Standard Summary Assignment

Standard Summary Assignment
Summary (each summary is worth 5% of final grade)

Write a 300-500 word summary of the article. This summary will consist of a few paragraphs that summarize the main and supporting points of the article.
Objectives
• Master pre-reading and reading strategies for different texts
• Understand how genre and intended audience shapes reading and writing
• Determine the logic to the ordering of ideas in a text and identify transitions as signposts to the different parts of texts
• Annotate a reading by identifying main ideas and supporting evidence
• Recognize the effect of perspective and purpose on tone, organization, and vocabulary choice
• Summarize accurately

To complete this assignment successfully
• Read and annotate the article, noting in the margins the main purpose of each paragraph
• Underline the main points of the article and number the evidence that supports it
• Try making an outline of the article
• Determine the article’s thesis (implicit or explicit)
• Make a list of what to include in your summary.
• Draft, paying careful attention to attribution of ideas and/or citations
• Review paraphrases
• Revise

Checklist
Content:
o Do you correctly surmise the thesis of the article?
o Do you accurately report all the main and supporting points for this thesis?
o Have you represented the author’s ideas clearly without distortion?
o Have you represented the authors ides concisely without including unnecessary detail?
o Have you used attributive tags to discuss the author’s arguments?
o Have you used your own words with few quotes and adequate paraphrase?
o Have you followed summary conventions mentioning the title and the author of the article?
o Have you included a works cited page?

Organization:
o Is your summary organized logically so as to clearly present the argument of the article (without necessarily mirroring the original order of the article)?
o Have you used transitions to smoothly link the supporting points to the main points?
o Do you differentiate (if necessary) between more important and less important reasons through transitional words?

Style:
o Is the summary typed and double spaced?
o Is the essay clean stylistically, using concise and clear sentences, strong verbs and active voice, and sentence variety?
o Is the essay grammatically correct?

Summary Grading Criteria (for students)

Summary Grading Criteria (for instructors)

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