SAMPLE SUMMARY: Here is a sample summary for the annotated bibliography. Notice that it begins with the bibliographic information (the citation). (If you were writing on one of the choices which includes 3 articles for one, you would have three shorter summaries (each positioned alphabetically in the document as a whole).

The summary itself starts by giving the problem (or misconception) addressed by the author. It then provides the key elements of the logical argument used to make his thesis point, and it gives that thesis point. Often, the order of the summary is not the same as the order of the article because an author wants to "win over" the audience (the ones who have the misconception) before giving the thesis.

Britton James. "Writing to Learn and Learning to Write." Prospect and Retrospect. Upper Montclair, NJ: Boynton/Cook, 1982. 94-111.

Teachers become frustrated because writing instruction often does not produce the improvement they expect. The reason it does not is that methods used to teach writing do not take into account the relation between cognitive development and writing-- the connection between thought (a kind of internalized diction), speech, and the written word. The kinds of writing we want children to learn are transactional language (the language of action) and poetic language (the language of art), but both are rooted in expressive language, which is primarily written-down speech. Because their writing is written-down speech, children start out writing expressive language, which is a direct outgrowth of their experience. Then, as they write more and mature, they discover the relationships that allow them to slowly transform expressive language into transactional or poetic language. Teachers must nurture and emphasize this discovery as discovery, drawing attention to the process itself. Too often, teachers instead focus on what is written (the product). Such a focus elicits writing that is boring, artificial, and non-coherent, because it is not based in and connected to the student's "thought" (or expressive language).

ON STYLE: The verb "to be" and the passive voice make this kind of writing cumbersome and hard to understand. Try to use agents in the subject slot with action verbs. Here’s an example of a sentence written in the passive:

"The problem Williams addresses in his article is that of a reader’s reaction to error. It seems that some errors are classed into categories. Some errors one may pine away over and call upon every resource to condemn, while others are simply noticed and passed over.

Here is the same thing re-written in the active voice; notice how much shorter it is:

Williams addresses the problem that readers react differently to different categories of error: They call upon every resource to condemn some, while noticing but passing over others.