Lesson 11 Prompt: Summarizing

On your blog, write about your experience summarizing the reading
Some of the articles that I have been using for my research paper have been tough to summarize while others have been easier. I am doing my research paper on the Alberta oil sands and the oil industry in that region. The majority of the articles I have found weigh the pros and cons of the issue and are fairly straight forward. These articles use facts and generally simplistic arguments to assert their claims. All of these articles are written for newspapers and are fairly easy to read so that the general public can make sense of them. These articles are fairly easy to summarize. That being said a minority of the articles use complex language and terms in them. These articles are for the most part written by industry insiders and there target audience is other people in the industry. When reading these articles I have consulted my dad to help me make better sense of them. He is in the oil business so he has been a great help making sense of these articles. The differing audience used by the writers of these articles has showed me how important it is to identify your audience before you begin writing. If you are writing a child’s book you cannot use complex wording and phrases that are way over a third graders head. While summarizing these articles has been fairly time consuming it has been very time saving in the long run. I have just finished writing out the rough draft of my research paper. As I planned out my essay I needed to use different references to strengthen my arguments. Having the summaries out in front of me allowed me to glance over them to decide which reference would be best in which part of my essay. It would have been much more difficult and ended up taking a lot more time if I had have just tried to remember the key points of each article in my head. The most useful article I found was the article “ Canada’s Tar Sands: Muck and Brass” from The Economist. It had a lot of strong arguments in favour of developing the oil sands and a lot of statistics that were very useful for my essay. It was one of the articles that was written for a wide audience and very easy to follow along with. In my Econ class we were required to subscribe to The Economist and we have to read a couple articles from it each week. It is a very well written magazine and I find it is usually written from an unbiased point of view. I searched for more articles from that magazine but could not find any more. It would have been nice to have another one to use but oh well. My mom is currently helping me proof read over the rough copy and I have an appointment with the writing center tomorrow. Hopefully there will not be to many problems with it and maybe I’ll be able to get it done this week!