Summary Reflection

The part about writing that I find difficult and causes me to spend hours writing a paper is coming up with ideas and organizing those ideas so that it makes sense to the reader. So writing persuasive essays or research papers are not my favorite. Summaries on the other hand don’t require the writer to come up with his or her own ideas or opinions. The purpose of a summary is simply to put the key points of someone else’s paper into a short description of what the article is about. This way if someone wants to find out what a paper is about without reading the whole thing they can just read the summary. Summaries can be really useful tools for people doing research on a particular topic.

The other reason I like summaries is because they are generally short and to the point. There isn’t any filler information, random facts or anecdotes. If someone writes a summary that is almost as long as the original paper then the summary is pointless because it would be better to read the article at that point. This means that summaries are required to be considerably shorter than the original piece of writing whereas if I were to write a rhetorical analysis on a journal article they would probably end up being closer to each other in length.

Lastly, I think writing this summary helped me understand the article better because I had to find all of the main points and try to understand the full article before I could begin. Writing summaries can be really helpful if you are trying to understand an article or want to use it for research because not only do you have to break the article down and read it many times but once you have a completed summary you can reference it later more easily when you have more than ten sources.