Summary Workshop

Johnson County Community College
Composition II MWF - Spring Semester 1999
Summary Workshop

Instructions: During Week 2, you will work in groups and summarize the two articles.

You may follow the Summarizing Strategies given on page 22 in the book. However, you may find this simplified drafting process helpful:

First, divide each essay into sections and give each member of the group a section of the essay to read.
Second, each member should then read his or her section carefully and break it down into its main points. One useful way of doing this is to paraphrase the topic sentence in each paragraph.
Third, group members should get back together and combine their sentences into a paragraph. Do not worry about transitions or author attributions yet. You will work on those later.
Fourth, look at your group paragraph and ask yourself these questions:

What is the central point of the essay? Can I create an opening sentence for this paragraph with this point in mind?
Do the sentences that our group has combined into a paragraph present an accurate summary of the original essay?
Do we need to add more information? Do we need to cut unnecessary information?

At home you will want to take this rough paragraph and make it your own by incorporating transitions, author attributions, and a direct quotation or two. You may find it useful to still remove unnecessary sentences and/or to expand some sentences with more paraphrase information from the essay. You should also rewrite many or most of the sentences in your own words so that your summary paragraph comes to match your own writing style.