Week 2 — Critical Reading: Summary & Response

Why this matters

A nursing student reporting a new hospital policy and a new hire passing a manager's memo to the team both have to say what a text claims before saying what they think.

In plain language

Before you can answer a piece of writing, you have to say fairly what it says. This week you learn to read a text the way a writer reads it, with a pencil in your hand and two questions in mind: what is this writer claiming, and how are they trying to convince me? Then you write a summary (a neutral report of what the text says, in your own words) first. Your response (your own judgment of the text, with reasons) comes second, in its own paragraph. The real text you practice on is President Eisenhower's farewell address of 17 January 1961, which you read at the National Archives.

• Already covered: Week 1, The Writing Process & the Rhetorical Situation, gave you five questions every piece of writing answers (writer, audience, purpose, genre, context) and the habit of treating writing as a process you loop through.
• This week: reading someone else's text critically, annotating it, and writing a summary and a response as two separate jobs.
• How they connect: last week you asked the five questions about your own writing; this week you ask them about someone else's, and then you add two more.
• Where we're going next: Week 3, The Paragraph, turns the claim-and-support skill you practice here into the way you build your own paragraphs.

Focus

Can you restate fairly what a writer says, and then, separately, say what you think and why?

By the end of this module, you should be able to:

• [ ] annotate a text: claim, support, turns, and margin questions
• [ ] tell a text's topic from its claim and its support
• [ ] write a neutral, complete summary in your own words
• [ ] write a response with reasons, kept separate from the summary

To-do

Plan your week

1. Read Chapter 2 (about 40 minutes), then the lecture and slides.
2. Work the lecture tutorial (60–90 minutes) and the practice set (about 20 minutes).
3. Do the Writing Studio (about 90 minutes), the discussion, and the assignment.
4. Take the quiz.

This week's checkpoint: write one neutral sentence stating the claim of Eisenhower's farewell address.

You've got this

Take it in order, and ask your instructor early if a step snags.

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