15.3.1: Exercise- Summary Practice

1) Summarize the following passage from Annie Dillard's essay "The Chase". Be sure to include a signal phrase.

Some boys taught me to play football. This was fine sport. You thought up a new strategy for every play and whispered it to the others. You went out for a pass, fooling everyone. Best, you got to throw yourself mightily at someone’s running legs. Either you brought him down or you hit the ground flat on your chin, with your arms empty before you. It was all or nothing. If you hesitated in fear, you would miss and get hurt: you would take a hard fall while the kid got away, or you would get kicked in the face while the kid got away. But if you flung yourself wholeheartedly at the back of his knees — if you gathered and joined body and soul and pointed them diving fearlessly — then you likely wouldn’t get hurt, and you’d stop the ball. Your fate, and your team’s score, depended on your concentration and courage. Nothing girls did could compare with it.

2) Summarize the following passage from Nicholas Carr's article "Is Google Making Us Stupid?", published in The Atlantic in 2008. Be sure to include a signal phrase.

Thanks to the ubiquity of text on the Internet, not to mention the popularity of text-messaging on cell phones, we may well be reading more today than we did in the 1970s or 1980s, when television was our medium of choice. But it’s a different kind of reading, and behind it lies a different kind of thinking—perhaps even a new sense of the self. “We are not only what we read,” says Maryanne Wolf, a developmental psychologist at Tufts University and the author of Proust and the Squid: The Story and Science of the Reading Brain. “We are how we read.” Wolf worries that the style of reading promoted by the Net, a style that puts “efficiency” and “immediacy” above all else, may be weakening our capacity for the kind of deep reading that emerged when an earlier technology, the printing press, made long and complex works of prose commonplace. When we read online, she says, we tend to become “mere decoders of information.” Our ability to interpret text, to make the rich mental connections that form when we read deeply and without distraction, remains largely disengaged.

3) Work on writing a two to three-sentence summary of an essay you have read in your EG 101 course. Begin by introducing the source and then tell the main point. Remember, your job in a summary is to "get the gist" of the text while putting it in your own words, so read the essay until you understand it, and then write the summary from your head or notes rather than looking at the original while you write.

For more help, see this page on summarizing, including a video and examples of effective summarizing from the Writing Commons.