SUMMARY GUIDELINES

Assignment Overview The summary assignment shouldnt take you long, but its important that you have mastered the skills of summary prior to working with source material for your other projects. Though the most obvious purpose of summarizing is to show that you understand the main ideas of an article or book you have read, there are many other uses for summary skills, both within and beyond academia. Please refer to the learning outcomes below and let me know if you have any questions. Learning Outcomes o Identify main & supporting ideas in your selected source material. o Demonstrate that you know when to get to the point quickly & when its appropriate to include an example or illustration. o Put ideas of your source in your own words without distorting meaning. o Produce accurate, objective, clear prose. o Correctly document source material using MLA format & style. o Craft a professional final product that flows smoothly from point to point and is error-free. Selecting an Article to Summarize You may draw your article from an online publication or a print journal, but it must be an article, not a blog, webpage, or other less formal source. The article must be ten years old or less. Relevant electronic journals you can access through Trumans JSTOR portal include: Western Folklore, The Journal of American Folklore, Journal of Folklore Research, Asian Ethnology, Missouri Folklore Society, and Asian Folklore Studies. Summary Process o Read the article all the way through using your normal process. o Re-read at least once, marking the main idea & any supporting ideas. I recommend you focus on section headings & subheadings, bolded or italicized words, or any other visual cues that the author is presenting a particularly important point. o Identify the main sections of the article, and write a one sentence summary of each. o Write a one sentence summary of the entire article that captures its thesis. o For your first draft, focus on including all of the main ideas. An easy way to start the summary is with a sentence like In her recent article titled Soup to Nuts, theorist Penelope Smith explores the reasons for the upsurge in interest in home cooking and fine dining in the past ten years. You could

o o o

o o

o o

then piece together the rest using your one sentence summaries of the main ideas. The trick is to put the original in your own words as much as possible without inserting your own opinions. Only include direct quotation from the piece sparingly and when absolutely necessary. Revise to add necessary supporting points, transitional words and phrases, and to combine sentences to avoid unnecessary repetition or jerky movement. Take special care with how you integrate source material.1 Make sure to use paragraph breaks to organize ideas and for greater readability. Check your summary against the original one more time. I always suggest you read your work aloud so you can hear if there are places that dont sound quite right. This works even better if you can record yourself and play it back or have a friend read it aloud so you can hear if s/he stumbles anywhere. Do any further necessary editing to cut the summary down to no longer than 500 words. Finally, edit for correct grammar, usage, and mechanics, and make sure you have properly cited.

Checklist for Submission o Have you included all the main & supporting points from the original in your summary? o Have you edited to eliminate unnecessary words or even unnecessary sentences? o Have you excised any places where your own point of view comes through? o Have you created a smooth flow of ideas that doesnt rely on listing first, second, third, or some similarly clunky series of transitions? o Have you put any direct quotations in quotation marks and cited the page number(s)? o Have included a Works Cited entry at the end of your summary? o Have you added your no longer than 420 character response directly after the Works Cited entry? Submit no later than 9:00 a.m. Monday, 12 September through Weebly assignment tab. If you run into trouble, send it to me as a document attachment via email: priggle@truman.edu.
1

Working with quotation and paraphrase may not come naturally to you. Heres a nice source that provides basic information about how to do this (please note that the kind of writing he uses for his examples is not summarybut the same strategies work): http://www.sjsu.edu/faculty/patten/usingquotes.html