Writing Guidance
As with any writing assignment, pre-drafting is key: it is impossible to arrive at a polished and successful summary and response in a single pass.
When revising your summary, keep in your mind that the goal is to get a complete, yet compact or condensed, restatement of the article. Summaries offer information at a high level of generality, and they must, therefore, boil out specifics, reserving just a few to nod towards key points of evidence. In terms of the article’s content, ask yourself as you revise if your summary is staying at a sufficiently general level of information.
To borrow Hayot and BEAM language here:
- In the “summary” portion of the assignment you are summarizing a single exhibit (the chosen article). Your own summary will largely perform at levels 2 and 3 (basic, interpretive, and conceptual summary). That said, you will also move into level 1 when you offer a quotation or two from your exhibit–the article.
- In the “response” portion of the assignment, you will engage more freely at all levels. Your own “response” will include some of your own level 5 sentences, which will deliver a more encompassing claim where you speak beyond both Lee and Yamashita in articulating your own claim-based response. You might also want to include a deeper dive into the way your chosen articles author handles her own evidence in more detail, engaging in that author’s own level-1 work (looking more closely at the evidence she selects and close-reads from Yamashita) in a way that you likely won’t do in the more general summary portion.
Note that this advice speaks to your own work. What you actually attend to in your summary–that is, what you will look for and summarize in Lee’s or Blyn’s article–will be the 4s and 5s. That is, you are summarizing–using largely level 2 and 3 work–Lees 4s and 5s, focusing in the bigger-picture arguments about how Yamashita’s characters help us think through (taking Lee’s article as an example), the critique of the uni-directional, oppressive sense of the universal, and the recovery of a more positive, inclusive and reciprocal, universalism embodied by Manzanar.
In your summary, when you provide a sense of the evidence that the writer uses to argue her case, keep in mind the need to stay at a higher level of abstraction and generality (3, 4, and 5). Report what kind of evidence the writer is using to support her argument (for instance, close readings of particular sections of the primary source, historical facts or data, theoretical constructs, and so on) and sum up the general features of this evidence. You won’t have time, however, to offer a play-by-play of any given close reading, no matter how engaging you found it. This more fine-tuned engagement can be saved for your “response.”
In the context of academic engagement with scholarly sources, one rarely summarizes with pure objectivity. Rather, one often summarizes only as a prelude to a more engaged or subjective response. In your summary, you should have already tinted that clear and objective window of summary just slightly. If you know where you are going in your response, it will change how you are summarizing, affecting both style and what you choose to focus more fully on in Lee’s article.
Your engaged response, which should comprise about 25% of the paper, might agree or disagree with Lee’s central claim—or, better yet, it might do a little of both. Alternately, you might pay particular attention to the strength or weakness one of her supporting points, or you might take a more extrinsic approach and relate her ideas to a broader set of theoretical concepts, or to a particular cultural context. Finally, you should feel free to bring in a new example from the book that either supports or contradicts or complicates her main point.
How to Proceed: Some Dos and Don’ts
- The original source’s main argument should appear in your first paragraph no matter where it actually appears in the source. Longer articles might reveal their core “thesis” in the second, third, or fourth paragraph (and sometimes much later). But you don’t have to state this in the first sentence. Do a bit of work in those early sentences getting the author in board by engaging and informing them.
- Avoid writing a “list summary” that provides a chronological account of the source (e.g., “The author’s first point is…. Next, she claims….”). Instead, organize your summary so that readers see how you understand the source and what you find important about it. The point is not to replicate the authors’ organization and argument point by point. Therefore, you will need to to distill their arguments into a more condensed and strategically organized space. You will have to cluster their ideas effectively and clearly, using your paragraphs as strategic containers for related ideas.
- Restate what the source says in your own language and quote selectively from only the most interesting parts of the main text. The goal is not to convince me (your professor) that you understand the article. The goal is to convey your understanding dynamically to an external audience so that they can understand it as well as you do.
- Select your quote or quotes well. Don’t just quote information; quote meatier statements. Another way to put this: the quote or quotes you draw from from your article will function at Hayot’s level 4 or 5.
- Don’t leave out any key aspect of BEAM: your summary will capture the background your author establishes (cultural / historical context), the exhibit she addresses (obviously!), the arguments and critical conversations she engages in, and the broader methodological or theoretical framework she uses.
- Use attributive tags to make sure a reader is able to clearly judge which ideas and arguments belong to the source. Attributive tags are especially important when you’re summarizing to accomplish some other task (to provide the basis for a critique, for example). Your reader needs to be able to tell the difference between what the source says and what you say. You can also use descriptive verbs in your attributive tags to help quickly capture the tone and purpose of the author. For example, “Smith argues that…”; “Jones critiques ideas which…”; “Brown compares….” It is important to always maintain the “summary frame”: don’t become the source and voice their argument as your own, but rather use those tags to relate the other author’s idea.