Posted: September 23rd, 2015

Following the seven steps outlined in the Behrens textbook for writing summaries, read, re-read and underline, make marginal notes, and divide the essay into sections and/or stages of thought.

Summary Assignment

Instructions: Choose ONE of the essays listed below.  Following the seven steps outlined in the Behrens textbook for writing summaries, read, re-read and underline, make marginal notes, and divide the essay into sections and/or stages of thought.  Then, develop a 400-word summary for your chosen essay, using the summaries of Bloom’s essay “The Baby in the Well: The Case Against Empathy” as models (pages 21 and 23-24).  Remember to follow these other points that we discussed in class:
•    Introduce the source’s title and the author, and paraphrase the author’s thesis in the first sentence of the summary
•    Stay objective and use neutral, descriptive language (referring to the author often will help) to represent the author and source accurately
•    Use the simple present tense to discuss the article (argues, says, discusses)
•    Explain how the author makes the argument (examples, illustrations, statistics, charts, graphs and so on)
•    Reflect the general organization of the article
•    Keep quotations to a minimum and quote key concepts only; use your own language for at least 90% of the summary.
•    Include an APA end-text citation for the article you are summarizing

Select ONE of the following essays to summarize:
Asch, S. E. (2016).  Opinions and social pressure. In L. Behrens and L. Rosen (Eds),Writing and
reading across the curriculum (13th ed.) (pp. 597-602).  Toronto, ON: Pearson.
Goodheart, A.  (2002).   9.11.01: The skyscraper and the airplane. The American Scholar,
71 (1),7-13. [Available on Blackboard]
Orwell, G.  Shooting an elephant.  In W.D. Smith (Ed.), Hypothetical reader (pp. 1-6).
Needham, MA: Allyn and Bacon.[Available on Blackboard]

Evaluation: The assessment will be based on the summary’s qualities of brevity, completeness, and objectivity, as described in Behrens and Rosen (2013, p. 4).  As an Academic Writing assignment, the summary will also be assessed for its grammatical correctness and clarity of expression.