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MCC Daily Tribune Archive

MCC's Style Guide -- Why Summary is Important


Did you know that MCC has a style guide? We have a text copy and a shortened OER version online. It’s used in over forty sections of English, Transitional Studies, English as a Second Language, and Writing Across the Curriculum classes each semester. Here’s an excerpt:

Summary

Summarizing the ideas of others is a key skill for writers and thinkers in any discipline to show comprehension. Summary is a “call”: it says “I understand.” It not only reflects what a reader has learned, but it also gives writers a place to build insights and address assumptions about the world.  College courses routinely use summary as a stand-alone assignment to get students exercising this essential thinking skill. Summary is also used as part of longer single and multiple source assignments that grow from the premise that a summary provides a starting point for the discussion of a given topic.

Good Summary takes practice. It involves condensing, rewording, and citing text material carefully. It is deceptively simple: readers and writers sometimes assume that the art of summary is an already-mastered skill because it’s covered so often in grade school.  But while recalling facts and ideas from written texts can be groomed in the early school years, this makes up only the basics of summary. As you read more sophisticated texts and work towards attaining complex knowledge and language, your precision in recalling and incorporating the ideas of others gets more complicated. In fact, many writing errors are blunders of mistaken, or partial, understandings of intricate readings. And who wants that to happen? Before you incorporate the ideas of other writers and scholars, you should routinely practice summary so you are sure you really “get” what you read.

As an important step in the reading process, summary makes you smarter. Each time you seriously and actively engage with texts, you jumpstart your thinking and whet your appetite for more knowledge.  As a college student, you develop your understanding through the use of long and short summaries, listing techniques, annotations, and annotated bibliographies of all types of sources. Then, you’ll move toward integrating these summaries into in-class essays, single source papers, and research projects that ask you to extend your understanding into analysis and synthesis of source material. In this way, you add your own voice to the existing literature on a particular subject.

Go ahead. Read. Summarize so you’re sure you’ve got your sources covered. Then, join the conversation.

~Angelique Johnston, English Faculty and Composition Coordinator

Want to see more? You can find it here:

https://courses.candelalearning.com/styleguide1x30master/

Or, click on the link on the right that says “Style Guide for College Writers”:

https://libguides.monroecc.edu/resources

Feel free to share with your students.

Angelique Johnston
English and Philosophy Department
10/25/2016