Summarizing
Last week, your written assignment consisted of analyzing a source. This week, you will summarize a source. These two skills are useful in different situations. Both will be necessary as you work on your researched argument paper for this course. You may even discover that you will use these skills in your personal and professional life as well.
Remember that the purpose of this summary is to present the information from the reading in condensed form; your paper should be objective.
- Do not include personal opinion, personal judgments of the material, or personal narrative.
- Be brief, be as accurate as you can, and try to capture the complete sense of the reading in your summary.
Step 1:
Use the Ebscohost link to search for the following article:
Friedman, T. L., & Mandelbaum, M. (2011). America really was that great (but that doesn’t mean we are now). Foreign Policy, (189), 76-78.
As you read the article, it may be helpful to take notes, or create an outline of the text.
Step 2:
Write a summary of the article. Your summary should meet the following guidelines:
- Is between 150 and 250 words(no longer)
- Includes direct quotations and paraphrased passages from the text which are cited in APA in-text citation style
- Uses attributive tags that but establishes him or her as an authority in the field of study
- Avoids personal opinion
- Is written clearly, concisely, and accurately
- Is written solely in third-person
- Includes an APA style References page
- Has been closely edited so that it contains few or no mechanical errors
Step 3:
Summary Exercise Checklist
Use these questions to evaluate your essay against the assignment requirements:
- Does this summary meet the assignment criteria?
- Does your summary present the main ideas in the original article?
- Does this summary use effective transitions as it progresses from sentence to sentence?
- Does this summary avoid personal opinion, casual language, or first or second person language?
- Is there anything in this summary that could have been left out without losing its effect?
- Is the summary effective? Does information need to be added or deleted to complete the assignment?
