next step: summarize!

Now that most of you have achieved levels of genius never before attained, locating precise and reliable information in the giant pile of dung known as the Information SuperWebnet Highway, you are ready to take the fruits of your labors, your precious articles, and prepare them for presenting to the class.

When you summarize, the point is to take the most important and interesting information and leave all the other nice connective stuff behind.

But first…we need a reference. If you want to use information or quotes from these articles in any piece of your own writing, and you don’t want to be arrested and imprisoned and/or  beaten with a rubber hose for plagiarism, you’ll need to cite the source (give the author’s name and the page number), and then, somewhere in your paper, provide complete information about the source, also known as the reference.

At the top of each article summary, provide a complete reference for the article. Here’s how to do it (substitute the specific info for your article–and don’t forget the periods, commas, and colons–they’re important!):

Magazine Article

Last Name, First Name. “Article Title.” Magazine Title PublicationDate: page#-page#.

Journal Article

Last Name, First Name. “Article Title.” Journal Title Vol. #(Year): page#-page#.

Newspaper

Last Name, First Name. “Article Title.” Newspaper Name [City]Date: Section & page.

Website

Last Name, First Name. “Page Title.” Site Title. PublicationDate. Organization. Date accessed <URL>.

NOTE: You may not have all of the information required for your reference. Be resourceful–you may have to click around a site to find out about the author, publisher, and date. Do your best with what you have!

Okay, now it’s time to summarize. An article summary should be no more than 1-2 paragraphs, and it must have the following elements. As long as you have these elements, you can write the summary in any style or voice that you prefer:

• In your first sentence, summarize the big idea of the article–this big idea is usually found in the article’s introduction. Be sure to restate it in your own words
• Summarize each major point in the article in a separate sentence. Give a brief description of a few of the examples the author uses to illustrate the main points. Choose examples you think would be most interesting for your fellow students to hear about.
• If you want to be really smart, take a sentence or two to connect the article to the ideas in one of the other articles you’re summarizing. Explain how they work together to give you a better understanding of your topic.

That’s it! When you summarize, everyone knows that you are borrowing someone else’s ideas, and you’ve got the reference up at the top so no one will think you’re plagiarizing, but please do make sure that everything you write is in your own words. If you must quote the article, include “quotation marks.”

Here’s a sample document to show you how to set up yours:  summary sample

MT

Time to apply your research skillzz

Yesterday your task was to gather interesting ideas and images from the life and times of Shakespeare. Perhaps that delightful comic cartoon above reminds you of some of the rather, uh, surprising aspects of Elizabethan England we discussed.

You were supposed to note anything you wanted to know more about, but if you were too busy thinking about running scabs, bile, and Juliet being played by a dude, you may want to take a few minutes today just to reflect on yesterday and figure out which part of it left the biggest impression on your tender, young, impressionable mind. If you didn’t pay much attention yesterday, you’re on your own today. Luckily, you’re sitting in front of a computer connected to all the knowledge in the world, so maybe you can do some preliminary reading to get an idea for something relating to Shakespeare that you want to find out more about.

Once you have a vague idea about your area of interest, it’s time to do some research to find out more about it. Here’s the assignment:

Use the Pioneer Online Library to find at least two articles focused on the Shakespeare-related topic you decided on above.

Use Google to locate at least one respectable webpage (not Wikipedia or any other general reference source, like dictionary.com) with information concerning your topic.

Print a copy of each article/webpage, then read them carefully, highlighting the main ideas. Generally speaking, you should highlight at least one main idea in each paragraph (although not every paragraph has an idea worth highlighting).

Tomorrow, we’ll be back here in the lab writing up brief summaries of these articles and getting ready to present the main ideas to the class.

Happy hunting!

Mt

To those about to scavenge, I salute you

Yesterday I taught you everything you need to know to be smart. Today, you get to prove that you’re smart. And if you are smart, you shall win prizes! Just think of it…prizes!

To those of you not in my class, and those random lurkers who only showed up at this site after innocently typing “purple gorilla suits” into Google to see where it would take them, perhaps a brief explanation is in order:

All you need to know to be smart in the world today is how to get information–not just any information, but the information that is reliable, specific to your needs, and comprehensive. These are skills that make business investors rich, that help artists develop their own unique voice, and assist students in an English class in their quest for prizes. Prizes!

Anyway, the lecture was yesterday. Today you’re each armed with a page of notes that contains all the information you’ll need for today’s work. Take out that piece of paper, and we’re off!

The rules are as follows:

• Find a source that answers each question below. Mostly, you’re looking for articles and webpages. Please print the first page only of each article/webpage–let’s not destroy the world’s rainforests in our mad dash for prizes! Number each article to correspond with a question in the scavenger hunt list.
• Every student who presents me with a complete portfolio of items by the end of the day will receive a prize tomorrow. There will also be special jury awards for
  • Weirdest Article
  • Most Authoritative Article
  • Most Variety of Sources (newspapers, magazines, gov’t docs, books, etc.)
  • Worst Website That Still Manages to Say Something AboutThe Topic You’re Researching.

Here’s the list:

Use the SIRS database to locate documents that answer the following questions:

1. Who was L. Frank Baum and what did he do?

2. What happened to King Henry VIII’s second wife?

3. What do Cervantes and Shakespeare have in common?

Use EBSCO to locate documents that answer the following questions:

4. Who is the most important Romanian filmmaker working today?

5. Find a review of his or her most recent film.

6. Where can someone go to see a gorilla in the wild?

7. What is the best novel ever written in the English language?

Use Google to locate reliable, non-Wikipedia websites that answer the following questions:

8. What does the whale symbolize in Moby Dick?

9. Who is the most famous Chinese poet of all time?

10. What is the Chinese poet’s most famous poem?

11. What does the Latin phrase sic transit gloria mean, and who said it originally?

That’s it. Scavenge!