Overview

The academic summary provides readers an opportunity to practice their reading skills and strategies. Reading is an active process; we must do more than merely glance at words and sentences to understand the full scope of a text. To learn and apply knowledge, we must practice close and critical reading strategies in order to understand the main idea, supporting ideas, and to consider connections to other aspects of the academic conversation around that topic.

Course Objectives

Module Objectives

Assignment sheet

Week 1: Reading Strategies

Reading is an activity we participate in daily, whether it’s watching tv, listening to music, or scrolling through social media. Much like writing, we can have different purposes for reading. This module will ask you to become an intentional reader by thinking about why you are reading while you read, rather than after.

Usually, when we read something in our spare time, we don’t need to prove or demonstrate our understanding to anyone else. However, reading for academic purposes often means that you will need to use the information you’ve read in some way. For example, you may read from a textbook and then need to demonstrate that you have understood and retained that information when taking an exam. You may read scholarly articles and need to apply that information by conducting an experiment.

Before we talk about how to read for academic purposes, think about your own experiences with reading:

1. What type of reading do you do most frequently?
2. What do you do when you don’t understand something you’ve read?
3. Can you think of a time when you had to read something for school and then use that knowledge in another situation, such as for a paper or project?
4. What is your process for reading something for college?

Hopefully, those questions have sparked some reflection about what you do (and don’t!) know about how to be an effective reader. Now, we’ll explore some ways in which you can be more intentional when you read for college.

Reading Strategies

Below are some of the most common strategies you might use when reading for academic purposes. These strategies can help you not only understand what you’ve read, but will help you take that information and use it for various purposes. Feel free to tell your instructor and peers about other strategies that you have found useful.

• Read more than once.
  • The first time you watch a tv show, what do you pay attention to? You’re probably getting to know the characters and trying to figure out the plot. When you watch the show again, you might notice things like foreshadowing, the location, dialogue, and how the show is similar to (or different from) others in the same genre. The same process will happen when you reread. Once you’ve understood the main idea, go back and see if you can distinguish the supporting ideas, or better understand how the text was organized to achieve its purpose.
• Skim and scan.
  • This process is similar to what you did when you first joined this class. You likely took a look at the syllabus or the online material and skimmed through to see what sections were included. Once you saw the sections or modules, that helped you understand what to expect before you delved into the details of reading the syllabus.
  • When skimming and scanning, look for: the index, headings, chapters, titles, and subtitles. You can practice skimming and scanning in this text! Each module in First-Year Composition includes an index and different level headers to signal what’s coming next.
• Highlight important words, phrases, and concepts. 
  • In textbooks, the author may highlight, bold, or underline these for you. What if you’re reading a newspaper article or a scholarly article where the author assumes that you can figure out the important ideas yourself? Look for common themes, metaphors, references, or ideas that connect to or contrast with one another.
  • You can also highlight words or phrases that stand out to you. Was there a particularly impactful quote or example? Perhaps there was a story or piece of evidence that helped you better understand the main idea, a supporting idea, or the topic.
  • Avoid going overboard with your highlighter! If you highlight too much of the text, it will be difficult to go back and try to identify the information you really need.
• Look up words, events, people, and concepts you are unfamiliar with.
  • You’ll encounter unfamiliar words often when reading for different classes. You may even see different authors using the same words to mean different things! Understanding the various meanings of words, especially in different contexts like biology, psychology, literature, or another field of study, can help you understand exactly what the author meant.
  • Chances are, if an author has referenced a historical event or an important figure, they did so for a reason. Don’t let that reference pass you by! You can learn a lot about what the author believes if you understand most, if not all, of their references. Think about the impact of a meme that you understand, versus one that’s so obscure that it evokes no reactions. You don’t want the full impact of the text to pass you by.
• Take notes. You can make notes in various ways:
  • Your personal reaction or opinions. Write notes in the margins as if you are responding to the author during a conversation. You can use this to prompt your own response or argument later.
  • Connections between what you are reading, and other articles, news, or ideas. Does the text remind you of anything else you’ve read or heard? How does it relate to recent news or events in the world? Has anything happened since the text was published that makes you think about the topic differently? You can use this information to analyze and evaluate a text, or to better understand the conversation about that topic.

Check-in and Questions

1. Which of the above strategies do you already use?
2. Which do you think will be the most helpful for you in this class?
3. Are there any additional strategies you would add to this list?

Close and critical reading:

Reading academically means understanding what you’ve read and having the ability to think critically about it. The first time you read a text, concentrate on reading closely. This will ensure you’ve understood the basics of the text.

To read closely, think about the WH-questions:

• WHO wrote it? This is the author(s).
• WHEN did they write? The date of publication can tell your audience a lot about the context.
• WHERE did they write it? This usually refers to the publisher (e.g. The New York Times, The Atlantic, The Washington Post, etc.) but it can also refer to the part of the world the article was published in. This is also an important part of the context.
• WHAT did they write? This includes the main and supporting ideas.

These four questions will help you to summarize; to be intentional readers, identify them while you are reading. The above reading strategies can help you identify and make note of those aspects of the article.

You likely noticed that there are two WH-questions missing:

• WHY did they write it?
• HOW did they write it?

While these are useful questions for reading critically, for now we will leave them aside. Critical thinking is a necessary step to achieving many different writing purposes, such as applying, analyzing, evaluating, defending, arguing, critiquing, or creating ideas. For this assignment, concentrate on understanding and describing the texts you’ve chosen by answering the first four WH-questions.

Week 2: Academic Summaries

As you read the articles for this unit, don’t forget to read with intention. That means you are not only thinking about what you need to understand, but why. What is your purpose for reading? In this case, you should explain the full scope of the text to your audience.

What is an academic summary?

