Instructions
As you know, your first major assignment will be to adapt a scholarly article to a different genre, whether a newspaper or magazine feature article (like the one by Kennicott) or a blog-post (like the one by Emerson). For this exercise, you must have chosen the scholarly article you will adapt, provide a summary of the article, explain what challenges you foresee in adapting it. You should also provide a correct MLA citation for the article.
Guidelines
Imagine the audience for the summary to be people who have a background in the article’s broad subject-matter. They have asked you to summarize this article (and presumably others) because they want to keep tabs on scholarly work in the field but don’t have time to read every article themselves.
Start by briefly explaining how you know your source is a scholarly article, not some other genre. In what publication does it appear? How do you know this publication is an academic journal? What conventions does it follow that conform to scholarly expectations?
The summary should then identify the article’s thesis, quote and cite it, and explain the article’s major supporting arguments. It should briefly discuss what kinds of evidence the author presents in support of the thesis.
Except for the thesis, you should not quote the article. The whole point of a summary is to convey the article’s major arguments in fewer words. When you quote, you obviously do not shorten anything. Paraphrasing allows you to shorten a passage from the original source a little, but even paraphrase will be of limited use here. Summarize instead.
Do not provide any specific citations in the summary, other than the one for the thesis, plus the works cited entry at the end. By definition, a summary presents only ideas that appear in the article itself. If you were to cite those ideas, you would need to cite every sentence in your summary, which is obviously silly.
You should not write your summary as all one paragraph: as always, proper paragraphing is one of the best tools you have to make your writing clear.
Once you have concluded the summmary, add a commentary in which you explain what genre you plan to adapt it to, and what you think will be the biggest challenge in that assignment and why.
The summary should be 450-500 words, not including the thesis statement that you quote. The commentary should be approximately 50 words.