"The Art of Summarizing"

Over the past week, we've talked a lot about ways of quoting and paraphrasing.  Summarizing is another form of writing down someone else's words, but, rather than quoting specifically or paraphrasing something, it is a way to briefly state another person's thoughts on a subject.  Often summarizing can be difficult, since it does not hold the power of quoting and can occasionally get dry or boring to our readers, when expressed in a dull way, of course.

This passage from They Say, I Say is a good guide to summarizing in an interesting way.  It warns us that we could potentially bore our reader, and it gives us guidelines for more interesting summarizing.

I like the idea of summarizing an opposing view.  This would definitely help with disproving the opponent in an argumentative essay.  It would also be helpful to summarizing lengthy articles or discoveries in an exploratory essay.  The author of "Squirrelly" summarizes quite a bit in her paper.  We don't see many quotes, but there are a lot of cited sources.

I hope to use the technique of summarizing in my paper, since there will be a lot of sources to cite, and I can't quote them all.