summary response assignment

Unit 3: Summarizing and Responding to Writing

18 Combining a Summary and Response

One way to explore a topic is to read and respond to an article. Such an assignment typically begins with a summary of the article followed by a response to idea(s) in the article. The format of a summary response assignment can vary depending on the course and instructor, but it is a common type of academic assignment.

Three steps in a summary-response assignment:

• Begin with a summary of the article. This will familiarize the audience with the context of your response.
• Include an introduction to the response. Identify an idea by quoting the idea and then paraphrasing the idea.
• Explain your response to the idea. Through one or more of the response techniques, explain your reaction to the idea.

Format for introducing a response: Quote + paraphrase + response

Look at the beginning of the response below. Notice the required components:

• Citation (author’s name and page number)
• Paraphrase of the quote
• The start to the response

Notice that the example follows this format:

• Last name (date) writes, “Exact quote here” (p. X). In other words, … (paraphrase of this idea). I find this topic / idea / concept / example interesting because…

Stems for introducing a summary

The sentence stems below can help you develop your command of more complex academic language.

• In “article title” author’s first name and last name (year) examines /discusses /claims…. main idea.

Stems for narrowing the scope in a selective summary

• In particular, Gambino ______.
• More specifically, Gambino ______.
• Gambino focuses on ______.
• In their discussion / analysis / etc., Gambino ______.

Stems to begin your response: (you are not limited to these and you can modify them):

• Last name (date) writes, “Exact quote here” (p. X). In other words, … (paraphrase of this idea). I find this topic/idea/concept/example interesting because…
• The first topic I’d like to discuss is … (identify the topic). Last name (date) states, “Exact quote here” (p. X). In other words, … (paraphrase of this idea). I was surprised with this finding…..
• One important idea concerns … (identify the idea). Last name (date) indicates, “Exact quote here” (p. X). In other words, … (paraphrase of this idea). In my experience…
• Another critical issue I’d like to address is … (identify the issue). Last name (date) points out, “Exact quote here” (p. X). In other words, … (paraphrase of this idea). This reminds me of when…
• (Identify the topic) … is very interesting to me. Last name (date) suggests, “Exact quote here” (p. X). In other words, … (paraphrase of this idea). This example can be compared to…

Note: you do NOT need to include the title in the beginning of your response because you already included the title in the summary section.

Stem for an indirect source:

• Some people argue that … (identify the idea). X (name plus credential) said, “Exact quote here” (as cited in Name, year, p. X). In other words, … (paraphrase of this idea). I agree with them to some extent, but…

Example: Some experts point out the problems of social networking sites. Stanford University Professor Jean Anderson claims, “These sites tend to (full quote here) …” (as cited in Cook, 2019, p. 6). Anderson means here that…paraphrase…. I agree with Anderson to some extent, but…. (response).

Stems to introduce a paraphrase:

• What Anderson means is…
• Anderson means that…
• This means that…
• That is to say, …
• Anderson’s point is that…
• What s/he/they is/are    suggesting/implying/saying    is that…
• What Anderson wants to express is…

Stems to show agreement:

• I totally/completely agree with X about/that…
• I agree with X about…
• I find X’s perspective on …. to be quite compelling.
• I sympathize with the author’s point about…

Stems to show concession:

• I agree with X about … to some extent, but…
• While I agree with X to some extent…
• I am not entirely in agreement with X about/that…
• My feelings on the issue are mixed. I do support X’s position on …., but I find Y’s argument about… to be equally persuasive.

Stems to show disagreement:

• I disagree with X’s point that…
• I strongly disagree with X about…
• I disagree with X’s claim that…. because…
• I disagree with X’s view that… because, as recent research has shown…
• I find it surprising that …… . I just can’t believe that….. .

Stems to introduce examples, personal experience, and comparisons:

• This example makes me think about…
• Based on my experience, …
• This reminds me of…
• This makes me think of…

Vocabulary alternatives:

• For topic : idea, concept, example, issue, problem, challenge, obstacle…
• For adjectives to modify the topic: important, significant, critical, interesting, first, second, next, another

Academic Writing I Copyright © by UW-Madison ESL Program is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License , except where otherwise noted.

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3 Academic Summary & Response

The summary/response builds off of the summary by asking you to reflect on how the text connects to your experiences and knowledge. Where an academic summary restricts you from including your reaction or opinions of what the author said, this assignment will allow you to include your own voice in the conversation. In addition to understanding the full scope of an article, you’ll need to distinguish between types of ideas, such as the difference between a fact and an opinion. Then you’ll work on developing your ideas by providing evidence from your own experience or prior knowledge.

Course Objectives

Assignment Sheet

Summarizing a Text

Responding to a Text

Revision & Workshop

Assignment Rubric

Suggested Pacing & Scheduling (for instructors)

Assessment Notes (for instructors)

This assignment meets the following CO1 course objectives:

• Develop rhetorical knowledge
• Develop experience in writing
• Develop critical and creative thinking
• Use sources and evidence

Module Objectives

During the process of completing this assignment, writers will:

• Recognize the structure of a text, including main and supporting ideas
• Paraphrase outside sources effectively and appropriately
• Demonstrate close and critical reading skills
• Summarize a source for an audience who is unfamiliar with it
• Reflect on personal experience as a source of support for response

Assignment sheet

Academic Summary & Response Assignment

Showing that you understand the conversation around you is an important aspect of academic conversation. In this assignment, after summarizing a source you will add your own voice and consider how your experience contributes to your understanding of what you’ve read. This is an important aspect of academic discourse as you begin to add your own thoughts to the conversation.

In this assignment, you will:

• demonstrate your critical reading skills by:
• summarizing  what a speaker says and then thoroughly
• reflecting on the points the author makes.

For this assignment you should imagine your audience to be an academic audience who has not read the text you are writing about. Your readers will want to understand the thesis/argument and main ideas as well as what you think about the text. Your readers will need to easily know which ideas are the speakers and which are yours through your author tags and citation.

• Please see your instructor for a choice of readings for this assignment.

You must show a thorough and accurate understanding of your chosen text and use your personal experience and critical thinking skills to explain to what extent you agree, disagree, reflect on, and/or question the speaker’s points.

• Show your ability to logically connect your ideas to the text, with sufficient development for your reader to fully understand your position.
• This paper must be double-spaced, typed in size 12, Times New Roman font, with 1-inch margins
• You must use paraphrases, direct quotes, and attribution to show which ideas are not your own. This will follow standard MLA conventions, including the author(s) last name and page number for in-text citations, and a full MLA citation in the Works Cited page.
• Your essay must be between 900-1,000 words .

Use the following questions to brainstorm ideas for your body/reflection paragraphs.

• What new ideas has this text given you? Why is this idea insightful to you? How might you apply it?
• What did you agree with in this text? Have you had experiences that confirm what the author is saying?
• Where do you disagree with this author? Why do you disagree? What experiences have you had that contradict what the writer says?
• What points has the writer omitted? (What else could be discussed?) Why do you think the writer omitted them? Why do you think that these ideas should have been addressed?

Week 1: Summarizing a Text

INSTRUCTORS: Please see the scheduling and pacing notes at the end.

Week 2: Responding to a Text

Responding to a text is a crucial part of the academic conversation. Now that you’ve read and chosen an article, it’s time to start organizing your thoughts about and reactions to what the author said. But how do you know what’s an appropriate reaction in an academic context? Are you allowed to disagree with an expert? What if you learned something new and aren’t sure what you think about it yet? This week, we’ll talk about how you can thoughtfully respond to an author’s ideas and join a written conversation.

Types of Ideas

As you read, make notes, and summarize the article you’ve chosen, you’ll undoubtedly have immediate reactions. Perhaps you are nodding along vigorously or frowning in confusion. Taking those reactions and putting them into a piece of academic writing can be challenging because our reactions are personal, based on our history, culture, opinions, and prior knowledge of the topic. However, an academic audience will expect you to have good reasons for why you responded to a text in different ways.

In order to better understand your own reactions, we should first identify the types of ideas you’ll encounter. Here are some types of ideas you are probably familiar with:

• Fact : an observable, verifiable idea or phenomenon
• Opinion : a judgement based on fact
• Belief : a conviction or judgement based on culture or values
• Prejudice : an opinion (judgement) based on logical fallacies, incorrect, or insufficient information

So how can we respond to those ideas? From the assignment sheet, you have four options:

• Agreement.  Did the author write a convincing argument? Were their claims solid, and supported by credible evidence?
• Disagreement.  Do you have personal experiences, opinions, or knowledge that make you come to different conclusions than the author? Do your opinions about the same facts differ?
• Reflection.  Did the author teach you something new? Perhaps they made you look at something familiar in a different way.
• Note omissions.  If you have a lot of experience or prior knowledge on the topic of the article, you may be able to identify important points that the author didn’t include in their article.

The next step is putting these together. Can you agree with a fact? What if you realize you’re agreeing with a prejudice? These are some important questions to consider because they may or may not be logical reactions to discuss and develop in your paper. Your audience will also wonder  why you are reacting in those ways, so it’s important to be able to explain what knowledge, experience, or values that led you to that reaction.

• Make a list of the main idea and key points you described in your academic summary. For each one, decide what type of idea it is (fact, opinion, belief, or prejudice).
• For each idea, what was your response? Did you agree, disagree, reflect, or notice an omission?
• Are your reactions appropriate for the idea type? Make note of which ideas and reactions you’d like to explore for the body paragraphs of your summary/response.

Developing Your Response

Once you know what ideas you will respond to and how, the next step is to explain  why you had that reaction. This reaction is personal to you, which means you will not need to use any outside sources to justify your response. Instead, you’ll use your personal experience, values, or knowledge to help explain your reaction to different ideas in the article.

Each body paragraph should be structured similarly so that your audience knows what you are responding to, how you are responding to it, and why.

