Audience: Academic

Purpose: Summarize the main point of the chapter and analyze it to show whether or not its use of
rhetorical strategies effectively persuades readers of its claim.

Instructions: Select one of our course readings so far (an article or one of the chapter sections from the
Preface book). Carefully read your chosen text and offer roughly one page of summary and three pages
of analysis with additional details from the text.

How to Summarize:

The purpose of a summary is to explain what someone else said. You should outline the point of your
chapter’s argument and explain how the writer supports that point. In summaries, you need to introduce
the author and title at the start of your summary and that you need to keep using signal phrases to show
that the ideas belong to the text. Review Read Up, Write Up Summary and Analysis chapter, "Her Point
Is: The Art of Summarizing," and "As He Himself Puts It: The Art of Quoting" for examples and templates.
Begin your descriptive summary pages with a one sentence account of the selection, and then identify its
content and structure in an organized fashion.

**Caution: do not simply retell the story of a fiction text; summarize the main
issues as they are revealed through the plot. Also be sure to describe how the
author writes about these events; don't just tell us about the characters as if this is
a story you made up yourself.

How to Analyze

Your analysis should be the careful, specific, and evidenced interpretation of how
effectively the text uses rhetorical strategies to persuade readers of its claim.
**NOTE: Although the Preface book may be a novel, each section also makes a
very clear argument about different concepts, ranging from the idea of home,
family, race, identity, love, power, survival, danger, history, culture, education,
violence, fear, economics, freedom, legal rights, etc. Focus your analysis on the
WAY the text exposes readers to one of those concepts and HOW the text
persuades readers to view that issue in a particular way.

Consider what the text means beneath the surface, what its purpose is, who its audience is, the implied
position of the author, what text it resembles, where it is especially successful, or where it fails to work
well. Support your analysis with evidence in the form of quotes and paraphrases from the text.

Analysis means lots of things, so let’s be clear on what it is not:

● it is not simple claim of taste, whether something is good or bad (by which you really mean
whether you like it or not), though you may indicate the why of such an evaluation;
● it is not unsupported opinion;
● it is not vague, general, or lacking evidence.

How to Support Your Argument with Evidence:

Each paragraph should feature one or two complete quotes and one or two partial quotes as evidence.
For both the descriptive summary and the analysis, you should incorporate textual evidence by
introducing its context (where in the book the quote appears, who is saying it and why), punctuating the
quote correctly, restating it in your own words, and then relating its particular meaning to the point you
make regarding the chapter. See the MLA Style Center and templates in Read Up, Write Up for
guidelines for incorporating quotes.