build on the text while challenging some of its points.
A caution: if your response primarily agrees with the text, you must be sure to extend it and apply the ideas rather than simply make your essay one long summary of the article.
Your response should be guided by a thesis that maps out for readers the points that you want to develop and discuss. These points should be risky and contestable; your thesis should surprise your readers with something new or challenging. Avoid tensionless thesis statements such as "This article has both good and bad points."
The most productive framework for writing summary/response essays is reproduced below. Model your essay on this structure:
a) Introduction (one paragraph): Introduces the topic/problem/question that the article addresses, conveys the writer's investment in the author's topic, provides rhetorical context of the article and its question, and identifies the author and the author's title and purpose.
b) Summary (one paragraph): Summarizes the article, giving a balanced, accurate, concise, and neutral presentation of its main points.
c) Thesis statement (forms its own short paragraph): Presents the two or more rhetorical or ideas points that the writer (you) will analyze and discuss in the body of the essay, establishes the writer's perspective on the author's text, maps out the analysis and critique to follow, giving readers a clear sense of the direction and scope of the essay, concludes with a clear explanation of the essay's "so what."
d) Body sections (1-2 paragraphs per point): Develop the rhetorical or ideas points with examples from the text, explain and discuss these points in a thorough critique with the writer's own perspective, continue the critique and analysis by explaining writer's ideas with examples and elaboration until all points in the thesis statement are fleshed out.
e) Conclusion (short paragraph): Concludes essay by explaining how the writer has proven the essay's thesis, and explains again-using new words-the significance of your argument (the "so what").
f) Work cited: Gives an appropriate citation in MLA format for the text discussed in the paper and any other sources mentioned in the essay (often only one source to list).