Composition
Writing the Summary

Read the assigned essays, choose one, and write a summary of the one you choose. There is no connection among them.  Just choose one you prefer.  The question here is simply, "What does the essay say?"

Besides writing the actual summary, you will need to 
1.  join a discussion of the article you choose (only one) on the discussion board.
2.  post a draft of your summary
3.  respond to other drafts to provide ideas for improvement
4.  post and email your final copy

Here are the three pieces to choose from.  Make sure you read the entire article! They're usually more than one page.    
"What Will We Do on Saturday Night?" 
"Will There Be any Wilderness Left?"
"Will We Still Have Privacy?"   

Your summary of the article is to be about two pages long (about 250-500 words--no more than that), following the MLA style (see the sample MLA paper in the handbook) as nearly as possible (you won't be able to double space). The purpose of the summary is to convey to the reader the ideas covered in the article without making overt judgments about the material there.  Your reader should be able to trust you to give a complete and unbiased account of the essentials of the article.  

The assignment is a test of your ability to write, but it's also a test of your ability to read carefully and to capture the essentials of what the writer intends.  Read carefully.  

The summary should follow these guidelines:

   1. It should follow the MLA format in all possible respects—header, margins, title, and other.

  1. It should have a beginning sentence that gets the reader’s interest and opens the subject covered in the essay.
  2. It should mention the author (and use only the last name after the first use).
  3. It should mention the title of the essay.
  4. It should tell clearly what the main point of the essay is.
  5. It should describe the entire essay briefly before going into details (one sentence may be enough).
  6. It should describe the main points of the essay in the order that they appear in the essay.
  7. It should describe the minor points of the essay where possible.
  8. It should be free of spelling, grammatical, and mechanical errors.
  9. It should avoid displaying the summary writer’s bias on the subject.
  10. It should have a sense of an ending.
  11. It should use the present tense when referring to what the author writes.
  12. It should make a clear distinction between the wording of the original author and your own wording. Make sure to put all the words of the author in quotation marks.
  13. It should provide at least one quotation from the article.  

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