Overview
Summary: it sounds so simple, so ordinary. What did you do today? What happened in class? Tell me about your trip to France? If you ask a friend these questions, a summary ensues. The asker doesn’t want the whole story—just the most important, lively details enriched by their friend’s unique perspective.
A staple in the art of everyday life, summary is also a crucial tool within any academic discourse. Scholars are constantly summarizing the views of others as a way to educate their audience even as they subtly set the stage for their own argument. This assignment asks you to practice and strengthen your summary skills by writing a 3-4 page summary of, and response to, a scholarly article on Baldwin’s Giovanni’s Room.
From Summary to Response
Your essay should begin by making clear the author’s central argumentative claim before mapping out the most important steps of that argument. Work to bring the essay to life for your reader by accurately representing the argument; in order to do this, try to imagine a reader who has read neither Giovanni’s Room nor the essay you are summarizing. An excellent summary will do its best to condense and clarify even very complicated arguments.
A strong summary will be clearly written, lively, concise, and well-organized. Furthermore, your summary should reflect a complete and fair understanding of the essay being discussed. Your tone, at the start, should be objective: think of a perfectly clear window. As the summary progresses, however, try to make more strategic word choices in order to signal the tone of your coming response. Here, you might think of a slightly tinted window that colors the argument just so as you subtly convince your reader to see the author’s essay from your perspective.
In the context of academic engagement with scholarly sources, one rarely summarizes with pure objectivity. Rather, one often summarizes only as a prelude to a more engaged or subjective response. In your summary, you should have already tinted that clear and objective window of summary just slightly using a word here or there that signals your point of view. The second part of this assignment asks you to respond to the argument. Here, your own voice will emerge more powerfully as you react explicitly to the arguments that the author lays out. This engaged final section of the summary should emerge naturally from your summary.
Your engaged response, which should comprise about 25% of the paper, might agree or disagree with the article’s central claims—or, better yet, it might do a little of both. Alternately, you might pay particular attention to the strength or weakness one of the supporting points, or you might take a more extrinsic approach and relate her ideas to a broader set of theoretical concepts, or to a particular cultural context. Finally, you should feel free to bring in a new example from the book that either supports or contradicts or complicates her main point. In this way, your summary could be viewed less as a “response” and more as an argumentative “extension” of one or more of her main points.
How to Proceed: Some Dos and Don’ts
Your first paragraph needs to very briefly set the stage for summary by introducing the author and the source. You will also need to provide a bird’s eye view of the author’s main argument. As this assignment is primarily focused on summary, you do not need to include your own argumentative thesis.
Your body paragraphs should each be dedicated to summarizing one of the author’s key points, or a set of related points. Keep in mind that you cannot cover every detail in the selected article. You will have to make strategic choices about what to include and what to exclude, clustering similar ideas and recasting them in concise and unified paragraphs.
While you might choose to incorporate a few brief quotes in certain cases, or where you are responding directly to something she writes, I expect you to own the author’s argument by recasting it in your own terms and through your carefully considered organizational choices. That is, I do not want you to rely heavily on quotation and paraphrase.
It is too easy for comprehensive attempts at summary to devolve into a mere “list” summary that proceeds blandly in series of phrases such as “then,” “also,” “next,” “after,” and “furthermore.” Do your best to avoid such words. The strongest summaries are not play-by-play reenactments; rather, they stand on their own in terms of organization and style. Again: you need to own this thing!
We will be discussing the rhetorical features of the “journal article” genre. This summary is not a rhetorical analysis of those features, but understanding these features will help inform your summary in key ways (more on this next week).
Revision Process
We will begin discussing the academic article in class, developing outlines and organizational strategies for our summaries. Rough drafts of your Summary and Response essays will be due via Oaks at the time noted in the schedule. You will also bring two hard copies to class on the appointed day, as we will hold both a larger group and a peer-review workshop of your rough drafts.