Academic summaries help you demonstrate that you’ve understood something you’ve read, and test your ability to communicate what you’ve learned to an audience who is unfamiliar with the text. As a distinct genre, your audience will have specific expectations of an academic summary. Academic summaries help audiences to understand long, often complicated texts without having read them. They can also help audiences decide if they want to read the complete article.

As with other genres, your audience will expect there to be certain information present in your academic summary. This information will help you achieve your purpose (to explain and describe) more effectively.

Check-in and Questions

1. Think of a time when you’ve explained the plot of a movie or book to a friend. What kind of information did they want to know?
2. How do you think an academic summary is different from the previous experience with your friend?

What to Include in an Academic Summary

If your purpose is to demonstrate understanding and describe the article to your audience, then you’ll need to make sure you include enough information so that they get a complete picture of what the author said. There is some basic information that every academic summary should include:

• Author, place, and time of publication: This information is usually located at the beginning of the article. Don’t forget to include when and where the article was published! This is important contextual information for your audience because it tells your audience what was happening around the time of publication, and what type of publication accepted their ideas.
• Main idea: This includes both the topic of the article, and the author’s point. What is their argument or claim?
• Key points: The key points help the author to demonstrate why their argument or claim is true. They may help the audience understand the topic better, or they may be persuade the audience to agree with the author’s view of the topic.
• Connections between ideas. Remember that a summary is not a bullet-point list of the ideas in the article. In order to give your audience a complete idea of what the author intended to say, explain how the ideas are related to one another by using transition phrases.

Characteristics of Academic Summaries

Academic summaries are more than a list of information; your audience will have other expectations of the tone, voice, length, and format of your summary. Below are some other characteristics to keep in mind.

• Concise. All summaries are concise, meaning they are shorter than the original text. They will typically take complex ideas and put them into fewer words. After all, why would someone read a summary of an article that’s longer than the article itself?
• Objective. A summary is about description, not evaluation. While you may have strong feelings about what the author wrote, the audience just wants to know what was written. Don’t forget your purpose for writing!
• Accurate. Readers will expect your summary to accurately represent the ideas, opinions, facts, and judgements made in the text. Don’t misrepresent or manipulate the author’s words. Being accurate relies heavily on your ability to understand the article, so you may need to reread or revisit your notes to ensure accuracy.
• Comprehensive. A summary covers the entire text. Don’t avoid sections you didn’t understand, or didn’t think were important. Each key point should be present in your summary.
• Include attribution. Your summary describes someone else’s ideas, and not your own. Whether you are writing in MLA, APA, or another citation style, you need to be very clear that any facts, opinions, or ideas are coming from the author of the article that you are reading. Never assume that your audience knows where information is coming from!
• Clear to an audience who has not read the source text. Check your summary for any complex terms, ideas, or references that your audience might be unfamiliar with or may have a difficult time understanding. If the author explained those ideas to you, it’s likely that you will need to explain them to your audience as well. Remember, you know far more about the text than your audience does, so it’s your job to anticipate when they may or may not understand.

Week 3: Revising Your Rough Draft

By now, you have written two rough draft summaries. Now it’s time to review others’ final drafts and revise your own before submitting your final draft.

Your summary might read like a checklist of information, rather than an explanation of what the author discussed in their article. An important aspect of your summary is the use of strong and neutral verbs.

Strong and Neutral Verbs

Strong verbs indicate the author’s main idea. Since the main idea is not just the topic, but how the author feels about the topic, use a strong verb to tell your audience what the author believed about the topic, or what they wanted the audience to believe.

Some examples of strong verbs include: argue, assert, claim, believe, think, dispute, disagree, allege, stress, stand up for, defend

Neutral verbs tell us about the supporting ideas. Because these ideas aren’t the main focus of the article, the verbs you use to describe them should indicate examples or ideas that the author shares to support their main idea.

Some examples of neutral verbs include: state, describe, explain, say, explore, express, present, give, discuss, mention, report, suggest, communicate, remark

As with all writing, these are guidelines, rather than rules. You may find it appropriate to use a strong verb to discuss a supporting idea because the author expressed a strong opinion about that idea.

Peer Workshop & Sample Summaries

Below is a sample paper that is lacking much of the information that an academic summary requires. Based on what you’ve read in this module, read the sample and then answer the following questions.

1. What are some of the issues present in this academic summary?
2. What suggestions would you give the writer if you read this academic summary during workshop?

Suggested schedule/pacing

The academic summary should take about three weeks to account for reading the available articles as a class, discussing academic summaries and identifying main ideas and key points, MLA, and revision. As one of the assignments with a heavy emphasis on reading, it could be used in place of the summary/response or in conjunction. After reading the two rough draft summaries (and/or the literacy narrative) you should have a better idea of whether your class would benefit from more time on close and critical reading, or if you can move on to more research-focused assignments.

For students to gain more practice and feedback on summary writing, one option is to have them complete two rough draft summaries, turn them in for feedback, and then choose one that they will revise for the final draft. That process would take more advanced planning in order to account for the extra feedback.

Students’ success in this assignment relies heavily on the correct understanding and interpretation of their chosen text. Because of this, allow them and yourself enough time to draft 2 summaries that they can receive feedback on before revise for the final workshop.

Assessment notes

Since discussion of the main ideas, supporting ideas, and evidence generally takes place in class, some of the more challenging aspects of this assignment are connecting ideas. Writers sometimes assume that their audience understands ideas the same way that they do; it’s a logical temptation, since their peers in workshop have read the same articles. Lack of transition phrases or other indicators of the connection between ideas can show that while writers understood distinct facts or concepts, they may not have been able to understand how those were related to the bigger picture.

Writers who are able to not only accurately describe the article, but can also demonstrate how the main idea and key points are related to one another, are typically more successful in completing this assignment.