• Paraphrase the idea you are responding to. This could be the main idea or one of the key points. Because you’ve already summarized the article, this paraphrase should only be 1-2 sentences. Remember that the purpose of your body paragraphs is to respond.
• Respond by telling the audience if you agree, disagree, are reflecting in a specific way, or noticed an omission. Make sure that your response is appropriate for the type of idea you have paraphrased.
• Develop  your response by including evidence from your personal experience, values, or knowledge to tell your audience why you had that response. You can refer to the article again throughout your development. Don’t get off track! If you are agreeing with an idea, the entire paragraph should be about why you agree. If you are reflecting on an idea, the entire paragraph should be reflection on that idea.

Read the following sample response paragraph, then answer the questions below.

• Bostock says that social media is positive because it helps family connect; what kind of idea is this?
• What kind of response did the writer have to this idea?
• How did the writer develop their response? What kind of “evidence” did they use?

Contrast the previous paragraph with the following. What suggestions would you give this writer during peer workshop?

Week 3: Revision & Workshop

Transition phrases are an important part of connecting your ideas and quickly, concisely telling your audience how different ideas are related to one another. Some ways that ideas may relate to one another include:

• Complementary.  Usually, key points are complementary, meaning that they work together to prove or explain the same claim. In this case, the ideas work together to reinforce the author’s main idea.
• Contrasting. Ideas can contrast with one another, meaning that they may show different sides of the same issue. For example, the author may discuss the impact of a problem on different populations, or the author may talk about how the law is viewed from the perspective of a police officer, a lawyer, and a judge. These ideas may agree or disagree with one another; contrasting ideas generally help readers understand multiple perspectives.
• Contradicting. The final option is that the authors or research may come to different conclusions or prove one another wrong. In that case, the author may be trying to show how complex an issue or event is.

There are two main places where you might use transition phrases to tell the audience if ideas are complementary, contrasting, or contradicting in multiple places in your paper: within paragraphs and between paragraphs . In your summary paragraph, you may want to use transition phrases to show how the author’s ideas are related to one another. In your body paragraphs, you may want to use transition phrases to show the similarities or differences in your responses.

In addition to the above relationships, transition phrases can also show time, cause and effect, emphasis, and sequence.  Here are a few examples of transition phrases you could use in your writing.

Return to the sample paragraphs above:

• What transition phrases did the writers use?
• How did those phrases help the reader understand how the ideas were connected?
• Are there any other transition phrases you would add to the chart above?

Peer Workshop

• Does the introduction explain the title of the text , where the text was published , who wrote it, and when it was published? What could be improved (i.e. transitions, style, organization)?
• Does the introduction summarize the article? Does it clearly explain the thesis of the article and then show the key points? Explain what the writer could do to improve.
• Does the introduction contain a thesis statement for the response that is a clear essay map with main points the author agrees/disagrees with? (Example: Although I think some of Carey’s ideas are helpful, I do not agree that changing study locations is beneficial). Are these points clear? Could they be clearer? Explain what the writer could do to improve.
• Does the paragraph clearly refer to the article using a paraphrased main idea and quoted or paraphrased evidence for support? List the ideas that your partner is responding to:
• Is the description of what the article says accurate and thorough ? Give suggestions for any clarifications or improvement.
• Does the writer clearly explain whether they agree, disagree, gained insight, or found an omission ?
• Is their description of what they think logical? Why or why not? (Think about facts, opinions, prejudices, and beliefs.)
• Does the writer explain the response with reasons and evidence from personal experience, their values, or prior knowledge? Could this be explained more?
• Does the writer conclude the paragraph with a transition, referring back to the article?

What are your two main suggestions for revision?

What are two strengths of this summary/response?

The following criteria define an “A” (excellent) response (90% +):

Understanding the text (close reading): Your essay convinces the reader that you have read the text closely and understand its purpose. The summary accurately represents the author’s central claim and key supporting points. In the body paragraphs you clearly and accurate ly show what the writer says be fore you respond with your own ideas.

Critical thinking (response): You critically respond to the writer’s ideas, connecting them to your own experience. You share a range of valid opinions (e.g. agreement, disagreement, new insigh ts, questions) about the ideas presented in the text and discuss multiple points. The ideas are logical and clearly connected to the article.

Development (use of examples): The response provides appropriate examples from the text to show the original writ er’s ideas. You describe your response fully and provide examples from your personal experience to support your opinions and connection to the text.

Organization : The essay is well organized, connected and easy to follow. The introduction includes a clear thesis statement and essay map and body paragraphs focus on just one idea at a time. Ideas within body paragraphs are organized and connected well, using topic sentences and transitions to introduce and connect the ideas. The essay flows well from one poi nt to the next.

Quotes and paraphrases: The essay contains both paraphrases and quotations from the article. The paraphrased and quoted passages are chosen appropriately and integrated effectively.

Conventions and style: You have followed MLA conventions and made appropriate choices for an academic essay. The essay is carefully proofread and edited for grammar and punctuation errors.

The following criteria define a “B” or “C” (satisfactory) response (70 – 89%):

Understanding the text (close reading ): Close reading of the text is evident. You understand the text and its purpose, but the summary could be more complete to represent the author’s central claim and supporting points. The body paragraphs could show a stronger understanding of what the text said ab out each idea but the descriptions are accurate.

Critical thinking (response ): You critically respond to some of the writer’s ideas, connecting them to your own experience. The range or number of opinions you share ma y be limited and or could be im proved to show stronger critical thinking skills. Some of the ideas may not be logical or may not seem to connect to the article.

Development (use of examples ): The response provides some appropriate examples from the text to show the original writer’s ideas, bu t more may be needed. You could also better support your opinions by providing more personal experience and connection to the text.

Organization : The essay is generally organized well, but some improvements could be made. The es say map could more accurat ely introduce the organization of the ideas. Connections between ideas could be clearer. More than one idea may be present in some paragraphs. The essay could flow better from one point to the next.

Quotes and paraphrases : Paraphrasing is generally used a ppropriately, but some could be improved (i.e. they may be too close to the original or inaccurately represent the idea). Some quotes could be in tegrated more effectively.

Conventions and style : While the essay generally follows MLA conventions, it would benefit from more careful proofreading and editing for grammar and punctuation errors.

The following criteria define a “D” or “F” (unsatisfactory) response (0 – 69%):

Understanding the text (close reading ): Close reading is not apparent. The summary is mini mal, inaccurate or missing. In the body paragraphs the descriptions of what the text said are minimal, inaccurate or missing. Your essay does not show a complete understanding of the article.

Critical thinking (response ): You have not critically responded to the writer’s ideas. The paper focuses on the writer’s i deas, not your response to them, o r your response does not fully relate to the writer’s points.

Development (use of examples ): This essay is not effectively developed. T he response does not includ e ap propriate examples either from the text or personal experience.

Organization: The essay is poorly organized. There is no clear essay map and ideas are not presented clearly. The same ideas may be presented several times in the paper. Or, paragraphs ma y often contain more than one idea.

Quotes and paraphrases : Paraphrasing and quotation may be missing. Most paraphrasing may be inaccurate or too close to the original and quotes may be in inappropriate or integrated poorly.

Conventions and style : The do cument is difficult to read due to mechanical errors. Attention to grammatical or MLA conventions is needed to make the writing clearer.

Suggested schedule/pacing

There are two approaches to the first week of this assignment:

• Copy content from the summary assignment if that was not taught, or
• Rely on the students to review the summary concepts together.

In the first scenario, you can copy and paste content from the Summary module to cover during week one. Because that might be overwhelming to cover in one week, you may consider extending this assignment to cover four weeks rather than three.

In the second scenario, use the first week as an opportunity for students to reflect on what they learned in the last unit, their strengths, and what they could do better for this assignment. You could have them review topics in small groups and then split them into different groups to teach the material to one another again; you could also rely more on students to describe the main ideas and key points in the articles you’ve selected for this assignment. This option has proven effective in the past.

A final option for the entire module would be to use the same articles from the previous assignment, essentially splitting this paper into two modules where the focus in the first portion is the summary and the focus in the second portion is the response. These choices will depend on your student population and their facility in reading the articles you’ve chosen.

Assessment notes

Writers tend to restrict themselves to thinking only about the main idea, which can make their response feel repetitive or vague. Identifying the supporting ideas or key points as valid ways in which they can respond to the text may help them to practice more critical thinking in their response.

When responding to an article, students can sometimes have difficulty distinguishing between distinct ideas in a text. For example, they may try to respond to the main idea in multiple ways, rather than delving into some of the supporting points. On the other end of the spectrum, they may find themselves stuck in response to details, rather than the consequences and purpose of those details. Spending time discussing the difference between facts, opinions, and prejudice is well worth your time. Those distinctions can help students avoid the pitfalls of agreeing with a fact or failing to recognize a prejudice (for example), which would then lead to failure to develop the paper.

Paragraph focus and cohesion is a big aspect of this assignment. While this isn’t a research paper, their body paragraphs should follow a familiar structure: claim from the text, their response to the claim, followed by evidence from their own experience and/or previous knowledge that supports their response. Stronger writers are able to distinguish between the ideas in the article, how those ideas are related, and clearly identify a response with reasoning.

First-Year Composition Copyright © by Leslie Davis and Kiley Miller is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License , except where otherwise noted.

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• Knowledge Base
• Working with sources
• How to Write a Summary | Guide & Examples

How to Write a Summary | Guide & Examples

Published on November 23, 2020 by Shona McCombes . Revised on May 31, 2023.

Summarizing , or writing a summary, means giving a concise overview of a text’s main points in your own words. A summary is always much shorter than the original text.

There are five key steps that can help you to write a summary:

• Read the text
• Break it down into sections
• Identify the key points in each section
• Write the summary
• Check the summary against the article

Writing a summary does not involve critiquing or evaluating the source . You should simply provide an accurate account of the most important information and ideas (without copying any text from the original).

