English 1102 J
Dr. Pemberton

SUMMARY WRITING ASSIGNMENT (50 Pts.)

First Draft Due: Monday, 2/9/08, in class
Final Draft Due: Tuesday, 2/10/08, in class

Purpose: Summary writing is an essential skill in virtually all academic classes and in the business and professional world outside the academy.  It draws on your ability to read critically, to comprehend the gist of what you read, and your ability to distinguish between critically important and less important information in long articles.  To a greater or lesser extent, you will be using summary skills in virtually every assignment you complete this semester.

Audience: Your audience is a group of educated peers who want to know just what the article you are summarizing is about without having to read the whole thing.  They hope to discover by reading your summary whether it will be important to read the entire article at a later date.  They expect you to be thorough – not leaving out any important parts of the argument – but concise (taking no more than a page to complete your summary). 

 Assignment: For this essay, I want each of you to choose ONE of the following two articles to summarize in a 1-page essay:

             Judith Stadtman Tucker’s “The Least Worst Choice: Why Mothers ‘Opt’ Out of the Workforce” (WID pp. 81-90)
 or
Linda Hirshman’s “Homeward Bound” (WID pp. 104-113)

In addition to the 1-2 page summary you write (minimum 300 words), you must also provide a 1-2 page outline of the article you are summarizing and a brief explanatory memo (1 page) telling me how you wrote the summary – why you included some details, why you excluded others, and why you structured it the way you did.   

First Draft:  Please bring a complete first draft of your summary to class on Monday.  The draft should be as complete as you can make it, not just an outline or a summary of part of the essay.  Since you will be sharing this draft with a classmate writing on the same essay, he or she will know the material well enough to see if the summary is incomplete.

Final Draft: The final draft of your summary should be 1-2 pages in length (and by that I mean at least one full page, not just most of one page), typed, double-spaced, with a font no larger than 12 pt. and margins no wider than 1” on all sides.  You should turn in all of the following materials in a manila folder with your final draft:

1)      Any notes, scratch outlines, and prewriting you did before the first draft

2)      The first draft and any other drafts you produced.  (Printing out a clean copy after making a few minor editing changes does not really count as an additional draft.)

3)      The final draft of the summary

4)      The outline of the article

5)      The evaluation(s) written by your reviewer(s)

6)      A one page “Writer’s Reflection”  (see below)

Writer’s Reflection: For this paper, the writer’s reflection will be the one-page memo described above, telling me how you wrote the summary – why you included some details, why you excluded others, and why you structured it the way you did.  In this memo, you may also talk about questions or problems that arose as you constructed the summary, what changes you would make if you had the opportunity to write another draft, what you learned by writing this summary, etc.  In essence, you should try to stand back from your essay and talk about your writing process and the decisions you made as a writer. 

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