English 111 Week 3 Overview

<p>In this week’s lesson, you will learn all about your first major writing assignment for the semester, the summary/analysis essay. This first essay assignment is worth 15% of your overall course grade, and you may be a little nervous about it since for most students, this will be their first major writing assignment in college. However, fear not! You will be provided with every tool necessary to succeed on this assignment.</p> <p>This week, we will focus on the steps to writing a successful summary. Luckily for you, those steps are carefully described on pages 15-18 of your English 111 Wake Tech Reader in the selection called “The Art of Summary in Academic Writing.” The basic goal of a summary is to walk your readers through the main ideas of a reading, step by step, so that your summary can act in place of the original article. You’ll read all about how to write a summary as part of this week’s reading assignment.</p> <p>However, I did want to offer you one very important tip for summary writing in this podcast. When you write your summary, don’t look at the original text as you are trying to summarize it! Instead, read a paragraph or two of the article, close your book, and write a few sentences describing in your own words what you just read. Writing your summary with your book closed will ensure that you write the summary in your own words. If you keep your book open, you will unintentionally mirror the exact sentence structure and phrases of the original text. This kind of close mirroring is plagiarism, unintentional or not. Therefore, the most important tip to remember when it comes to summary writing is simple: Don’t look at the original article as you attempt to write your summary!</p> <p>Next week, we will focus on the step to writing a successful analysis. To write your analysis paragraphs, you’ll need to consider the author’s purpose, the intended audience, the author’s tone and style, use of evidence, etc. Thus, be on the lookout for next week’s lesson and practice assignment on writing an analysis