Table of contents

When to write a summary, step 1: read the text, step 2: break the text down into sections, step 3: identify the key points in each section, step 4: write the summary, step 5: check the summary against the article, other interesting articles, frequently asked questions about summarizing.

There are many situations in which you might have to summarize an article or other source:

• As a stand-alone assignment to show you’ve understood the material
• To keep notes that will help you remember what you’ve read
• To give an overview of other researchers’ work in a literature review

When you’re writing an academic text like an essay , research paper , or dissertation , you’ll integrate sources in a variety of ways. You might use a brief quote to support your point, or paraphrase a few sentences or paragraphs.

But it’s often appropriate to summarize a whole article or chapter if it is especially relevant to your own research, or to provide an overview of a source before you analyze or critique it.

In any case, the goal of summarizing is to give your reader a clear understanding of the original source. Follow the five steps outlined below to write a good summary.

Prevent plagiarism. Run a free check.

You should read the article more than once to make sure you’ve thoroughly understood it. It’s often effective to read in three stages:

• Scan the article quickly to get a sense of its topic and overall shape.
• Read the article carefully, highlighting important points and taking notes as you read.
• Skim the article again to confirm you’ve understood the key points, and reread any particularly important or difficult passages.

There are some tricks you can use to identify the key points as you read:

• Start by reading the abstract . This already contains the author’s own summary of their work, and it tells you what to expect from the article.
• Pay attention to headings and subheadings . These should give you a good sense of what each part is about.
• Read the introduction and the conclusion together and compare them: What did the author set out to do, and what was the outcome?

To make the text more manageable and understand its sub-points, break it down into smaller sections.

If the text is a scientific paper that follows a standard empirical structure, it is probably already organized into clearly marked sections, usually including an introduction , methods , results , and discussion .

Other types of articles may not be explicitly divided into sections. But most articles and essays will be structured around a series of sub-points or themes.

Now it’s time go through each section and pick out its most important points. What does your reader need to know to understand the overall argument or conclusion of the article?

Keep in mind that a summary does not involve paraphrasing every single paragraph of the article. Your goal is to extract the essential points, leaving out anything that can be considered background information or supplementary detail.

In a scientific article, there are some easy questions you can ask to identify the key points in each part.

If the article takes a different form, you might have to think more carefully about what points are most important for the reader to understand its argument.

In that case, pay particular attention to the thesis statement —the central claim that the author wants us to accept, which usually appears in the introduction—and the topic sentences that signal the main idea of each paragraph.

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The AI-powered Citation Checker helps you avoid common mistakes such as:

• Missing commas and periods
• Incorrect usage of “et al.”
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Now that you know the key points that the article aims to communicate, you need to put them in your own words.

To avoid plagiarism and show you’ve understood the article, it’s essential to properly paraphrase the author’s ideas. Do not copy and paste parts of the article, not even just a sentence or two.

The best way to do this is to put the article aside and write out your own understanding of the author’s key points.

Examples of article summaries

Let’s take a look at an example. Below, we summarize this article , which scientifically investigates the old saying “an apple a day keeps the doctor away.”

Davis et al. (2015) set out to empirically test the popular saying “an apple a day keeps the doctor away.” Apples are often used to represent a healthy lifestyle, and research has shown their nutritional properties could be beneficial for various aspects of health. The authors’ unique approach is to take the saying literally and ask: do people who eat apples use healthcare services less frequently? If there is indeed such a relationship, they suggest, promoting apple consumption could help reduce healthcare costs.

The study used publicly available cross-sectional data from the National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey. Participants were categorized as either apple eaters or non-apple eaters based on their self-reported apple consumption in an average 24-hour period. They were also categorized as either avoiding or not avoiding the use of healthcare services in the past year. The data was statistically analyzed to test whether there was an association between apple consumption and several dependent variables: physician visits, hospital stays, use of mental health services, and use of prescription medication.

Although apple eaters were slightly more likely to have avoided physician visits, this relationship was not statistically significant after adjusting for various relevant factors. No association was found between apple consumption and hospital stays or mental health service use. However, apple eaters were found to be slightly more likely to have avoided using prescription medication. Based on these results, the authors conclude that an apple a day does not keep the doctor away, but it may keep the pharmacist away. They suggest that this finding could have implications for reducing healthcare costs, considering the high annual costs of prescription medication and the inexpensiveness of apples.

However, the authors also note several limitations of the study: most importantly, that apple eaters are likely to differ from non-apple eaters in ways that may have confounded the results (for example, apple eaters may be more likely to be health-conscious). To establish any causal relationship between apple consumption and avoidance of medication, they recommend experimental research.

An article summary like the above would be appropriate for a stand-alone summary assignment. However, you’ll often want to give an even more concise summary of an article.

For example, in a literature review or meta analysis you may want to briefly summarize this study as part of a wider discussion of various sources. In this case, we can boil our summary down even further to include only the most relevant information.

Using national survey data, Davis et al. (2015) tested the assertion that “an apple a day keeps the doctor away” and did not find statistically significant evidence to support this hypothesis. While people who consumed apples were slightly less likely to use prescription medications, the study was unable to demonstrate a causal relationship between these variables.

Citing the source you’re summarizing

When including a summary as part of a larger text, it’s essential to properly cite the source you’re summarizing. The exact format depends on your citation style , but it usually includes an in-text citation and a full reference at the end of your paper.

You can easily create your citations and references in APA or MLA using our free citation generators.

APA Citation Generator MLA Citation Generator

Finally, read through the article once more to ensure that:

• You’ve accurately represented the author’s work
• You haven’t missed any essential information
• The phrasing is not too similar to any sentences in the original.

If you’re summarizing many articles as part of your own work, it may be a good idea to use a plagiarism checker to double-check that your text is completely original and properly cited. Just be sure to use one that’s safe and reliable.

If you want to know more about ChatGPT, AI tools , citation , and plagiarism , make sure to check out some of our other articles with explanations and examples.

• ChatGPT vs human editor
• ChatGPT citations
• Is ChatGPT trustworthy?
• Using ChatGPT for your studies
• What is ChatGPT?
• Chicago style
• Paraphrasing

 Plagiarism

• Types of plagiarism
• Self-plagiarism
• Avoiding plagiarism
• Academic integrity
• Consequences of plagiarism
• Common knowledge

A summary is a short overview of the main points of an article or other source, written entirely in your own words. Want to make your life super easy? Try our free text summarizer today!

A summary is always much shorter than the original text. The length of a summary can range from just a few sentences to several paragraphs; it depends on the length of the article you’re summarizing, and on the purpose of the summary.

You might have to write a summary of a source:

• As a stand-alone assignment to prove you understand the material
• For your own use, to keep notes on your reading
• To provide an overview of other researchers’ work in a literature review
• In a paper , to summarize or introduce a relevant study

To avoid plagiarism when summarizing an article or other source, follow these two rules:

• Write the summary entirely in your own words by paraphrasing the author’s ideas.
• Cite the source with an in-text citation and a full reference so your reader can easily find the original text.

An abstract concisely explains all the key points of an academic text such as a thesis , dissertation or journal article. It should summarize the whole text, not just introduce it.

An abstract is a type of summary , but summaries are also written elsewhere in academic writing . For example, you might summarize a source in a paper , in a literature review , or as a standalone assignment.

All can be done within seconds with our free text summarizer .

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A Guide to Effective Summary Response Essays

Table of Contents

If you’ve been tasked to write a summary response essay but are unsure where to start, don’t worry. We’ve got you covered with this quick guide on the basics of summary response essays. We’ll cover everything from its definition and writing tips to a sample  outline for summary response essay .

This is a less common type of essay that requires a certain style and approach that differs from other types of essays. But with the help of this guide, you’ll be able to make the writing process much easier.

What is a Summary Response Essay

Summary response essays are two-part essays that include a summary of an article, essay, chapter or report and a response to it.

It is not a formal paper or essay because it does not have an introduction, body, or conclusion like other essays. This type of essay instead consists of a summary of the reading followed by a response to the reading.

To better understand this type of essay, it’s best to look at its two parts separately in the next section.

What to Include in Your Essay

The summary is a concise round-up of all the main ideas in an essay or writing. It cites all the relevant details about the work you’re reviewing. Your summary can include the following:

• Author and the work’s title (typically in the first sentence).
• The thesis of the essay and its supporting ideas
• It may use direct quotations to provide forceful or concise statements of the author’s ideas

Most summaries present the main points in the order they were made by the author and continually referred back to the article being summarized. Your summary should not exceed one-third the length of the original work.

Responses are critiques or evaluations of an author’s work. Unlike the summary, it is composed of YOUR opinions for the article being summarized.

This examines ideas that you agree or disagree with. It identifies the work’s strengths and weaknesses by looking at its organization and style. You should use examples and evidence to support the opinions in your response.

A good response must contain

• Personal experiences

Depending on your stance, these can either refute or support the article you’re responding to.

Steps for Writing a Summary Response Essay

Identify the main idea of the reading .

Create a topic sentence that describes the main idea of your reading for your summary. For your response, create a separate thesis statement that states your opinion on the author’s main idea.

Add supporting details for the summary and response.

Next, identify the supporting facts of the reading. In the summary paragraph, it is important to keep the order of the supporting details. Consider how these points relate to the author’s main idea.

Develop the supporting details for the response paragraph, highlighting how your evidence or personal experience supports the thesis statement you’ve created.

Identify the author’s purpose for writing.

It’s helpful to get to know the goal that the author wants to achieve through their work.

For your summary, try to ask yourself:

• Why did the author write this?
• Is there anything specific that the author wants me to know?
• Does the author want me to do something after reading this? 

And in your response, discuss whether or not the author was successful in achieving the goal of their work.

Write a summary response to the reading .

