Enrichment English
Summarizing
The ability to summarize is an important academic skill that can be applied to a variety of purposes: reviewing lecture and text material for examinations, condensing key texts to include in term papers or class presentations, briefly retelling a narrative as part of a critical evaluation, or digesting technical material for decision making in a field situation.
To summarize a book, a textbook chapter, an article, or any other long piece of writing requires that you condense the content to its essentials:
Its identification—title, author, date (where relevant), purpose, audience, and writing level where this is related to purpose.
Its overall main idea and the most important subtopics or supporting ideas.
The most significant supporting details, examples, or methods of development.
The author’s main conclusion(s) based on the material presented in the text.
The length of a summary in relation to the original material varies. For shorts articles, one rough determination is to have approximately the same number of summary sentences as there are paragraphs in the original. Another is to have the summary be about 15-25 percent of the length of the original piece.
Characterization of a Summary:
A summary generally has the following characteristics of organization and style:
* It is written in ordinary paragraph-essay form, although it may contain various kinds of lists for the purpose of brevity.
* It begins with the identification of the material to be summarized.
* It clearly states the overall main idea of the original work.
* It discusses the author’s main points and their supporting details in the order followed in the original.
* It is written in the reader’s own words, which filter and condense the author’s thoughts.
* It does not include large pieces of direct quotations from the original.
* It does not contain the reader’s reaction to or opinions about the piece.
Writing a Summary
The prerequisite to writing a good summary is a thorough, careful reading of the original the first time. While reading the text, you should underscore, take notes in the margin, or in some other way annotate the main ideas and significant details. Then you can use these notations for your summary,
l Mapping the Selection
Prior to summarizing, skin the selection so you can group together those paragraphs that deal with the same major topic or idea. Use a separate sheet of paper to “map” the selection, that is, to list the paragraphs that go together, to state the topic of the grouped paragraphs, and to express the main idea, viewpoint, or topic development of the ground unit.
l Summary Introduction
Begin the summary with a statement that identifies the original piece. Indicate the author’s overall main idea and purpose.
In The Silent Language, anthropologist Edward Hall theorizes that certain aspects of perception such as those of time and space are learned “out of awareness”, without our knowing we have learned them. Hall’s book is intended for non-specialists. Its purpose is to reduce cross-cultural misunderstanding in daily life. It is written in a highly readable style with many interesting, specific examples.Note the italicized expression theorizes. This verb is important to a summary since it is a key part of the main idea statement. The following list contains other useful verb combinations:
Analyzes a situation or structure (divides it into its different components)
Explains a situation (makes something intelligible to the reader)
Compares or contrasts two or three items (shows how they are similar to or different from each other in related and significant areas.
Discusses a situation or problem (investigates or debates a question by presenting its various sides in objective language).
Describes a structure, environment, or series of events (presents a mental picture by using concrete words; presents the characteristics of someone or something).
Evaluates a work or a result (examines with the purpose of placing a value on something).
l Composing the Summary body
After mapping the original text and writing the summary introduction, you are ready to compose the summary using your mapped material as a basis. As you proceed, check the original piece for specific points or developmental patterns to include. But, do not use whole sentences or pieces of the text for your summary. Do not use the writer’s figures of speech. If you find yourself copying more than a few words from the original, stop and ask yourself, what is the main idea of this piece of text? Say the answer aloud without looking at the text, and then write down what you said. This technique will help you summarize properly in your own words.
l Revising for Efficiency
The following items were written by various students as part of their summaries of an article on engineering and the recent changes that have taken place in both the field and the type of person who enters that field. The items are not necessarily incorrect, but they are too wordy for a summary and could benefit from revision. Utilize adjective clauses, descriptive phrases, and parallel items in your revisions. Follow the directions for each and rewrite it on a separate sheet of paper.
a. (1) Times are changing in engineering. (2) This is the factor that has changed, that engineers used to be males who came from workingclass families, but now many engineering students come from families that are more middle and even upper class.
(Use adjectives to reduce relative clauses; reduces the number of clauses in (2)).
b. (1) In the last two decades, not only the social background of engineers has changed. (2) The racial and sexual composition has changed, too. (3) And also, the national background of engineers has changed, as there are now many foreign students in engineering. (4) This is in addition to all the women and minority Americans who are becoming engineers.
(Combine the information in (2) and (3) into a series; combine the related information of (3) and (4) into a series sentence.)
c. (1) Engineering does not guarantee a job. (2) it depends on the economic situation. (3) It also depends on the supply of engineers. (4) An average of 53,000 engineering jobs was open yearly until 1985. (5) Most of these jobs were in private industry. (6) The average engineer will begin with $28,000, whereas the liberal arts graduate may only earn around $ 24,000 in his or her first working years.
(Combine sentences so that there are no more than four; eliminate some detailed information that is too specific for a summary)
d. (1) The kinds of engineering jobs that are employing new engineers who are recent engineering school graduates are electrical engineering, civil engineering, and mechanical engineering. (2) These are the different kinds of engineering jobs open nowadays.
(Reduce to one sentence with as little repetition as possible.)
e. (1) In this article the author says that engineering is the only field in which women start with higher salaries than men do. (2) I think the author is wrong here, because men and women studying the same field and getting the same position are supposed to get the same salary. (3) Also, women have little difficulty finding a job in engineering.
(Eliminate one sentence as an opinion.)
