Due Date – Please submit your summaries by 02/18/19 at 11:00am.

Submission Guidelines – Please email your completed assignment as a Microsoft Word .docx file to me. My address is [email protected].

Prompt –

This assignment asks you to summarize one of the readings from Keywords for American Cultural Studies that we will not discuss in class. The readings may be found in the “Additional Keywords” section of our Resources page. You should choose a keyword from this list to summarize based on your interests and based on any possible topic that you would like to research to write your final paper. The point of this assignment is to get you thinking like a scholar just beginning to start a research project. Ask yourself: which of these keywords do I find most interesting? Which keyword allows me to think in an interesting and challenging way? Which keyword might allow me to look at my passion in an extremely surprising and seemingly unrelated way?

Your task in this summary assignment is to present a description of its general idea (main argument), structure (organization and evidence), and tone (emotional quality) of one of these articles. Clarity of writing and the ability to pick out and effectively describe the important bits of the essay you choose are key to an effective summary.

Do not use quotations while summarizing. The whole point of the summary is for you to be able to reproduce the original essay in your own words. When you directly quote from the essay that you are summarizing, you avoid using your own creativity to come up with an accurate description, and you show your own inability to thoroughly understand the essay.

Your summary should be 430-450 words long. The length requirements for this assignment is of critical importance. The whole point of the summary is to reduce and crystallize the essential features of a given work of writing. If you cannot abide by this word range, then your grade for this assignment will be affected.

Learning Outcomes –

Upon completing this assignment,

• Students will begin thinking about their own individual research projects like humanistic scholars.
• Students will gain a better understanding of how to engage actively and critically with a text.
• Students will gain a broader familiarity with the process of summarization.
• Students will begin to see the many ways in which it can be incorporated into other forms of writing.
• Students will develop a stronger command over one of the core terms in literary studies.

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