Examining Sample Assignment 1: Summary and Analysis
Examining Sample Assignment 1: Summary and Analysis
In this chapter and in the next three, I walk through example assignments and how you might analyze them to better understand your task.
This assignment comes from one of my first-year writing classes. It’s a fairly typical early assignment in my first-year writing classes, one that asks students to read a text and engage with it in some way. In this case, the readings include the same one I use as a model in the first section of this book, though the actual assignment differs a bit.
| Assignment | Summarize the ideas of “segregated coexistence” and “living in community” from Mitchell’s essay and analyze how those ideas apply to the situation described in an additional article (see sources below). |
| Audience | Fellow college students who are unfamiliar with either of the essays or the terms that Mitchell uses |
| Sources | “The First Battle in the Culture Wars: The Quality of Diversity” by Nicholas Ensley Mitchell
Your choice of the following:
|
| Length | 700-900 words (2-3 pages) |
The ability to read critically and summarize accurately is a crucial academic skill. The ability to use ideas from one text to guide understanding in another text is similarly crucial. This assignment helps you practice both of these skills.
Summaries
Your summary will need to explain the key concepts in Mitchell’s article and to explain the main points in the article that you choose to work with. In class, we will work specifically on critical reading strategies to understand how authors make claims and connect those claims to one another. We will also work on techniques for writing strong summaries that accurately represent an author’s work.
Your summaries of these texts should be between 300 and 400 words of your final paper.
Analysis
In this part of your paper, you will make connections between Mitchell’s concepts and the specific situation described in the article you have chosen. Specifically, you must try to explain the situation in your article using the terms “segregated coexistence” and “living in community” as Mitchell explains them. Think about questions like the following:
- Does the article you have chosen describe a situation that could be considered “segregated coexistence”? If so, what is that situation and how well does it align with “segregated coexistence” as Mitchell describes it?
- Similarly, does the article you have chosen describe a situation that could be considered “living in community”? If so, what is that situation and how well does it align with “living in community” as Mitchell describes it?
- Are there ways in which Mitchell’s terms don’t apply or don’t cover the issue well enough? How so?
Note that this part of your paper should be between 400 and 500 words long, longer than your summaries. While accurately summarizing is important, readers at the college level are more interested in seeing your thinking, so this part should be longer than your summary.
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