Given all the data you’ve gathered from the first three steps, you can start writing your summary and the response paragraphs. Make sure to include all the necessary information and be detailed but not flowery. 

General Outline for Summary Response Essay

Summary paragraph.

• Provide the title and author’s name to introduce the work the essay will discuss. Additionally, state the author’s main idea.
• Write supporting sentences that describe the supporting details of the work .
• Let this information come together in a sentence that explains the author’s reason or goal for writing the piece.

Response Paragraph

• Clearly state your opinions or thoughts about the author’s main idea. Use the thesis statement you created in the earlier steps. You can also ask yourself: Does my opinion regarding the reading relate to the author’s main idea?
• Put your personal experience into a supporting sentence (or sentences) describing how your opinion or thoughts support or go against the author’s main idea.
• Write a sentence summarizing this information and explain how your opinion or thought relates to the author’s main idea.

Wrapping Up

A summary response essay typically includes a summary of the reading followed by your thoughts and reactions. It may seem like a long and daunting task, but with a little guidance, you can be confident you’re up for the challenge.

Use the writing tips and  outline for summary response essay  sample in this essay to help you easily get started!

Abir Ghenaiet

Abir is a data analyst and researcher. Among her interests are artificial intelligence, machine learning, and natural language processing. As a humanitarian and educator, she actively supports women in tech and promotes diversity.

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Chapter Five: Summary and Response

As you sharpen your analytical skills, you might realize that you should use evidence from the text to back up the points you make. You might use direct quotes as support, but you can also consider using summary.

A summary is a condensed version of a text, put into your own words. Summarizing is a useful part of the analytical process because it requires you to read the text, interpret and process it, and reproduce the important points using your own language. By doing so, you are (consciously or unconsciously) making choices about what matters, what words and phrases mean, and how to articulate their meaning.

Often (but not always), response refers to a description of a reader’s experience and reactions as they encounter a text. Response papers track how you feel and what you think as you move through a text. More importantly, responses also challenge you to evaluate exactly how a text acts upon you—to make you feel or think a certain way—using language or images. While a response is not an analysis, it will help you generate ideas for the analytical process.

Chapter Vocabulary

Identifying main points, concerns, and images.

If you ever watch TV shows with a serial plot, you might be familiar with the phrase “Previously, on _________.” The snippets at the beginning of an episode are designed to remind the viewer of the important parts of previous episodes—but how do makers of the show determine what a viewer needs to be refreshed on? And why am I watching full episodes if they’ll just tell me what I need to know in the first minute of the next episode?

Typically, the makers of the show choose short, punchy bits that will be relevant in the new episode’s narrative arc. For instance, a “Previously, on The Walking Dead ” might have a clip from ten episodes ago showing zombies invading Hershel’s farm if the new episode focuses on Hershel and his family. Therefore, these “previously ons” hook the viewer by showcasing only exciting parts and prime the viewer for a new story by planting specific details in their mind. Summaries like this are driven by purpose, and consequently have a specific job to do in choosing main points.

You, too, should consider your rhetorical purpose when you begin writing summary. Whether you are writing a summary essay or using summary as a tool for analysis, your choices about what to summarize and how to summarize it should be determined by what you’re trying to accomplish with your writing.

As you engage with a text you plan to summarize, you should begin by identifying main points, recurring images, or concerns and preoccupations of the text. (You may find the Engaged Reading Strategies appendix of this book useful.) After reading and rereading, what ideas stick with you? What does the author seem distracted by? What keeps cropping up?

Tracking Your Reactions

As you read and reread a text, you should take regular breaks to check in with yourself to track your reactions. Are you feeling sympathetic toward the speaker, narrator, or author? To the other characters? What other events, ideas, or contexts are you reminded of as you read? Do you understand and agree with the speaker, narrator, or author? What is your emotional state? At what points do you feel confused or uncertain, and why?

Try out the double-column note-taking method. As illustrated below, divide a piece of paper into two columns; on the left, make a heading for “Notes and Quotes,” and on the right, “Questions and Reactions.” As you move through a text, jot down important ideas and words from the text on the left, and record your intellectual and emotional reactions on the right. Be sure to ask prodding questions of the text along the way, too.

Writing Your Summary

Once you have read and re-read your text at least once, taking notes and reflecting along the way, you are ready to start writing a summary. Before starting, consider your rhetorical situation: What are you trying to accomplish (purpose) with your summary? What details and ideas (subject) are important for your reader (audience) to know? Should you assume that they have also read the text you’re summarizing? I’m thinking back here to the “Previously on…” idea: TV series don’t include everything from a prior episode; they focus instead on moments that set up the events of their next episode. You too should choose your content in accordance with your rhetorical situation.

I encourage you to start off by articulating the “key” idea or ideas from the text in one or two sentences. Focus on clarity of language: start with simple word choice, a single idea, and a straightforward perspective so that you establish a solid foundation.

The authors support feminist theories and practices that are critical of racism and other oppressions.

Then, before that sentence, write one or two more sentences that introduce the title of the text, its authors, and its main concerns or interventions. Revise your key idea sentence as necessary.

In “Why Our Feminism Must Be Intersectional (And 3 Ways to Practice It),” Jarune Uwuajaren and Jamie Utt critique what is known as ‘white feminism.’ They explain that sexism is wrapped up in racism, Islamophobia, heterosexism, transphobia, and other systems of oppression. The authors support feminist theories and practices that recognize intersectionality.

In most summary assignments, though, you will be expected to draw directly from the article itself by using direct quotes or paraphrases in addition to your own summary.

Paraphrase, Summary, and Direct Quotes

Whether you’re writing a summary or broaching your analysis, using support from the text will help you clarify ideas, demonstrate your understanding, or further your argument, among other things. Three distinct methods, which Bruce Ballenger refers to as “The Notetaker’s Triad,” will allow you to process and reuse information from your focus text. 1

A direct quote might be most familiar to you: using quotation marks (“ ”) to indicate the moments that you’re borrowing, you reproduce an author’s words verbatim in your own writing. Use a direct quote if someone else wrote or said something in a distinctive or particular way and you want to capture their words exactly.

Direct quotes are good for establishing ethos and providing evidence. In a text wrestling essay, you will be expected to use multiple direct quotes: in order to attend to specific language, you will need to reproduce segments of that language in your analysis.

Paraphrasing is similar to the process of summary. When we paraphrase, we process information or ideas from another person’s text and put it in our own words. The main difference between paraphrase and summary is scope: if summarizing means rewording and condensing, then paraphrasing means rewording without drastically altering length. However, paraphrasing is also generally more faithful to the spirit of the original; whereas a summary requires you to process and invites your own perspective, a paraphrase ought to mirror back the original idea using your own language.

Paraphrasing is helpful for establishing background knowledge or general consensus, simplifying a complicated idea, or reminding your reader of a certain part of another text. It is also valuable when relaying statistics or historical information, both of which are usually more fluidly woven into your writing when spoken with your own voice.

Summary , as discussed earlier in this chapter, is useful for “broadstrokes” or quick overviews, brief references, and providing plot or character background. When you summarize, you reword and condense another author’s writing. Be aware, though, that summary also requires individual thought: when you reword, it should be a result of you processing the idea yourself, and when you condense, you must think critically about which parts of the text are most important. As you can see in the example below, one summary shows understanding and puts the original into the author’s own words; the other summary is a result of a passive rewording, where the author only substituted synonyms for the original.

Original Quote: “On Facebook, what you click on, what you share with your ‘friends’ shapes your profile, preferences, affinities, political opinions and your vision of the world. The last thing Facebook wants is to contradict you in any way” (Filloux).

Each of these three tactics should support your summary or analysis: you should integrate quotes, paraphrases, and summary with your own writing. Below, you can see three examples of these tools. Consider how the direct quote, the paraphrase, and the summary each could be used to achieve different purposes.

Original Passage

It has been suggested (again rather anecdotally) that giraffes do communicate using infrasonic vocalizations (the signals are verbally described to be similar—in structure and function—to the low-frequency, infrasonic “rumbles” of elephants). It was further speculated that the extensive frontal sinus of giraffes acts as a resonance chamber for infrasound production. Moreover, particular neck movements (e.g. the neck stretch) are suggested to be associated with the production of infrasonic vocalizations. 2

The examples above also demonstrate additional citation conventions worth noting:

• A parenthetical in-text citation is used for all three forms. (In MLA format, this citation includes the author’s last name and page number.) The purpose of an in-text citation is to identify key information that guides your reader to your Works Cited page (or Bibliography or References, depending on your format).
• If you use the author’s name in the sentence, you do not need to include their name in the parenthetical citation.
• If your material doesn’t come from a specific page or page range, but rather from the entire text, you do not need to include a page number in the parenthetical citation.
• If there are many authors (generally more than three), you can use “et al.” to mean “and others.”
• If you cite the same source consecutively in the same paragraph (without citing any other sources in between), you can use “Ibid.” to mean “same as the last one.”

In Chapter Six, we will discuss integrating quotes, summaries, and paraphrases into your text wrestling analysis. Especially if you are writing a summary that requires you to use direct quotes, I encourage you to jump ahead to “Synthesis: Using Evidence to Explore Your Thesis” in that chapter.

Summary and Response: TV Show or Movie

Practice summary and response using a movie or an episode of a television show. (Although it can be more difficult with a show or movie you already know and like, you can apply these skills to both familiar and unfamiliar texts.)

Watch it once all the way through, taking notes using the double-column structure above.

Watch it once more, pausing and rewinding as necessary, adding additional notes.

Write one or two paragraphs summarizing the episode or movie as objectively as possible. Try to include the major plot points, characters, and conflicts.

Write a paragraph that transitions from summary to response: what were your reactions to the episode or movie? What do you think produced those reactions? What seems troubling or problematic? What elements of form and language were striking? How does the episode or movie relate to your lived experiences?

