Summary Guidelines

Reading Summaries - Guidelines

One of your course requirements is to write and submit a certain number of summaries of reading assignments (see syllabus for exact number and any specific deadlines). Below are some guidelines for writing these summaries.

Purpose

Summaries have at least two purposes. First, they are part of your participation grade because they help to prevent you from falling behind in your reading assignments. When students feel time pressures, reading assignments are one of the first things to be abandoned. Yet if you write regular summaries, you are more likely to contribute to class discussion and less likely to be unprepared for exams or paper assignments. (Good summaries can be helpful study aids.)

Second, summaries help you focus on the main points of an assigned reading. You cannot write an accurate summary unless you make careful choices about what is important or central in a text. This includes filtering out material that is not essential; as noted below, summaries can be too long as well as too short.

How to Write a Successful Summary

• A summary should be approximately one, and certainly no more than two, double-spaced, typed pages with 1” margins. (Summaries that are significantly shorter than one page, or more than two, may be returned for no credit.) If your summary is two pages, please staple in the upper left.

• Summaries must be submitted at the start of the class period in which the reading will be discussed. If multiple readings are assigned for a class period, you may choose which reading to summarize; however, only one summary may be submitted per class. If you are absent, you may arrange to have someone else deliver the summary. Summaries may not be transmitted via e-mail. No late summaries will be accepted for any reason.

• All summaries should have a heading using the same, single-spaced format. In the top left, put your name and date. In the top right, put the course number and which number summary it is, e.g., Summary #5. (This assures that your count and mine are the same.) On the third line indicate the reading you are summarizing, listing title and author. (See sample summary for a heading example.)

• In the body of the summary:

• Restate the author’s main points in the order they have been presented. A summary is not simply a compilation of random notes. Your task is to present the author’s argument and key evidence. It may help to use the first sentence or two to briefly summarize the overall argument.

• Identify the author’s argument, not your view on the subject. Although you are not prohibited from including your reaction to what you read, the point of the summary is to restate the author’s key points. If you devote too much space to your view and too little to the text, you can expect me return the summary without credit.

• Put the author’s main points in your own words. You may NOT quote from the reading in these summaries. Be careful: any quotations, inadvertent or otherwise, that are submitted under your name without proper sourcing constitutes plagiarism, and will bring serious punitive consequences.

• Divide your summary into paragraphs, one for each of the author’s key points. (Failure to divide a summary into paragraphs is a warning sign that you have not followed the structure of the author’s argument.) When a text contains headings, you can often use these as a guide in organizing your summary, with (generally) one summary paragraph per heading.

• Summarize the entire argument, and not just the first few pages. Summaries that cover only part of the assigned reading will be returned without credit. (Again, summaries should only cover ONE text, even if more than one reading is assigned for a particular class.)

• Submit only the required number of summaries for the semester. If you accidentally submit an extra summary, you will not receive credit for it.

Grading

Summaries are not graded with letter grades. Either a summary is acceptable (marked with a check mark), or it is not. As suggested above, failure to follow the above guidelines may lead me to return a summary without credit. I will likely consider a summary unacceptable if it:

• Is too short (only half a page);
• Is too long (over two pages);
• Only covers a small part of the reading;
• Devotes a considerable amount of space to your views instead of the author’s;
• Presents the author’s words, not yours;
• Violates these guidelines in any other way.

If a particular summary shows considerable merit—i.e., it is organized exceedingly well, it clearly and comprehensively presents the author’s argument in its entirety, and it is free of grammatical and mechanical errors—I may mark it as an “exceptional” summary (with a check-plus mark). Exceptional summaries help increase your class participation grade.

We will spend some time in class going over these guidelines, and will cover summaries again after you have had the chance to submit a few. I encourage you to SUBMIT YOUR SUMMARIES EARLY; do not run out of time to complete the required number.