Essay 1 Prompt: Summary and Response (Review Only)

Introduction

This essay will focus on the idea of education, its value to our lives and your experiences within our education system so far. A summary and response essay allows you to interact with and respond to an academic text. With this assignment, you will show me your ability to summarize a text concisely, and you will get the chance to respond to the author's claims and ideas through your own lived experiences. 

 

Reading and Writing Skills

Over the course of this assignment, we will continue to work on developing key academic reading and writing skills, which you will use throughout your career as a student and which constitute the basis of most scholarly writing.  You will be focusing on developing a strong thesis, summarizing a text concisely and clearly, and making an argument using your own experiences as support (information). 

Focusing Questions

Now that you briefly understand what we are doing with this assignment and why we are doing it, I will now introduce our guiding questions. Through our reading and writing over the next few weeks, we will be considering and discussing the following: What educational barriers have you faced? Can you find any connections between your experiences on those of the individuals we have read and watched? 

Assignment Overview

The section below outlines the specific requirement of this assignment.

Purpose

The purpose of this assignment is to:

1. Read and respond to a college-level text.
2. Compose college-level writing.
3. Produce an academic summary of an article.
4. Respond to a topic with an original argument.

Goals

This assignment will help students meet the following Learning Objectives.

1. Students will use all stages of the reading and writing processes—including pre-reading, reading, post-reading, pre-writing, writing, and editing—in order to critically analyze readings and produce clear, well-organized essays predominantly free of grammatical and proofreading errors.
2. . Students will write effective essays that engage readers and present original ideas or points of view.
3. Emphasis will be placed on thesis-driven essays, which will demonstrate the principles of argumentation, including claims, evidence, and analysis.
4. Students will be able to edit their own writing for errors in grammar, spelling, and punctuation

The assignment addresses the following student learning outcomes:

1. Synthesize material from multiple texts to create and support an argument in response to a prompt.
2. Create writing that is clear and concise.

Task

Compose a summary and response essay, between 700-900 words in length, in which you clearly summarize Martin Luther King Jr's "The Purpose of Education" or Malcolm X's "Learning to Read" (review Academic Summary of Your Text ) and then respond to it by agreeing or disagreeing with the author’s ideas based on connections between the author’s claims and your own experiences. Please make sure to review your lecture on Writing a Summary and Response. 

More Specifically, the paper should have four paragraphs:

1. Introduction: The introduction should introduce the readers to the idea of educational barriers and challenges. It should introduce the article you have chosen to summarize ("Purpose of Education" or "Learning to Read"). It should end with a thesis that makes a claim about YOUR purpose for learning or getting an education. 
2. Summary: Your summary of the article chosen formatted in Academic Summary format.
3. Response: Your response will show your reader what your reason or purpose for learning is. This should be formatted in PIE paragraph structure. 
   
   1. 1. 1. In the Point (topic sentence), you should make your claim. It can sound something like "For me, the purpose of education/the reason to continue learning is that......"
         2. The Information will give an example of your personal experiences that connects to your reason for wanting and education/to learn.  
         3. The Explanation will explain to the reader how your experiences prove that the author is correct or wrong in his/her assertions. 
4. Conclusions: Restates your thesis and provides a final thought.

 NOTE: Since you are citing an article or video, don’t forget your Works Cited page.

Due Date:

Tuesday, September 14. 

Need Help?

As you write, it may also help to review Understanding Your Assignment. 

If you need further assistance, please consider taking advantage of our Online Tutoring with the Writing Center. 

Their hours for this semester are Monday & Thursday 9am-6pm, Tuesday & Wednesday 9am-7pm, and Friday 10am-2pm. They can help you on Zoom,  or through email.  To make an appointment, you can click on Make an Appointment with Chris or click on Tutoring, right from Canvas. You can email Cuyamaca.Tutoring@gcccd.edu or call (619)660-4525 to and leave a voicemail.  

Also, don't hesitate to email me with questions or concerns (kim.bailey@gcccd.edu or Canvas Inbox), or post questions to our Class Q&A Discussion.

Happy Writing!

Kim