Everyone’s a Critic: Food Review

Food critics often employ summary and response with the purpose of reviewing restaurants for potential customers. You can give it a shot by visiting a restaurant, your dining hall, a fast-food joint, or a food cart. Before you get started, consider reading some food and restaurant reviews from your local newspaper. (Yelp often isn’t quite thorough enough.)

Bring a notepad to your chosen location and take detailed notes on your experience as a patron. Use descriptive writing techniques (see Chapter One), to try to capture the experience.

What happens as you walk in? Are you greeted? What does it smell like? What are your immediate reactions?

Describe the atmosphere. Is there music? What’s the lighting like? Is it slow, or busy?

Track the service. How long before you receive the attention you need? Is that attention appropriate to the kind of food-service place you’re in?

Record as many details about the food you order as possible.

After your dining experience, write a brief review of the restaurant, dining hall, fast-food restaurant, or food cart. What was it like, specifically? Did it meet your expectations? Why or why not? What would you suggest for improvement? Would you recommend it to other diners like you?

Digital Media Summary and Mini-Analysis

For this exercise, you will study a social media feed of your choice. You can use your own or someone else’s Facebook feed, Twitter feed, or Instagram feed. Because these feeds are tailored to their respective user’s interests, they are all unique and represent something about the user.

After closely reviewing at least ten posts, respond to the following questions in a brief essay:

What is the primary medium used on this platform (e.g, images, text, video, etc.)?

What recurring ideas, themes, topics, or preoccupations do you see in this collection? Provide examples.

Do you see posts that deviate from these common themes?

What do the recurring topics in the feed indicate about its user? Why?

Bonus: What ads do you see popping up? How do you think these have been geared toward the user?

Model Texts by Student Authors

Maggie as the focal point 3.

Shanna Greene Benjamin attempts to resolve Toni Morrison’s emphasis on Maggie in her short story “Recitatif”. While many previous scholars focus on racial codes, and “the black-and-white” story that establishes the racial binary, Benjamin goes ten steps further to show “the brilliance of Morrison’s experiment” (Benjamin 90). Benjamin argues that Maggie’s story which is described through Twyla’s and Roberta’s memories is the focal point of “Recitatif” where the two protagonists have a chance to rewrite “their conflicting versions of history” (Benjamin 91). More so, Maggie is the interstitial space where blacks and whites can engage, confront America’s racialized past, rewrite history, and move forward.

Benjamin highlights that Maggie’s story is first introduced by Twyla, labeling her recollections as the “master narrative” (Benjamin 94). Although Maggie’s story is rebutted with Roberta’s memories, Twyla’s version “represent[s] the residual, racialized perspectives” stemming from America’s past (Benjamin 89). Since Maggie is a person with a disability her story inevitably becomes marginalized, and utilized by both Twyla and Roberta for their own self-fulfilling needs, “instead of mining a path toward the truth” (Benjamin 97). Maggie is the interstitial narrative, which Benjamin describes as a space where Twyla and Roberta, “who represent opposite ends of a racial binary”, can come together to heal (Benjamin 101). Benjamin also points out how Twyla remembers Maggie’s legs looking “like parentheses” and relates the shape of parentheses, ( ), to self-reflection (Morrison 141). Parentheses represent that inward gaze into oneself, and a space that needs to be filled with self-reflection in order for one to heal and grow. Twyla and Roberta create new narratives of Maggie throughout the story in order to make themselves feel better about their troubled past. According to Benjamin, Maggie’s “parenthetical body” is symbolically the interstitial space that “prompts self-reflection required to ignite healing” (Benjamin 102). Benjamin concludes that Morrison tries to get the readers to engage in America’s past by eliminating and taking up the space between the racial binary that Maggie represents.

Not only do I agree with Benjamin’s stance on “Recitatif”, but I also disapprove of my own critical analysis of “Recitatif.” I made the same mistakes that other scholars have made regarding Morrison’s story; we focused on racial codes and the racial binary, while completely missing the interstitial space which Maggie represents. Although I did realize Maggie was of some importance, I was unsure why so I decided to not focus on Maggie at all. Therefore, I missed the most crucial message from “Recitatif” that Benjamin hones in on.

Maggie is brought up in every encounter between Twyla and Roberta, so of course it makes sense that Maggie is the focal point in “Recitatif”. Twyla and Roberta project themselves onto Maggie, which is why the two women have a hard time figuring out “‘What the hell happened to Maggie’” (Morrison 155). Maggie also has the effect of bringing the two women closer together, yet at times causing them to be become more distant. For example, when Twyla and Roberta encounter one another at the grocery store, Twyla brings up the time Maggie fell and the “gar girls laughed at her”, while Roberta reminds her that Maggie was in fact pushed down (Morrison 148). Twyla has created a new, “self-serving narrative[ ]” as to what happened to Maggie instead of accepting what has actually happened, which impedes Twyla’s ability to self-reflect and heal (Benjamin 102). If the two women would have taken up the space between them to confront the truths of their past, Twyla and Roberta could have created a “cooperative narrative” in order to mend.

Maggie represents the interstitial space that lies between white and black Americans. I believe this is an ideal space where the two races can come together to discuss America’s racialized past, learn from one another, and in turn, understand why America is divided as such. If white and black America jumped into the space that Maggie defines, maybe we could move forward as a country and help one another succeed. When I say “succeed”, I am not referring to the “American dream” because that is a false dream created by white America. “Recitatif” is not merely what characteristics define which race, it is much more than. Plus, who cares about race! I want America to be able to benefit and give comfort to every citizen whatever their “race” may be. This is time where we need black and white America to come together and fight the greater evil, which is the corruption within America’s government.

Teacher Takeaways

“This student’s summary of Benjamin’s article is engaging and incisive. Although the text being summarized seems very complex, the student clearly articulates the author’s primary claims, which are a portrayed as an intervention in a conversation (i.e., a claim that challenges what people might think beforehand). The author is also honest about their reactions to the text, which I enjoy, but they seem to lose direction a bit toward the end of the paper. Also, given a chance to revise again, this student should adjust the balance of quotes and paraphrases/ summaries: they use direct quotes effectively, but too frequently.”– Professor Wilhjelm

Works Cited

Benjamin, Shanna Greene. “The Space That Race Creates: An Interstitial Analysis of Toni Morrison’s ‘Recitatif.’” Studies in American Fiction , vol. 40, no. 1, 2013, pp. 87–106. Project Muse , doi: 10.1353/saf.2013.0004 .

Morrison, Toni. “Recitatif.” The Norton Introduction to Literature, Portable 12th edition, edited by Kelly J. Mays, W.W. Norton & Company, 2017, pp. 138-155.

Pronouns & Bathrooms 4

The article “Pronouns and Bathrooms: Supporting Transgender Students,” featured on Edutopia, was written to give educators a few key points when enacting the role of a truly (gender) inclusive educator. It is written specifically to high-school level educators, but I feel that almost all of the rules that should apply to a person who is transgender or gender-expansive at any age or grade level. The information is compiled by several interviews done with past and present high school students who identify with a trans-identity. The key points of advice stated are supported by personal statements made by past or present students that identify with a trans-identity.

The first point of advice is to use the student’s preferred name and/or pronoun. These are fundamental to the formation of identity and demand respect. The personal interview used in correlation with the advice details how the person ended up dropping out of high school after transferring twice due to teachers refusing to use their preferred name and pronoun. This is an all-too-common occurrence. The trans community recommend that schools and administrators acquire updated gender-inclusive documentation and update documentation at the request of the student to avoid misrepresentation and mislabeling. When you use the student’s preferred name and pronoun in and out of the classroom you are showing the student you sincerely care for their well-being and the respect of their identity.

The second and other most common recommendation is to make “trans-safe” (single-use, unisex or trans-inclusive) bathrooms widely available to students. Often these facilities either do not exist at all or are few-and-far-between, usually inconveniently located, and may not even meet ADA standards. This is crucial to insuring safety for trans-identified students.

Other recommendations are that schools engage in continual professional development training to insure that teachers are the best advocates for their students. Defend and protect students from physical and verbal abuse. Create a visibly welcoming and supportive environment for trans-identified students by creating support groups, curriculum and being vocal about your ally status.

The last piece of the article tells us a person who is trans simply wants to be viewed as human—a fully actualized human. I agree whole-heartedly. I believe that everyone has this desire. I agree with the recommendations of the participants that these exhibitions of advocacy are indeed intrinsic to the role of gender-expansive ally-ship,

While they may not be the most salient of actions of advocacy, they are the most foundational parts. These actions are the tip of the iceberg, but they must be respected. Being a true ally to the gender-expansive and transgender communities means continually expanding your awareness of trans issues. I am thankful these conversations are being had and am excited for the future of humanity.

“The author maintains focus on key arguments and their own understanding of the text’s claims. By the end of the summary, I have a clear sense of the recommendations the authors make for supporting transgender students. However, this piece could use more context at the beginning of each paragraph: the student could clarify the logical progression that builds from one paragraph to the next. (The current structure reads more like a list.) Similarly, context is missing in the form of citations, and no author is ever mentioned. Overall this author relies a bit too much on summary and would benefit from using a couple direct quotations to give the reader a sense of the author’s language and key ideas. In revision, this author should blend summaries, paraphrases, and quotes to develop this missing context.”– Professor Dannemiller

Wiggs, Blake. “ Pronouns and Bathrooms: Supporting Transgender Students .” Edutopia , 28 September 2015

Education Methods: Banking vs. Problem-Posing 5

Almost every student has had an unpleasant experience with an educator. Many times this happens due to the irrelevant problems posed by educators and arbitrary assignments required of the student. In his chapter from Pedagogy of the Oppressed , Paulo Freire centers his argument on the oppressive and unsuccessful banking education method in order to show the necessity of a problem-posing method of education.

