ENGL102 Jewell – SUMMARY ESSAY
Rough draft due Wednesday January 16 – Final draft due Friday January 18
The purpose of the Summary Essay is to help you distinguish between ideas in the text and your own
response to or attitudes about these ideas (reasonable objectivity), identify the purpose and central
arguments of the text, improve accuracy and precision when representing and conveying another
writer's ideas in your own words (completeness), improve in condensing and economy at the sentence
level to make good use of the limited space allowed (brevity), and practice appropriate paraphrasing and
(very) occasional judicious integration of quotation in MLA form. It is important that you distinguish
between naming topics the writer covers and writing what the writer actually asserts about these topics
Your task is to read assigned text actively and critically, identify its purpose and distill its central
ideas/arguments into your own words, organize and signpost the summary with your readers in mind
using transitional signals to help readers note and digest the writer's unfolding arguments, and use MLA
in-text citation where appropriate.
You have two options for the Summary Essay:
- Summarize the entire book Program or Be Programmed by Douglas Rushkoff. This option will
require that you focus on condensing in order to address all of the central ideas within the space
allowed. Your thesis will be your interpretation of the book’s purpose and central argument.
- Summarize any one chapter of Program or Be Programmed. This option will require you to focus
on paraphrasing over condensing; this option will also require that you identify the purpose of the
book as a whole and address how the chapter you selected fits into the context of that
purpose/argument.
Please follow these formatting instructions: in the upper left corner, please include your name, the course
and section number (10am is section 3 and 11am is section 8), and the date your completed paper is due;
the essay must be double-spaced, use 12-point Times font, and be formatted with 1” margins; your essay
must be no fewer than two and no more than three pages.
Grading Rubric
Process (rough drafts, peer review, proper format)
Grammar, spelling, and punctuation
Brevity (economical sentence structure, stays within page limits)
Completeness (contains/addresses all important ideas within chosen scope)
Reasonable objectivity (distinguishes between writer’s ideas and your response)
TOTAL
10 pts
10 pts
20 pts
20 pts
40 pts
100 pts
Additional Assignment: Preparing for Analysis – Discussion Prompt
I’m including this on the same page only to save paper, but it will be useful to start thinking about the
next steps as you work on this essay. The key to analysis is identifying pieces or aspect of a text and
asking questions, making inferences, and teasing out implications of them. Once we complete summary,
we will look back at the book as a whole to identify possible topics for the Analysis Essay. Your job will be
to help guide those discussions by producing a discussion prompt. This can be in the form of a question
from or about the text, a reference to a specific passage you feel is important or interesting, or a challenge
to the text – an argument or rhetorical strategy employed by the author with which you take issue. Make
notes as we work through the Summary Essay, and email me your discussion prompt no later than 5pm
on Wednesday January 16.