Lesson 1: Critical Reading and Summary Writing—Foundations for Course Success
An Example of a Summary
Sometimes it is helpful to have a concrete example of the kind of writing that has been assigned. I have included here a summary that I wrote of an article that was published in Newsweek magazine a few years ago and reprinted in the ninth edition of Writing and Reading Across the Curriculum by Laurence Behrens and Leonard Rosen. The original article was four pages long and contained nineteen paragraphs. You can see that I was able to condense the original to five paragraphs, which is about one-fourth of the original.
Notice how the first sentence serves as the thesis. It names the article, the author, and provides a one sentence summary of the article’s content. Believe it or not, that was the hardest sentence to write. I actually wrote the summary before I wrote that first sentence. I tried three or four starting sentences before I found one that I felt expressed the content of the article both accurately and completely. “What is it that the author is doing? What is his or her purpose or aim?” The answer to those questions may give you a start in writing the first sentence of your summary.
In his article “We’ve Got Mail—Always” for Newsweek magazine, contributing editor Andrew Leonard examines the ways e-mail has both helped and hurt our communication with one another. Leonard opens with a question: “Is e-mail a blessing or a curse?” Offering a personal anecdote that illustrates the love-hate relationship most people have with e-mail, Leonard estimates that out of the over 1200 messages that were waiting for him when he returned from a vacation, only seven were worth reading. Leonard proclaims that e-mail is a new medium of communication that is inconvenient, wastes time, and isolates people from others, while paradoxically he says that e-mail is convenient, saves time, bridges distance, increases our productivity, and keeps people in closer touch with friends and family (240).
Leonard asserts that e-mail is more than just the latest advance in communication. He believes that it is both a cause of and reaction to the rapid pace of modern life. Noting that 225 million people worldwide have e-mail access, Leonard states that e-mail is the number one computer application that people feel they must have because e-mail helps people manage their lives. E-mail allows the disabled to transcend physical limitations; it helps people cope with the pressures of balancing work and family life; it even enables people to work from home. Moreover, e-mail assists in the search for love and romance, creates opportunities for input from workers regardless of their status in the organization, and provides an opportunity for people who might never otherwise speak out to find their voice (Leonard 241-242).
But, Leonard also reminds readers that unfortunately e-mail creates the means for some individuals to behave in ways that they never would behave in person. The dark side of email is the rudeness, intimidation, harassment, bullying, and aberrant sexual behavior that is a growing problem not only with e-mail, but also with other electronic communication environments (242).
Still another paradoxical aspect Leonard emphasizes is that e-mail simultaneously promotes and undermines literacy. He explains that people communicate in writing more, but they are also more likely to say nothing of value and say it badly. E-mail allows people to speak without thinking, and risk hurting others and embarrassing themselves (242).
Leonard concludes his article by suggesting some of the ways that e-mail is changing the way people work. Discussion groups and online conferencing enable workers to collaborate in creative new ways. But all this workplace connectivity is causing people to lose the distinction between work and personal time. Workers seem to be always on call. So does Leonard think that e-mail is a blessing or a curse? His article ends with his answer. E-mail is both a blessing and a curse (242).
Phrases like “Leonard examines…” “Leonard opens with the question…,” “Leonard estimates…” are called attribution tags. Notice that I use attribution tags periodically to cue my readers that the ideas here come from the source and are not my own. These tags remind readers that they are reading a summary. The attribution tags also serve as a transition to signal a new stage of thought in the article.
The numbers in parentheses indicate the page number where the specific information from the Leonard article can be found. This is an example of a parenthetical citation. By placing it at the end of a paragraph, I am saying to my readers that all the information in the preceding paragraph can be found on that page. The placement of the parenthetical citations together with the attribution tags make it clear that the ideas presented here are the author’s own, and not my own.
Here is a Works Cited entry that corresponds to the attribution and parenthetical citations in the text of my summary:
Leonard, Andrew. “We’ve Got Mail—Always” Newsweek. 20 September 1999. Rpt. Writing and Reading Across the Curriculum, Ninth Edition. Laurence Behrens and Leonard J. Rosen. New York. 2005.
In this entry, I not only give the original publication place and date, but I also let you know that the article was reprinted in the Behrens and Rosen text. If you want to read the original article, you now have two options for locating it.
Notice that in my summary, I did not include any of my own opinions or responses to Andrew Leonard’s ideas. I did not add what I think may be the implications of a tool that both hurts and helps us. I have tried to be as objective as possible in reporting Leonard’s ideas about the role of e-mail in modern life. No summary, however, will be perfectly objective. In determining what to include and what to leave out, I have made judgments about what information was important and what information could be considered minor. Someone else summarizing this article might have made different judgments and written a different summary.
With that said, I’d like to think that after reading my summary, you will have a good understanding of what Leonard says about e-mail, even though you have not read his article. If you want to check the accuracy and completeness of the summary, you can download the original article to read yourself here. (See source info.)
Finally, notice that a summary, unlike other types of academic essays, does not require a conclusion of your own. Rather your goal is to emphasize the way the writer concludes his or her article.
