Project Links

The Assignment:
For this assignment, you are asked to summarize a discipline-specific text and then write an analysis of that text in which you discuss what makes the text-discipline specific. The text you must summarize and comment on is a social sciences research report "Prime Suspects: The Influence of Local Television News on the Viewing Public," by Franklin D. Gilliam, Jr. and Shanto Iyengar and published in the American Journal of Political Science, 44:3. (Jul., 2000): 560-573.

Goals:

1. Demonstrate that you can write an accurate and complete summary of a discipline-specific text;
2. Demonstrate that you can write a detailed analysis of a discipline-specific text; and
3. Demonstrate that you understand what makes that text discipline-specific.

Composition:

Audience:
The audience for your assignment is a class of undergraduates who are not familiar with the article you are summarizing and the conventions of writing and researching in the social sciences

Strategies for the Summary:

1. Review your notes from our discussion of the article and the social sciences;
2. Write your summary following the method outlined in our discussion on summaries;
3. Aim to produce a summary of 2-3 typed pages. You are putting the original in your own words in a more concise form than the original;
4. Do not quote or use key phrases from the text;
5. Do not include your opinion in the summary Remember that in a summary, you are objective; and
6. You always begin by identifying the author and the title of the work you are summarizing. For example: "In "Prime Suspects: The Influence of Local Television News on the Viewing Public," by Franklin D. Gilliam, Jr. and Shanto Iyengar argue that . . . ."

Strategies for the Analysis

1. Review your notes from our discussion on analysis;
2. Review your notes from our discussion of the article;
3. Make a list of the discipline-specific conventions we discussed;
4. Compare that list to the article; and
5. Aim to produce a 2 page analysis of strategies

Your response to the assignment should, at minimum:

• Accurately summarize the text
• Analyze key rhetorical features of the text and explain those features
• Have a clear organizational pattern

Heuristics for Project One

1. After reading the text of the essay, try to summarize identifying key ideas in your own words and also noting what strategies and conventions seem discipline specific.
   
   
2. After you have read and annotated the essay, try to identify the key ideas for each section of the essay and put those in your own words.
   
   
3. Draft the introduction to your summary making sure that you introduce the essay, the subject, and the author.
   
   
4. Draft the rest of your summary.
   
   
5. Now list all of the discipline-specific strategies and conventions you associate with writing in the social sciences.
   
   
6. Find an example in the essay that illustrates each of these strategies or conventions so that you can use that as a quotation in your analysis.
   
   
7. Look at your list and come up with a thesis that explains whether this is a typical example of writing in the social sciences and why.
   
   
8. Draft your analysis--you may not need to discuss each strategy and convention you have identified.