“The Maker’s Eye: Revising Your Own Manuscripts”

  The summary should cover the document in its totality, from beginning to end. The challenge here will be to distill the work down as accurately as possible into a smaller and smaller form. Purpose: The ability to write an effective summary is one of the most fundamental and important writing skills that any writer can possess. Much of academic writing requires you to enter a conversation among experts, and to do this, you must demonstrate that you have accurately understood the positions of the people your work responds to. Process: This summary will demonstrate that you have closely read your chosen text. Remember, you are just summarizing – not analyzing or responding. You are explaining what the main ideas of the text and the details which support it. In order to achieve this, you may find the following strategies helpful: • Write the longest (300-word) summary first. Briefly introduce the text in the beginning of your summary so your readers know the exact text you are summarizing. Include the author’s name, the date of publication, and the publication title within the first few sentences. • Focus on the writer’s major arguments, central ideas, and main claims. Show that you understand the “big picture” – the writer’s purpose and how they support it. • Though integrating some important examples or quotations will be effective, you do not want to get mired in the specific details. Include only the key phrases and terms that are central to the text and an explanation of what those mean and how they are