Last Name 1

First Name Last Name

Professor Landes

English 1301.XXX

Date Draft Submitted

ESSAY #1: Summary & Response Essay

Throughout your academic career—including later in our course and likely in English 1302—you will be asked to summarize and respond to texts. Summarizing a text requires that you can read, understand, and concisely convey the text’s main ideas for a reader, and responding to a text requires you to think critically about and interact—in some way—with what that text “says.” For this first assignment, you may choose one of these two texts to summarize and respond to: either Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s short story “The Yellow Wallpaper” (1892) or Chimamanda Adichie’s TedTalk “The Danger of the Single Story” (2013).

Objectives:

To demonstrate your understanding and interpretation of (thinking critically about and analyzing in some way) a piece of writing.

To practice accurately and ethically incorporating others’ ideas into your own writing

Requirements:

Include a title that reflects the overall goals of your essay

Introduce the text in your introduction: identify the title of the text, the author’s name, and the date of publication.

A good introduction will:

Engage (or “hook”) the reader’s interest

Orient the reader to the subject of your essay

Include a thesis statement—1-2 sentences that make the statement that your essay will work to support/demonstrate to the reader.

Include a summary (250 words or fewer) that shows that you understand the text’s thesis—or the major claim/idea that it is trying to communicate—and how the author supports that main idea. (You want to give the reader a comprehensive, yet concise, idea of what the text is about.)

In your summary, use signal phrases/author “tags” that tells your reader when you are referring to the author’s ideas. (Example: “according to ______,” “_______ believes/argues/contends/suggests that…”)

Avoid personal commentary; summaries should be objective.

Use mostly paraphrase, limiting the number of times you quote the text (a good summary is mostly paraphrase)

Include a response (300 – 500 words) that indicates your overall assessment of the text, supported by evidence and explanation.

This is the place for your personal opinion—you get to decide how you want to respond to (or assess) the text overall, but you must support that assessment through examples (evidence) from the text.

You want to make sure to not only support (with evidence from the text) the claims you make in your response, but also offer explanation to help your reader to understand how the evidence you present supports your claim(s).

You are welcome to also draw from your own personal experiences in supporting your claims, if you like (though you don’t have to)!

Conclude your essay with at least one paragraph reflecting on the significance of what you’ve said in the rest of your essay.

Remind your reader of the major takeaways.

Suggestions for responding to the text: Remember that you can approach your response in different ways, and you get to decide the question(s) you want to address in your response. (You want your response to feel focused, so if you plan to address more than one question, make sure that they correspond logically.) Some potential questions that you might use to guide your response could be:

Taking a position: Do I agree or disagree with the author’s ideas/claims? (What parts do I agree with—and why? What parts do I disagree with—and why?)

Critiquing: Are there holes/oversights/weaknesses in the text? What are they and how does this impact the author’s purpose/ideas/claims?

Commenting on Style: Were there portions/elements of the text that were particularly moving, persuasive, or powerful?

Personal Reflection: Does the text remind me of anything that I have personally experienced? Does the text support (or challenge) any of my beliefs? Did the text help me to see anything in a new way?

Connections: Does the text remind me of any other texts?

Formatting: Your final draft should be 2-3 typed, double-spaced pages, using 12-point standard font. You should have one-inch margins all-around. Your title should be centered, and you’ll want to include the MLA-style headers (with your last name and page numbers—see example on first page of assignment instructions) and the four lines in the upper-left-hand corner of your document (see example on first page of assignment instructions; I’ll go over the MLA formatting with you in class).

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