Erie Community College ENG102 Impact of Climate Change Articles Summary

Question Description

Purpose:

This summary assignment will give you practice in a very important research and writing skill. You will rely on summary skills—both reading and writing—in the research process and are also likely to read and write summaries in other courses, on exams, and in the workplace. Summaries reveal your strengths as a reader and writer—how well you can identify central ideas in the writing of others and represent what you have read fairly and accurately in your own words.

Summarize two readings of your choice that have something to do with your chosen documentary for the semester. Consider texts that appear in a textbook from another course, an online article, a short story, or a newspaper or magazine article; you have carte blanche to choose your texts, so be creative and have fun! For example, if you were to choose An Inconvenient Truth for your documentary, you might use a chapter from your Environmental Sciences textbook on climate change and a newspaper article about the 2019/2020 bush fires in Australia. Choose two readings that you can accurately summarize and compare and contrast in 3-4 pages—look for readings of about 4-8 pages each. After selecting the readings, reread the text critically, annotating and outlining as you read.

Your summary will be a condensed version of the longer texts, capturing the original texts’ purposes, audiences, ideas, and emphases. Please do not use quotes or paraphrases in this essay; the summary must be all your own words and ideas. Therefore, there is no need for a Works Cited page—just provide the article titles and authors’ names in your introduction. You will convey your summary of the selected essays with enough information to represent the original text fairly, accurately, and objectively. In English classes and in MLA format, we consider works of literature (and music and film) to be ‘living’ texts; as such, please write your summary in the present tense.

As you summarize each text, be sure to compare and contrast it with the other chosen text. Some things you might want to discuss would be the relationship between the two texts, the content of each text, the authors, examples of ethos, pathos, logos, and Kairos, and the rhetorical situations. Rather than a literary analysis focusing on the why of a text, your summary should focus on the what and how of the texts—this is not a critique of the readings!

Format:

This essay must be 3-4 pages in length and must be in MLA format (with proper heading, title, 1” margins, and doubled-spaced 12-point Times New Roman font). Improper formatting will result in a grade reduction. Write in third person only. Please follow grammar and punctuation conventions; if you are unsure of these, ask me, ask a classmate, see a tutor at The Write Place, or visit Excelsior College’s helpful Online Writing Lab.