Freire begins his argument by intervening into the conversation regarding teaching methods and styles of education, specifically responding in opposition to the banking education method, a method that “mirrors the oppressive society as a whole” (73). He describes the banking method as a system of narration and depositing of information into students like “containers” or “receptacles” (72). He constructs his argument by citing examples of domination and mechanical instruction as aspects that create an assumption of dichotomy, stating that “a person is merely in the world, not with the world or with others” (75). Freire draws on the reader’s experiences with this method by providing a list of banking attitudes and practices including “the teacher chooses and enforces his choices, and the students comply” (73), thus allowing the reader to connect the subject with their lived experiences.

In response to the banking method, Freire then advocates for a problem-posing method of education comprised of an educator constantly reforming her reflections in the reflection of the students. He theorizes that education involves a constant unveiling of reality, noting that “they come to see the world not as a static reality but as a reality in process, in transformation” (83). Thus, the problem-posing method draws on discussion and collaborative communication between students and educator. As they work together, they are able to learn from one another and impact the world by looking at applicable problems and assignments, which is in direct opposition of the banking method.

While it appears that Freire’s problem-posing method is more beneficial to both the student and educator, he fails to take into account the varying learning styles of te students, as well as the teaching abilities of the educators. He states that through the banking method, “the student records, memorizes, and repeats these phrases without perceiving what four times four really means, or realizing the true significance” (71). While this may be true for many students, some have an easier time absorbing information when it is given to them in a more mechanical fashion. The same theory applies to educators as well. Some educators may have a more difficult time communicating through the problem-posing method. Other educators may not be as willing to be a part of a more collaborative education method.

I find it difficult to agree with a universal method of education, due to the fact that a broad method doesn’t take into consideration the varying learning and communication styles of both educator and student. However, I do agree with Freire on the basis that learning and education should be a continuous process that involves the dedication of both student and educator. Students are their own champions and it takes a real effort to be an active participant in one’s own life and education. It’s too easy to sit back and do the bare minimum, or be an “automaton” (74). To constantly be open to learning and new ideas, to be a part of your own education, is harder, but extremely valuable.

As a student pursuing higher education, I find this text extremely reassuring. The current state of the world and education can seem grim at times, but after reading this I feel more confident that there are still people who feel that the current systems set in place are not creating students who can critically think and contribute to the world. Despite being written forty years ago, Freire’s radical approach to education seems to be a more humanistic style, one where students are thinking authentically, for “authentic thinking is concerned with reality” (77). Problem-posing education is one that is concerned with liberation, opposed to oppression. The banking method doesn’t allow for liberation, for “liberation is a praxis: the action and reflection of men and women upon their world in order to transform it” (79). Educational methods should prepare students to be liberators and transformers of the world, not containers to receive and store information.

“I love that this student combines multiple forms of information (paraphrases, quotes, and summaries) with their own reactions to the text. By using a combined form of summary, paraphrase, and quote, the student weaves ideas from the text together to give the reader a larger sense of the author’s ideas and claims. The student uses citations and signal phrases to remind us of the source. The student also does a good job of keeping paragraphs focused, setting up topic sentences and transitions, and introducing ideas that become important parts of their thesis. On the other hand, the reader could benefit from more explanation of some complex concepts from the text being analyzed, especially if the author assumes that the reader isn’t familiar with Freire. For example, the banking method of education is never quite clearly explained and the reader is left to derive its meaning from the context clues the student provides. A brief summary or paraphrase of this concept towards the beginning of the essay would give us a better understanding of the contexts the student is working in.”– Professor Dannemiller

Freire, Paulo. “Chapter 2.” Pedagogy of the Oppressed , translated by Myra Bergman Ramos, 30 th Anniversary Edition, Continuum, 2009, pp. 71-86.

You Snooze, You Peruse 6

This article was an interesting read about finding a solution to the problem that 62% of high school students are facing — chronic sleep deprivation (less than 8 hours on school nights). While some schools have implemented later start times, this article argues for a more unique approach. Several high schools in Las Cruces, New Mexico have installed sleeping pods for students to use when needed. They “include a reclined chair with a domed sensory-reduction bubble that closes around one’s head

and torso” and “feature a one-touch start button that activates a relaxing sequence of music and soothing lights” (Conklin). Students rest for 20 minutes and then go back to class. Some of the teachers were concerned about the amount of valuable class time students would miss while napping, while other teachers argued that if the students are that tired, they won’t be able to focus in class anyway. Students who used the napping pods reported they were effective in restoring energy levels and reducing stress. While that is great, there was concern from Melissa Moore, a pediatric sleep specialist, that napping during the day would cause students to sleep less during that “all-important nighttime sleep.”

Sleep deprivation is a serious issue in high school students. I know there are a lot of high school students that are very involved in extra-curricular activities like I was. I was on student council and played sports year-round, which meant most nights I got home late, had hours of homework, and almost never got enough sleep. I was exhausted all the time, especially during junior and senior year. I definitely agree that there is no point in students sitting in class if they’re so tired they can barely stay awake. However, I don’t know if sleeping pods are the best solution. Sure, after a 20-minute nap students feel a little more energetic, but I don’t think this is solving the chronic issue of sleep deprivation. A 20-minute nap isn’t solving the problem that most students aren’t getting 8 hours of sleep, which means they aren’t getting enough deep sleep (which usually occurs between hours 6-8). Everyone needs these critical hours of sleep, especially those that are still growing and whose brains are still developing. I think it would be much more effective to implement later start times. High school students aren’t going to go to bed earlier, that’s just the way it is. But having later start times gives them the opportunity to get up to an extra hour of sleep, which can make a huge difference in the overall well-being of students, as well as their level of concentration and focus in the classroom.

“I appreciate that this author has a clear understanding of the article which they summarize, and in turn are able to take a clear stance of qualification (‘Yes, but…’). However, I would encourage this student to revisit the structure of their summary. They’ve applied a form that many students fall back on instinctively: the first half is ‘What They Say’ and the second half is ‘What I Say.’ Although this can be effective, I would rather that the student make this move on the sentence level so that paragraphs are organized around ideas, not the sources of those ideas.”– Professor Wilhjelm

Conklin, Richard. “ You Snooze, You Peruse: Some Schools Turn to Nap Time to Recharge Students .” Education World, 2017 .

Bloom, Benjamin S., et al. Tax onomy of Educational Objectives: T he Classification of Educational Goals . D. McKay Co., 1969.

Also of note are recent emphases to use Bloom’s work as a conceptual model, not a hard-and-fast, infallible rule for cognition. Importantly, we rarely engage only one kind of thinking, and models like this should not be used to make momentous decisions; rather, they should contribute to a broader, nuanced understanding of human cognition and development.

In consideration of revised versions Bloom’s Taxonomy and the previous note, it can be mentioned that this process necessarily involves judgment/evaluation; using the process of interpretation, my analysis and synthesis require my intellectual discretion.

Mays, Kelly J. “The Literature Essay.” The Norton Introduction to Literature , Portable 12th edition, Norton, 2017, pp. 1255-1278.

“Developing a Thesis.” Purdue OWL , Purdue University, 2014, https://owl.english.purdue.edu/owl/resource/616/02/ . [Original link has expired. See Purdue OWL’s updated version: Developing a Thesis ]

Read more advice from the Purdue OWL relevant to close reading at https://owl.english.purdue.edu/owl/section/4/17/ .

One particularly useful additional resource is the text “Annoying Ways People Use Sources,” externally linked in the Additional Recommended Resources appendix of this book.

Essay by an anonymous student author, 2014. Reproduced with permission from the student author.

This essay is a synthesis of two students’ work. One of those students is Ross Reaume, Portland State University, 2014, and the other student wishes to remain anonymous. Reproduced with permission from the student authors.

Essay by Marina, who has requested her last name not be included. Portland Community College, 2018. Reproduced with permission from the student author.

the verbatim use of another author’s words. Can be used as evidence to support your claim, or as language to analyze/close-read to demonstrate an interpretation or insight.

author reiterates a main idea, argument, or detail of a text in their own words without drastically altering the length of the passage(s) they paraphrase. Contrast with summary.

a mode of writing that values the reader’s experience of and reactions to a text.

a rhetorical mode in which an author reiterates the main ideas, arguments, and details of a text in their own words, condensing a longer text into a smaller version. Contrast with paraphrase.

EmpoWORD: A Student-Centered Anthology and Handbook for College Writers Copyright © 2018 by Shane Abrams is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License , except where otherwise noted.

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Teaching Students How to Write a Summary and Response

November 30, 2020 //  by  Lindsay Ann //   1 Comment

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As high school teachers, we know that it is important to teach our students to read for a critical understanding of nonfiction texts. This means that we want students to engage in close reading, making marginal notes, and marking-up important passages. Teaching students how to write a summary and response as a result of their critical reading is an important next step.  

I hear teachers frequently asking about strategies for teaching summary response writing. 

First of all, know that, although this assignment may demonstrate that students have read the required text(s), we are most likely concerned with more than simple reading comprehension. 

When teaching how to write a summary and response, we are concerned with a student’s thinking about why an author made certain choices in terms of diction, syntax, etc.

Therefore, students must not only read to comprehend, but also read to respond and evaluate, adding unique thought and analysis prompted by the original text, extending the author’s thoughts with their own.

To state it simply, summary and response writing offers students the opportunity to read and understand part of the current academic conversation before joining that academic conversation.  

To join this conversation, students must have unique thoughts and perspectives to share. They must do more than summarize the original text, and they must spend time expanding their thinking . There’s no easy way around thinking . 

The following list will help you shape the thinking that you will produce in response to nonfiction texts.

For all of these suggestions, writers should always connect back to the original text(s) with in-text citations, quotes , and paraphrasing when appropriate. Writers should be careful not to over-quote or over-paraphrase, though .

Summarizing a Nonfiction Text

To teach students summary writing skills, I focus on thinking aloud and modeling the process for students. 

