Sue Frantz wrote:
> After a bit more probing, I discovered they both
> had been taught (by separate teachers in separate school districts in
> separate decades) that to summarize something, you take each sentence
> and reword it. No wonder they looked alike!
>
> I explained that's not the best technique for summarizing. :-)
In one of my sophomore-level courses I regularly ask the entire class about
this. Large percentages (I'd guess around 40%) report that they had been
taught to summarize that way, and in fact that a perfectly acceptable paper
could be made by doing nothing more than that. Remember that I'm asking the
class as a whole, when the class members have no reason to say that if it
weren't true (i.e., I'm not asking AFTER having discovered that a student
did that, and I'm asking after having made it clear that they won't be doing
it that way in my classes). I'm convinced that _many_ students come to us
honestly believing as a result of prior education that one writes papers by
rewording original sources a sentence at a time.
I suppose you might argue that skill is a necessary developmental step in
learning to write papers, and obviously there's the strong possibility that
students are learning that, but their high school teachers aren't actually
TEACHING it (in other words, that the students are misinterpreting the
teachers).
Paul Smith
Alverno College