Summary Writing Exercise
The following story is from a book about technical disasters during opera performances. Read it carefully, more than once if you want, and then fill in the blanks with appropriate words.
Tosca: City Center, New York, 1960
This catastrophe is due, not to misunderstanding and incompetence, but entirely to ill-will between the stage staff and the soprano(女高音). With diabolical sunning they permitted her, after several stormy rehearsals, to complete her first performance without mishap until the very last moment, when Tosca throws herself off the battlements of the Castel Sant’Angelo. What normally happens if that on her cry “Scarpia, vavanti a Dio” she hurls herself off the lands on a mattress four feet below. This large young American singer landed not on a mattress, but—perish the thought—on a trampoline(蹦床). It is said that she came up fifteen times before the curtain fell—sometimes upside down, the right way up—now laughing in delirious glee, now screaming with rage….Worse still, it seems that the unhappy lady was unable to reappear in New York because the Center’s faithful audience, remembering the trampoline, would have burse into laughter. She had to remove herself to San Francisco, where of course no such grotesque incident could possible occur…
Summary:
In New York in 1960, the ______in Tosca was not very friendly with the ______workers. So instead of giving her a ______to fall on when she ______from the castle in the last act, they gave her a ______. Instead of disappearing, she ______up behind the battlements again and again. She had to ______New York as a result of this incident.
Unit 1
An Animal’s Place
Michael Pollan
1 The first time I opened Peter Singer’s “Animal Liberation,” I was dining alone at the Palm, trying to enjoy a rib-eye steak cooked medium-rare. If this sounds like a good recipe for cognitive dissonance (if not indigestion), that was sort of the idea. Preposterous as it might seem, to supporters of animals rights, what I was doing was tantamount to reading “ Uncle Tom’s Cabin” on a plantation in the Deep South in 1852.
2 Singer and the swelling ranks of his followers ask us to imagine a future in which people will look back on my meal, and this steakhouse, as relics of an equally backward age. Eating animals, wearing animals, experimenting on animals, killing animals for sports: all these practices, so resolutely normal to us, will be seen as the barbarities they are, and we will come to view “speciesism”---a neologism I had encountered before only in jokes---as a form of discrimination as indefensible as racism or anti-Semitism.
3 Even in 1975, when “Animal Liberation” was first published, Singer, an Australian philosopher now teaching at Princeton, was confident that he had the wind of history at his back. The recent civil rights past was prologue, as one liberation movement followed on the heels of another. Slowly but surely, the white man’s circle of moral consideration was expanded to admit first blacks, then women, then homosexual. In each case, a group once thought to be different from the prevailing “we” as to be undeserving of civil rights was, after a struggle, admitted to the club. Now it was animals’ turn.
4 That animal liberation is the logical next step in the forward march of moral progress is no longer the fringe idea. A growing and increasingly influential movement of philosophers, ethicists, law professors and activists are convinced that the great moral struggle of our time will be for the rights of animals.
5 So far the movement has scored some of its biggest victories in Europe. Earlier this year, Germany became the first nation to grant animals a constitutional right: the words “and animals” were added to a provision obliging the state to respect and protect the dignity of human beings. The farming of animals for fur was recently banned in England. In several European nations, sows may no longer be confined to crates nor laying hens to “battery cages”---stacked wired cages so small the birds cannot stretch their wings. The Swiss are amending their laws to change the status of animals from “things” to “beings.”
6 Though animals are still very much “things” in the eyes of American law, change is in the air. Thirty seven states have recently passed laws making some forms of animal cruelty a crime, 21 of them by ballot initiative. Following protests by activists, McDonald’s and Burger King forced significant improvements in the way the U.S. meat industry slaughters animals. Agribusiness and the cosmetics and apparel industries are all struggling to defuse mounting public concerns over animal welfare.
7 Once thought of as a left-wing concern, the movement now cuts across ideological lines. Perhaps the most eloquent recent plea on behalf of animals, a new book called “Dominion” was written by a former speechwriter for President Bush. And once outlandish ideas are finding their way into mainstream opinion. A recent Zogby poll found that 51 percent of Americans believe that primates are entitled to the same rights as human children.
8 What is going on here? A certain amount of cultural confusion, for one thing. For at the same time many people seem eager to extend the circle of our moral consideration to animals, in our factory farms and laboratories we are inflicting more suffering on more animals than at any time in history. One by one, science is dismantling our claims to uniqueness as a species, discovering that such things as culture, tool-making, language and even possibly self-consciousness are not the exclusive domain of Homo sapiens. Yet most of the animals we killed lead lives organized very much in the spirit of Descartes, who famously claimed that animals were mere machines, incapable of thought and feelings. There is a schizoid quality to our relationship with animals, in which sentiment and brutality exist side by side. Half the dogs in America will receive Christmas presents this year, yet few of us pause to consider the miserable life of the pig---an animal easily as intelligent as a dog---that becomes the Christmas ham.
9 We tolerate the disconnect because of the life of the pig has moved out of view. When is the last time you saw a pig? Except for our pets, real animals---animal living and dying---no longer figure in our everyday lives. Meat comes from the grocery store, where it is cut and packed to look as little like parts of animals as possible. The disappearance of animals from our lives has opened a space in which there is no reality check, either on the sentiment or the brutality. This is pretty much where we live now, with respect to animals, and it is a space in which the Peter Singers and Frank Perdues of the world can evidently thrive equally well.