They need to be able to understand the author’s overall organization in order to chunk the text and identify main and supporting ideas. 

We practice chunking the text and stopping to write the “gist” of each section in the margin. I show students how putting these summaries together in the end provides a starting place for summary writing. 

This “Gist” strategy is one of the first reading instruction strategies I learned and used as a teacher, and it remains one of the most helpful to this day.

Ways to Respond to a Text

To help my students get started with the response portion of their summary and response essays, I give a list of these starters. This list is by no means comprehensive, but it is a good place to start! 

With a Question:  

• Pose a related question to the author and explain how the author might answer it
• Generate a question that the text prompts of you and answer it
• Generate a question that the text prompts of you, and use additional research to extend the author’s ideas

With Comparison/Contrast:

• Compare an author’s claim to the claim(s) made in a different text or by a different author
• Show how an author’s perspective or claim is different from something else or someone else’s idea

With Analysis:  

• Explain an emotional response to the piece you had and analyze what made you have this reaction:  was it something about yourself, culture, or society?
• Explain why you had a hard time connecting with a text or an author’s claim
• If responding to an older text or a different cultural text, explain how the author’s claim might function or malfunction in today’s society or your culture
• Explain how this text could be seen differently through another person’s or another theory’s perspective
• Explain how a controversy or other historical situation may have given rise to the author’s essay
• Expose how your own bias or assumptions may interfere with your reading experience

With Extended Thought:

• Extend one of the author’s ideas into a broader context discussion.  In other words, what is this idea a part of?
• Pose an observation or realization this text sparks in you
• Pose an important word or concept and explain how the author might define it
• Examine a similar or parallel issue that this text is related to

Ways to Evaluate a Text

By Arguing for or Against an Idea Offered by the Author:

• If you turned the subject of this text into a question on which people would vote, how would you vote – and why?
• State one of the author’s claims and bring in additional outside reasons and evidence (personal or researched) for or against this claim
• Explain your subtly different definition of a term or perspective of a claim, and why this difference, while subtle, is important
• Expose an author’s assumption or bias and explain why this assumption or bias weakens or strengthens his/her idea

By Arguing for or Against the Way an Author Presents Ideas:

• Evidence:   Do facts and examples fairly represent the available data on the topic?  Are the author’s facts and examples current, accurate?
• Logic:   Has the author adhered to standards of logic?  Has the author avoided, for instance, fallacies such as personal attacks and faulty generalizations?
• Development:   Does each part of the presentation seem well-developed, satisfying to you in the extent of its treatment?  Is each main point adequately illustrated and supported with evidence?
• Fairness:   If the issue being discussed is controversial, has the author seriously considered and responded to his opponents’ viewpoints?
• Definitions:   Have terms important to the discussion been clearly defined – and if not, has lack of definition confused matters?
• Audience:   Is the essay appropriate for its audience – does it convince who it’s intended to convince?

I hope that this post helps you in your teaching of how to write a summary and response. This is one of my favorite assignments to give students because it’s easy to see growth and also to engage students as they share their own voices and perspectives in the response portion of the essay. 

My students are working on a “They Say, I Say” project right now, in fact. Here is the digital notebook I set up for them to work in !

About Lindsay Ann

Lindsay has been teaching high school English in the burbs of Chicago for 18 years. She is passionate about helping English teachers find balance in their lives and teaching practice through practical feedback strategies and student-led learning strategies. She also geeks out about literary analysis, inquiry-based learning, and classroom technology integration. When Lindsay is not teaching, she enjoys playing with her two kids, running, and getting lost in a good book.

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Introduction

Goals and Goal Setting

Goals Common to All RST Writers

Other Goals to Consider

Defining My Own Goals

Advice about Assignments

Getting Started: Listing Topics to Write about in the Tutorial

Narrative One: Personal Piece on a Significant Experience

Narrative Two: Academic Piece on a Significant Experience

Summary/Response One

Summary/Response Two

Tutorial Evaluation Postscript

On Using the Resources for Writers

Generating and Developing Ideas

Finding/Expressing Main Ideas

Showing v. Telling Sentences

Focusing Topic Sentences

Thesis Statements

Reading Strategies

Assessing Your Reading Strategies

Summarizing

Writing Effective Summary and Response Essays

Discourse Analysis Worksheet

Trade Magazines

Selecting Readings

Teacher Advice: Summary/Response Two

The second summary/response is one of two essays that will constitute the student's final portfolio (which will be evaluated to determine whether or not s/he moves on to CO150). This is similar to the first summary/response, but the idea is to move beyond the narratives to summarizing a different kind of academic essay and to incorporate (an)other text(s) into the response. If their discipline lends itself to this, you might try to find (with the student) some kind of essay that ties in education with their discipline. (If this seems like it will be too difficult or will unnecessarily complicate the assignment, pick something else.)

The goals for this assignment are:

How to respond to this assignment: At this point, you can start to discuss the idea of a "dual audience" - the audience that you posit for the essay and the audience that will evaluate the essay (i.e. the Writing Center Director). You'll have already discussed the conventions of summary/response, so you can ask the student to evaluate his or her own draft based on those conventions. However, this kind of revision might not take place until the second or third draft - the first draft or two you might be concerned primarily with helping the student decide on a focus for the response. Near the end, be sure to talk about conventions for incorporating material from other texts into the student's own writing (quoting, paraphrasing, etc.).

In the end, ideally the student will produce an accurate summary & focused, developed response that is informed by some of the reading he or she has done during the semester. If this seems overwhelming, though, you might work on another agree/disagree response like Summary/ Response 1 (You might also need to do this if you've been working on assignments for other classes, since you may not have been able to get to as much outside reading). Similarly, if the student seems to be working with ideas that don't fit the summary/response format, you might suggest a more inquiry-based paper, where two or more texts interact, rather than having the student respond only to one. In that case, you may want to use a modified Inquiry/Public Literacy assignment sheet (from CO150) rather than the one in the student's resource packet.

Purpose : (1) Summarize the purpose and main points of this writer's essay, and (2) Agree or disagree with his/her points based on your own experiences and reading.

Audience : The same academic audience as for the last essay you wrote (Summary/Response 1). This audience has not read either the essay you're summarizing or the other essays you've read. You'll have to give them enough information so that they will understand what you're saying about these other essays.

In this case, you have a secondary audience--the Writing Center Director will read this essay as part of your final portfolio. S/he will use it to evaluate your progress and decide if you're ready for CO150. So, you'll want to show him/her that you understand the academic conventions of writing that you've been talking about this semester with your tutor. Be sure to ask your tutor if you have questions about the portfolio or the evaluation process.

The goals are (1) to accurately summarize an article using the conventions of academic summary, (2) to provide a focused response to the article with a clear thesis statement, and (3) to develop your response using examples from other texts and/or your own experience that are clearly related to examples/ideas from the article itself.

If you're having trouble getting started, take another look at the "Summarizing" section in the back of this resource packet. You might also revisit the section on "Reading Strategies." Be sure to use your notes on the article itself - you might also make a two-column log for ideas.

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4.2: Response Writing

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A response is a commentary on another piece of writing. Developing a response will help you make personal connections with the ideas in the essay. Instructors might use question prompts to help guide you in creating a focused response on a particular aspect of an assigned reading. Using a focusing question may help you stay on track and prevent the potentially frustrating and superficial task of trying to respond to everything in the essay in just one or two pages.

The summary captures only the author’s ideas; however, the response includes your own. The response is the place for your opinions, interpretations, and evaluations. The most important aspect of writing a response is to create a main idea/statement (it may be your nutshell answer to an assigned focusing question) and back it up with specific evidence. Depending on the focus of the response, it might include observations about the writer’s technique, commentary on tone or literary strategy, views as to effectiveness of the writing, relationships between the author’s ideas and your own, an analysis of content, or any number of items. If a focusing question is required, make sure the entire response directly connects to (somehow serves to answer/support the answer) the focusing question.

If you use verbatim (word-for-word) material from the essay or article, be sure it is accurate and enclose it with quotation marks. This tells the reader that you are using the author’s exacts words, not your own, and gives credit to the author. However, in this type of writing, use quotations sparingly, and try to keep them short.

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How To Buy Response Essay: Starting Your Successful Learning Time

Every student looks for a "buy summary response paper" option at least once during their high school or college time. There is probably no student who hasn't been amazed by their professor's "ingenuity" at least once during the school years. The variations of school assignments are so diverse; therefore, it is challenging to keep all the peculiarities of each of them in your head and follow all the necessary rules and requirements. The most widespread assignment is an essay in all its manifestations. Often, learners have to write a summary response paper with a topic from a specific study field. Preparing such paperwork may seem like a stumbling block and a thought-provoking assignment. What is its purpose? Is it focused more on the article analysis, or is your task to pay more attention to your feelings and thoughts concerning the read text? Don't worry! It's not that challenging to study this type of academic paper and its peculiarities in detail.

The appropriate definition of summary and response essay

The most appropriate way to A+ writing begins with defining the concept to analyze. This strategy definitely applies to all the school assignments. First, you should know the definition of a summary and response essay and its main purpose. Such an assignment has four clear objectives:

• Process the article appropriately;
• Define the core message and its writer's primary intention;
• Summarize the central points found in the text;
• organize thoughts and express your position concerning the article.

Therefore, a thoughtfully prepared assignment will show your responsibility, diligence, competence in specific issues, and the ability to express a point of view in an original way.

Guide on summary response paper structure

In order to present information in a more logical order and gradually lead your readers to the core message, there are some essay structure rules that will assist you in making your academic paperwork perfect. It is commonly known that almost every paper has an introduction, body, and conclusion, but the filling of these elements always depends on the type, purpose, and format of your assignment. Since a summary response paper prepares us to write each component separately, respectively, it is important to select the right way to make these parts interconnected and ensure the coherence of the whole paperwork. The "summary and response" format implies combining the creating an abstract with describing your own thoughts and viewpoints about it. But it does not mean that your essay will be divided into two separate sections. The main thing is to find the right balance between these two tasks and, at the same time, preserve all the structural peculiarities. To determine the essential stages of your future essay, we offer an example of a summary response paper outline with short and simple guidelines on what you have to write in all parts of your assignment.

