From Inquiry to Academic Writing A Practical Guide, 3rd edition

156 CHAPTER 7 | FRom SummARy To SynTHESiS

Writing a Summary

As you have seen, a summary condenses a body of information, present-

ing the key ideas and acknowledging the source. A common activity or

assignment in a composition class is to summarize a text. you may be

asked to read a text, reduce it to its main points, and convey them, without

any details or examples, in a written summary. The goal of this assignment

is to sharpen your reading and thinking skills as you learn to distinguish

between main ideas and supporting details. Being able to distill informa-

tion in this manner is crucial to critical thinking.

However, summarizing is not an active way to make an argument.

While summaries do provide a common ground of information for your

readers, you must shape that information to support the purposes of

your researched argument with details that clarify, illustrate, or support

their main ideas for your readers.

We suggest a method of summarizing that involves

1. describing the author’s key claims,


2. selecting examples to illustrate the author’s argument,


3. presenting the gist of the author’s argument, and


4. contextualizing what you summarize.
   We demonstrate these steps for writing a summary following Clive
   Thompson’s article “On the New Literacy.”

A Practice Sequence: Paraphrasing

■^1 In one of the sources you’ve located in your research, find a sen-

tence of some length and complexity, and paraphrase it. Share the

original and your paraphrase of it with a classmate, and discuss

the effectiveness of your restatement. Is the meaning clear to your

reader? Is the paraphrase written in your own language, using

your own sentence structure?

■^2 repeat the activity using a short paragraph from the same source.

you and your classmate may want to attempt to paraphrase the

same paragraph and then compare results. What differences do

you detect?

On the New Literacy

A print journalist at New York Magazine, Clive Thompson started his blog,

Collision Detection, in September 2002, when he was beginning his year

CLive ThOmpsON

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