2.5 Summaries, summaries, summaries!

Announcements:  
Baseline essays: I will be sending you feedback on your baseline essays before next class.  I will be looking for the baseline, the revised baseline, your rubric score + your discussion of what you see as your issues as a writer.  I still do not have essays from some of you, but at this point it is time to move on.

Group work:  Some times you will have working groups set up in class, and a new group member might be added (someone who was not in class) might be added after class.  I will be in touch with you to request your group's permission - and I will be looking for a response.  Be in touch!   We need to work together to make sure everyone in class has a chance to get their work done.

Group summaries:
The group summaries are posted to the right.  We spent the first part of class developing criteria for evaluating how well these summaries were going, and then we took a look at the work by Group 1 and Group 2.

Our criteria were as follows:
Audience/genre:
Names the author/article and sets up the overall focus of the article at the very beginning of the summary
Uses academic language moves (as set up in the TS/IS templates)
Attributes the ideas from the text to the author (according to . . .; the author writes that. . .; etc)

Focus
Identifies the overall idea and the supporting ideas in the text
Does not include irrelevant material or comments about how you feel about the text

Organization
Starts with the overall focus of the article, then develops the supporting ideas, and comes back to the overall focus
Makes clear distinctions between TS and IS

Good job on this!

Writing a summary to set up your response (this was the focus of Ch 2 in TS/IS)
In general, there are 4 ways to respone: agree; disagree; agree with somethings and disagree with others; or introduce new material / open up a new way to think about the idea.  We reviewed the main points of Ungar's article on Liberal Arts Education, and you then took a minute to think about how you would respond.  Depending on what you have to say back => you will summarize the piece differently.  You will emphasize the points you will talk back to, and generalize or skim over the points not relevant to your response.  

We looked at the assignment sheet for writing a focused summary to set you up for writing your response to Ungar.  After discussing some possible ways to respond to Ungar, you spent the rest of class writing a summary to Ungar.

For next class:
Read:  ANDREW HACKER AND CLAUDIA DREIFUS, Are Colleges Worth the Price of Admission?  TS/IS 179-183.

Write: 
1) revise the group summary in light of class discussion
2) finish the in-class summary of Ungar and post it to your portfolio (attach it to the summary page) by midnight tonight.  I will read your summaries and provide you with feedback by the end of Friday.
3) using the assignment sheet posted to the right, write a summary of Hacker & Drefus and post it to your portfolio on the summary page.

I think we made good progress today.  Good writing!   If you have questions, send me an email.  Have a great weekend and see you Tuesday.