• Introductory paragraph: Thesis statement, information about the text to review.
• Abstract: Your review of a particular text.
• Response: View and ideas you accept\disagree.
• Conclusions: Main results you've got after working on the assignment.

However, it is just a short review of what you are expected to consider and write about in your college writing. Each structural element has its demands and distinctive features, and being taken together, they all create a peculiarity of such an academic paper. Don't delay an in-depth exploration of the summary response assignment parts - and the entire picture will clear up!

How to create an introduction and thesis for your paper

Perfect academic writing starts with a good introduction. It is not the main part of your paper, but it gets your readers acquainted with the topic and shows a certain picture of it. Thus, this part has to be prepared quite responsibly and attentively. Do not overdo with information but make it enough to attract your audience's attention. Try to learn some interesting facts by using pertinent sources. A good essay introduction state the following points:

• main information about the text: a writer, time and place of publication, and, of course, title;
• author's key messages and intentions you have defined;
• the thesis statement of the analyzed article.

The thesis statement part deserves specific attention since it determines the essay's originality and points out your central perspective about the specific text. Therefore, formulate your thoughts in a clear but enjoyable way, and try not to be too categorical (at least at the very beginning). Also, do not be afraid of non-trivial opinions - every point is good as long as you can prove it. Therefore, it is a task for the body part.

Summary response assignment body guidelines

As you already know, the main part of your academic paperwork is an abstract of a certain text and your thoughts. All these components have some tips that will be helpful to keep in mind to reach your goal. First, when you create an abstract, you do not have to retell the whole text in detail fully. It is enough to raise its central ideas and prove them through the author's quotations. You can also paraphrase some thoughts, but don't overdo it and preserve the original intentions. Try not to include some specific information - it may overload your college paperwork with redundant facts. The main thing is to be objective - you should provide trustworthy evidence to prove your opinion.

The next part is a response one. Here you can make some kind of well-grounded critique and not just say about any grammatical or contextual mistakes but also state whether you agree with the author's opinion or not. In each case, you should present reliable pieces of evidence to your audience. They could be based on your experience or other articles; otherwise, they would be just empty and unfounded words. After all pieces of evidence are provided and all the messages are conveyed, you may confidently make a step towards the final part of your academic writing.

How to conclude a summary response assignment

The summary response paperwork ​​concept is straightforward because we are discussing a summary and response. You need to end your academic work with a brief description of the ideas presented in the text, and it's not a joke! Your reasoning should be explained gradually: you form thoughts and assumptions and then bring them together in the text. Further, you can expand it with some new comments on the text, but don't turn it into an absolutely new essay. By following all these simple instructions, you will not even notice how easily you have completed this assignment!

Examples of summary response topics to create the A+ paper

There are no more blind alleys for you in the college assignment issue. How to apply all the knowledge gained effectively? In practice, of course! However, many students struggle with choosing the essay's topic. It has to be actual and fascinating enough as well as offer a possibility of discussion. We offer you to review our response essay topics list, and maybe it will assist you in looking for prominent paperwork ideas! You can widen or narrow them as well - we are sure that it would be an original and unique work in any case!

• Legalization of drugs
• Feminism movements in modern societies
• Importance nutrition culture
• Modelling VS Body size
• Nuclear family issue
• Social networks and Teenagers
• LGBT communities
• Cellular society
• Safety on the Internet
• Losing someone you love

Our Top Writers Which Provide Response Essay Help For You

There is no doubt that each of these aspects has already become the foundation for many articles, books, movies, etc. So choose the topic that you like and provide yourself with the appropriate, exciting materials for analysis. Now you know what to do next, and we wish you luck in dealing with your summary response essay!

Jessica Bond

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Summary & Response Assignment #1          Directions:...

Summary & Response Assignment #1          Directions:...

Summary & Response Assignment #1         

Directions: Four - Six Hundred words Summary & Response paper from either "Does Recycling Actually Conserve of Preserve Things?" or "Recent Attempts at Reparations Show that World War II Is Not Over" using your notes and the information below.

Part 1: The Summary (1 st  Paragraph)

A summary is a concise paraphrase of all the main ideas in an essay. It cites the author and the title (usually in the first sentence); it contains the essay's thesis and supporting ideas; it may use direct quotation of forceful or concise statements of the author's ideas; it will NOT usually cite the author's examples or supporting details  unless  they are central to the main idea. Most summaries present the major points in the order that the author made them and continually refer back to the article being summarized (i.e., MacBride argues that ..." or "Webster also points out that ..."). The summary should take up  no more than one-third  the length of the work being summarized.

Part 2: The Response (2 nd , 3 rd , & 4 th  Paragraphs)

A response is a critique or evaluation of the author's essay. Unlike the summary, it is composed of YOUR opinions in relation to the article being summarized. It examines ideas that you agree or disagree with and identifies the essay's strengths and weaknesses in reasoning and logic, in quality of supporting examples, and in organization and style. A good response is persuasive; therefore, it should cite facts, examples, and personal experience that either refutes or supports the article you're responding to, depending on your stance.

Special Note: When you paraphrase or quote an author, you  must  give credit to your source.

To paraphrase , simply place the author's last name and page number in parentheses following your paraphrased text; then, place your end punctuation after the parentheses like this:

The author claims that companies do not scale back production even with use of plastics recycling (MacBride 71).

Remember, do not place a period before the parentheses; it only comes  after  the parentheses.

For a quote , the in-text citation will look like this:

Webster convincingly states, "I believe the United States ignores the Asian tensions over World War II at its peril" (215).

The quotation mark comes  before  the parentheses.

Strategies for Completing the Summary (Part 1):

1. Read the essay carefully, several times.

2. Annotate the essay. Make any notes in the margins that help you better understand what the author is saying (including noting difficult passages so you can find them more easily).

3. Summarize. Try this several ways; for example, try summarizing the whole essay with your book closed. Be sure to include the name of the article, author's name, and the author's main point in the beginning. Use your own words!

4. Use  transitions, paraphrasing, and quotations  as appropriate.

5. Use frequent author tags to show that the ideas are the author's, not yours.

6. When you've written a draft that you like, go back and check for accuracy against the original. Have you spelled the author's name correctly? Have you included all of the main ideas? Have you included selective supporting details?

7. Revise as necessary.

Strategies for Completing the Response (Part 2):

. Select a statement, idea, or paragraph from the essay that you disagree or agree with, and then read it a few times.

2. Consider what it means and why it was written.

3. Respond as to why you agree or disagree with the text. Avoid merely ranting.

4. Support your thinking with evidence, such as facts, examples, and personal experience.

5. Use transitions as you move onto your next point.

6. It is acceptable to agree with some points and not to agree on others.

Answer & Explanation

TOPIC: "Does Recycling Actually Conserve of Preserve Things?"

In the essay "Does Recycling Actually Conserve or Preserve Things?" by MacBride, the author critically examines the efficacy of recycling as a solution for resource conservation. MacBride challenges the commonly held belief that recycling inherently leads to environmental preservation, particularly focusing on the paradoxical behavior of companies engaged in plastic recycling. The central thesis asserts that despite participating in recycling initiatives, these companies often do not scale back production, raising questions about the genuine impact of recycling on resource conservation (MacBride 71). Throughout the essay, MacBride presents a nuanced exploration of recycling, questioning its status as a panacea for environmental issues and advocating for a more comprehensive approach to sustainability. The summary captures the essence of the author's argument, emphasizing the need for readers to reevaluate assumptions about the effectiveness of recycling in preserving resources.

MacBride's investigation of recycling presents a complex viewpoint that contradicts popular belief. The fact that businesses frequently maintain or even grow production despite taking part in recycling activities is one that stands out as especially persuasive. This calls into serious doubt if they really are committed to sustainability. The author challenges readers to reevaluate the notion that recycling inevitably results in less resource usage. This claim is consistent with what I have seen in terms of business practices that put profit considerations ahead of true environmental stewardship.

MacBride's exploration of recycling offers a nuanced perspective that challenges conventional wisdom. One particularly compelling point is the observation that companies often maintain or even increase production despite participating in recycling initiatives. This raises critical questions about the sincerity of their commitment to sustainability. The author prompts readers to reconsider the assumption that recycling inherently leads to reduced resource consumption. This assertion resonates with my own observations of corporate practices that prioritize profit margins over genuine environmental stewardship (MacBride 71).

It's important to recognize, nonetheless, that the essay's argument may use some support from more specific examples or case studies. Although the main notion is thought-provoking, the author's argument would be strengthened if she included examples of actual businesses that put profits above sustainability. The essay also doesn't explore any possible counterarguments, which could improve its overall persuasiveness.

According to my personal experiences, there have been instances where recycling has appeared less like a sincere dedication to conservation and more like a token gesture. This supports MacBride's claim that recycling as it is done now could not be the answer to all of the world's problems related to the environment. The essay persuasively argues for a more selective approach to sustainable living and pushes readers to assess recycling initiatives critically.

In conclusion, MacBride's essay prompts readers to reconsider the effectiveness of recycling in conserving resources. The critique of corporate practices and the call for a broader perspective on sustainability contribute valuable insights to the ongoing discourse on environmental conservation. While the essay could benefit from additional supporting examples and a more thorough exploration of counterarguments, its central message is a compelling catalyst for reflective consideration of current recycling practices.

Approach to solving the question:

The activity was answered based on the instruction and reference given.

The summary and response provide all the information asked in the guidelines.

All questions were properly addressed.

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