Blugold Seminar in Critical Reading and Writing
Grounding students in the reading, writing, and rhetorical demands
necessary for success in college and beyond
ENGL 110.011
Fall 2011 Watson
Paper/Project #1:
Writing Effective Summaries and Strong Response
DUE: Tues, Sep 27 at the beginning of class
Purposes: To gain practice writing useful, accurate and concise summaries. To effectively revise draft
work on the basis of comments and feedback. To formulate an appropriate academic response to one of
the articles.
Relevant course goals:
Rhetorical Knowledge: demonstrate beginning rhetorical awareness as it pertains to the conventions of
Academic English by using appropriate tone, style, format and structure.
Inquiry & Research: demonstrate critical reading skills by summarizing, paraphrasing and synthesizing
information from various sources (articles).
Writing Craft: assess the strengths and weaknesses of your own writing, and develop a plan for revision
and improvement; use comments and feedback to inform revision process.
Assignment: Write 5 drafts summaries of articles assigned and discussed in class Sep 15-23. Select and
revise FOUR of those to turn in for a grade and evaluation.
Format: Times or Times New Roman, 12 point font, double-spaced, one-inch margins. (I will email you
a template with the correct formatting to use if you would like to.) Each summary should be only one
paragraph long, or about 150-200 words. For one of the articles, add one paragraph of “strong
response” (either a critique or a reflection, as outlined in the attached sheet). So this “paper” will only be
five paragraphs long, or about 1,000 words.
You will need to provide a bibliography or works cited page with accurate bibliographic information for
each article. (You may use MLA, APA, Chicago, or CSE documentation styles. See pages 147-282 in
Writing Matters for specific guidelines for each style.)
Schedule of drafts: Your draft summaries are crucial to this assignment. You will do five of them, in
addition to annotations of the various articles from Sep 15 to Sep 23. You will turn in both your draft
summaries and your annotations each day for grading and feedback for revision. This initial work is
worth half of the total assignment points (50/100).
Grading: This project is worth 10% of your final grade, or 100 points, broken down in the following
way. Late work will not receive any credit.
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Sep 15: Summary draft 1 (“Why Tourism Matters”) and annotations—10 points
Sep 16: Summary draft 2 (“From Travel to Tourism”) and annotations—10 points
Sep 20: Summary draft 3 (“Secular Ritual: A General Theory of Tourism”) and annotations—
10 points
Sep 22: Summary draft 4 (“Let’s Go Europe: What Student Tourists Do and Learn from
Travel”) and annotations—10 points
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Sep 23: Summary draft 5 (article TBA) and annotations—10 points
Sep 27: Final FOUR summaries and response paragraph to ONE—50 points
Evaluation criteria: I will use the bulleted criteria outlined on the last page of the attached handout,
“Writing Summaries.” Points for your drafts and final versions will given on the basis of these criteria,
which are restated here:
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Represents the original article accurately and fairly.
Is direct and concise, using words economically.
Remains objective and neutral, not revealing the writer’s own ideas on the subject, but, rather
the original author’s points.
Gives the original article balanced and proportional coverage.
Distinguishes the student writer’s ideas from original author’s ideas by using attributive tags.
Uses quotes sparingly, if at all, to present the original author’s key terms to convey the “flavor”
of the original.
Is a unified, coherent piece of writing in its own right.
Cites and documents the text the writer is summarizing and any quotations used according to
an appropriate documentation style/system.