For Tuesday--Summarize Bird

For Tuesday we are reading and writing a summary of Gloria Bird's 1993 article on Ceremony. The article is available in BB in course documents. You should print a copy to work on the summary and bring the copy to class on T.

Write a 150 word summary of the article--what it says. First review the handout about summarizing that is available in course documents. Read the article once through, underlining what you think might be possible points to summarize.

The underlined parts will help you focus, but you will also need to do some synthesizing, that is, articulating what she is saying by taking the parts and whole of the essay into account. This is because most arguments are more than their stated main points. And in summaries you sometimes have to combine points.

Keep this in mind: a legitimate summary, one that avoids plagiarism of the source, alters the language and sentence structure of the original. This is more important when paraphrasing. Summarizing is more compressed but the rules still apply. Typically you need to use parenthetical citations, but do not do that for this summary.

Do put the entire citation, MLA style as much as possible, at the top of your summary. Skip a line before the summary.

Do use attributive tags such as "Bird asserts that Ceremony is a "decolonizing text." " and "according to Bird, . . ." etc.

Post your summary to your blog before class and do not read anyone else's summary before writing your own.

Other Don'ts: Don't write a journal entry on what this made you think about. Just summarize what Bird says. Don't use "I" or mention our class etc.



Dr R