I’ll be honest, summaries are not my favorite kind of writing, but I understand the necessity of being able to summarize. The hardest part of summarizing is probably not the actual writing, but more understanding the reading you are summarizing. I tried using Rosenburg’s technique of reading the introduction and conclusion first to understand the main point that the author was trying to make, and I was surprised how much of a difference it made. I didn’t find myself rereading the same sentence over and over again or struggling to look for key words nearly as much. After I understood what the article was trying to say, it became easy to put it down in writing.
I have done assignments similar to this in the past in the form of research papers, though those were less formal than ones written at a college level. The task was very similar because we wrote to synthesize information without adding our own bias. Something that would have made writing the summary easier could be a more specific goal. The topic was very broad, which was good because it gaves us the ability to choose something relevant to our majors, but slightly narrowing down the criteria might have helped.
This assignment gave me a better idea of writing in architecture. Architecture is a field that combines art with science. Issues in architecture are not just that though. The architecture community deals with social issues in a way that I didn’t really understand before reading the article I summarized.
I hear what you're saying about needing a little bit of bounds within which to think. For future reference, would it help to have a certain audience in mind? Or a certain purpose behind that audience? For instance, how would this writing have been different if you had asked yourself, prior to and while writing, "My instructor wants to teach us how to communicate better in our fields. How can I help her do that, even in our class, through what I write here?" Or something like that. So see, you get an audience in your head, and then you find a purpose for writing that makes sens to you to your audience. It's usually easier, too if you have a real person to imagine as the audience
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