Paper Assignment I
For your first paper assignment, write a summary of “Family Guy and Freud” by Antonia Peacocke in TSIS.
In summarizing, you express the author's main ideas more briefly than they appeared in the original. Using your own words to express the ideas of others is called paraphrasing; expressing the ideas of others using their exact words is called quoting. To write an effective summary, consider following the guidelines found on pages 6-7 in the textbook A Sequence for Academic Writing (ASAW).
Planning
Begin by finding the main ideas in the article. As a reader/writer, it is your job to analyze a text and to determine what information is the most important.
Anecdotes (personal stories) are usually inserted into articles to support specific arguments being made by the author. Rather than retelling all of the personal information from the article you read, try to report the reason the information was given. This may require an act of interpretation on your part, but it will be good for your essay in the long run. Summaries are often derailed by too much detail.
Introduction
You should accomplish the following in your essay’s introduction (preferably in as few as three sentences): Combine your paraphrase of the source text's thesis with the author's name and the text’s title. Identify the central issue and supporting points of the source text. Establish the order (your “essay map”) in which your summary will account for the supporting information found in the source text.
This type of introduction will orient the reader to the topic under consideration, the author’s central idea in regard to that topic, and the evidence or reasoning used to support that idea.
Body
In keeping with the order outlined in your essay map, paraphrase the author’s ideas as they relate to each supporting section of the original text. Be sure to use your own words to convey those ideas. If you use the author’s actual words, you are required to place them within quotation marks. Enhance the readability of your prose by integrating quotations smoothly into your sentences (follow the advice on page 45 of ASAW).
Because the object of a summary is to present information concisely while remaining true to the original, be sure to concentrate on the