Academic Summary and Analytical Response Assignment

Assignment Task

Overview

Throughout your academic career, you will be asked to summarise and respond to the materials you engage with. This assignment will ask you to: 1) accurately summarise a text using the conventions of an outline summary, 2) provide a focused response to the text with a clear thesis statement, and 3) develop your response by supporting it with clear reasoning and textual evidence.

Your outline summary should accurately and objectively represent the author’s purpose and main ideas in approximately 60% of the total word count. Your response should be approximately 40% of the total word count and should contain a thesis statement related to a key passage or idea from Harrison’s text. The thesis statement of your response should be supported by textual evidence and clear reasoning.

Begin your assignment with an outline summary (explained below) of the text and then lead into your response with an effective transition from an objective outline summary to a reflective response that is well supported with textual examples (explained below). The summary and response should be clearly separated.

Writing a Summary

An academic summary should be accurate and while 100% objectivity isn’t possible, your summary should strive to stay as close as possible to this position. Most importantly, you should fairly represent the author’s ideas and save your own ideas and interpretations for the response, rather than including these things in the summary.

You should use the following strategies in your summary:

• Use an “outline summary” which mimics the structure of the text being summarised. It includes the main points and argument in the same order they appear in the original text. It involves a  full accounting and complete representation of the author’s entire set of ideas .
• Introduce the text in the beginning of your summary. Include the author’s name, the title of the author’s text, and the date of publication within the first few sentences.
• Focus on the author’s arguments by reporting the text’s main claims and the key supporting ideas.
• Avoid giving examples and evidence that are too specific, to maintain the focus of the overall argument of the text. Feel free to generalise about types of evidence, kinds of examples, and rhetorical strategies used by the author to support her/his argument.
• Use an objective tone and a balance of paraphrased and quoted source material. Quotations should be representative of the text’s main ideas or claims.
• Use author tags so that your reader understands that you are reporting the author’s ideas. Author tags are phrases such as, “In her article, Miller states,” or “Miller argues/explains/says/asks/suggests.” These tags will make it clear which ideas are those of the author and the text being summarised, not the summariser.

Writing a Response

Your response should contain a thesis statement which is directly and clearly related to a key passage or idea from the required text by Harrison. The thesis statement of your response should be supported by textual evidence and clear reasoning.  Support for your thesis statement should primarily take the form of textual evidence from the required text and one other relevant textual source.  The additional textual source can be from the course reading list or one of your own choosing.

The important thing to remember is that your response must be reasoned, developed (backed-up), logical, coherent, clear in terms of what it is exactly that you're responding to, and focused (no rambling, padding, beating around the bush, touching on an idea but not developing it, or trying to cover everything in a short space)

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