summary refection

Ashley Meyn

Summary Reflection

2/2/14

Upon hearing that our first graded English assignment was going to be a summary of another paper, I just about jumped for joy. As you know, I am not a strong writer. The fact that I just had to paraphrase what someone else had to say was the best news ever. I wouldn't have to come up with any of my own thoughts!

Step one: Find an article. Apparently it had to be a scholarly article. That adds a bit of a twist. For one, most scholarly articles are like nine pages long, and all seem to include words that are not in my vocabulary. This made things a little more difficult than I expected. But once I find an article I like, I will be good to go, right?

Wrong.

What I thought would be the easiest paper of all, was actually rather tricky. Condensing a long article into just the bare, necessary facts is difficult. What does the reader really need to know? Will leaving out this fact deter or misguide the reader? This took a lot more analyzing than I expected.

I do not consider myself to be a strongly opinionated or expressive person. So why is it when we had to “leave yourself out” of this paper, I became so dramatic? I am so used to writing opinion and persuasive essays, that I found myself wanting to help out the articles author, and put my own understandings into it. I still am not sure if I completely left myself out of my paper, but I did my best to stick to the authors words alone.