Writing Analytically, 6th Edition - Rosenwasser, David & Stephen, Jill [103]
Summarizing isn’t simply the unanalytical reporting of information; it’s more than just shrinking someone else’s words. To write an accurate summary, you have to ask analytical questions, such as the following:
Which of the ideas in the reading are most significant? Why?
How do these ideas fit together?
What do the key passages in the reading mean?
Summarizing is, then, like paraphrasing, a tool of understanding and not just a mechanical task.
When summaries go wrong, they are just lists, a simple “this and then this” sequence. Often lists are random, as in a shopping list compiled from the first thing you thought of to the last. Sometimes they are organized in broad categories: fruit and vegetables here, dried goods there. At best, they do very little logical connecting among the parts beyond “next.” Summaries that are just lists tend to dollop out the information monotonously. They omit the thinking that the piece is doing—the ways it is connecting the information, the contexts it establishes, and the implicit slant or point of view.
Writing analytical summaries can teach you how to read for the connections, the lines that connect the dots. And when you’re operating at that level, you are much more likely to have ideas about what you are summarizing.
Strategies for Making Summaries More Analytical
Strategy 1: Look for the underlying structure. Use The Method to find patterns of repetition and contrast (see Chapter 2). If you apply it to a few key paragraphs, you will find the terms that get repeated, and these will suggest strands, which in turn make up organizing contrasts. This process works to categorize and then further organize information and, in so doing, to bring out its underlying structure.
Strategy 2: Select the information that you wish to discuss on some principle other than general coverage. Use Notice and Focus to rank items of information in some order of importance (see Chapter 2). Let’s say you are writing a paper on major changes in the tax law or on recent developments in U.S. policy toward the Middle East. Rather than simply collect the information, try to arrange it into hierarchies. What are the least or most significant changes or developments, and why? Which are most overlooked or most overrated or most controversial or most practical, and why? All of these terms—significant, overlooked, and so forth—have the effect of focusing the summary, guiding your decisions about what to include and exclude.
Strategy 3: Reduce scope and say more about less. Both The Method and Notice and Focus involve some loss of breadth; you won’t be able to cover everything. But this is usually a trade-off worth making. Your ability to rank parts of your subject or choose a revealing feature or pattern to focus on will give you surer control of the material than if you just reproduce what is in the text. You can still begin with a brief survey of major points to provide context, before narrowing the focus. Reducing scope is an especially efficient and productive strategy when you are trying to understand a reading you find difficult or perplexing. It will move you beyond passive summarizing and toward having ideas about the reading.
If, for example, you are reading Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales and start cataloguing what makes it funny, you are likely to end up with unanalyzed plot summary—a list that arranges its elements in no particular order. But narrowing the question to “How does Chaucer’s use of religious commentary contribute to the humor of ‘The Wife of Bath’s Tale’”? reduces the scope to a single tale and the humor to a single aspect of humor. Describe those as accurately as you can, and you will begin to notice things.
Strategy 4: Get some detachment: shift your focus from what? to how? and why? Most readers tend to get too single-minded about absorbing the information. That is, they attend only to the what: what the