The summary, as its name suggests, simply requires you to produce a short piece of prose that captures the most essential features of one of either Swift’s “A Modest Proposal” or Phiddian’s “Have You Eaten Yet?”. Like all of your assignments for this course, your summary ought to be prepared according to the dictates of the MLA Style. That means no separate title page is required. Instead, your name, student identification number, course and section, ought to appear in the top left-hand corner of the first page of your submission, along with the date when you turn in your summary and a word count that reflects the number of words that the assignment actually contains.
Your summary should be written from an objective, third-person perspective. Omit the pronoun “I” unless it is the knowledge-making or discursive “I”, and concentrate on conveying the most crucial elements of the text that you choose to summarize to your reader. Do not include any of your subjective opinions or impressions—simply tell your reader, as clearly and succinctly as you can, about the following features of the essay you select, bearing these elements in mind:
✓ The genre that the piece falls into and the title of the piece.
✓ The rhetorical or literary mode in which the piece is written
✓ The topic of the piece.
✓ The author’s name and the date of publication.
✓ The point-of-view from which the piece is written.
✓ The tone of the piece.
✓ Does the author take a position? Is that position clearly stated in a thesis, or must
it be inferred based on an analysis of the whole?
✓ What kind of diction is used in this essay?
✓ Does the piece contain an argument? Is the argument valid? Are its premises true?
✓ What is the conclusion of the piece? If a main idea (theme) or fundamental point
is conveyed to the reader, what is it?
Your summary must (obviously) be typed and double-spaced. It must contain a minimum of 500 words. It is a rhetorical exercise: you will be attempting to persuade your reader that you have captured the most important elements of the piece and that, having read your summary, your reader will understand what the piece is about, what the author has written about that subject and how she has organized and executed the piece.
When you are organizing your summary, an easy way to plan it is to devote one paragraph to form and one to content, then a final paragraph to drawing the two together to account for the piece as a whole. Proofread your summary carefully!