what is a critical summary?

7/27/2019 What is a critical summary?

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WRT 205-M260: Critical Research and Inquiry

The Prison and the American Imagination

Spring 2014, Tuesdays and Thursdays, 12:30-1:50 p.m., HB Crouse 306

Patrick W. Berry, [email protected], office: HBC 235

office phone: 315-443-1912

office hours: Fridays, 1:00-3:00 p.m. and by appointment

http://patrickberry.com/wrt205spring2014

Introduction to Critical Summary

So what exactly is a critical summary?

You likely have been asked to write summaries before. It is a necessary early step to learning more about

a subject. As a researcher in this course, it will be important for you to do more than simply report

someone elses words in a smaller form. In fact, as youll see when you read the first chapter of Harris,

this is not even really possible, because each of us comes to a text with our own perspectives. Harris

explains: [t]here is no such thing as a completely accurate or objective summary, a view from nowhere.

All readings are interested(15). So what can you do as a reader, trying to summarize? You can strive

to be fair and self-reflective and try to give a text its due and to show what uses you want to make of

it(Harris 15).

So a critical summary is a fair and generous overview of a text, but an overview that takes into account

the fact that as a researcher, you will have a project of your own in mind, that there will likely be some

principle other than simple coverage that helps you select the information you decide to highlight in

your summary.

What is meant by critical?

In the university, as you may have already learned, the word critical or critique does not mean that

you are necessarily criticizing in a negative way. Instead, it means that you are reading a text (or image, or

film clip) in order to evaluate the content or reliability as well as why a particular work was written, by

whom, under what conditions and context, and perhaps most importantly, how it fits into your own

thinking, interests and exploration of a topic.

Why are we working on critical summary in this class?

This class is designed to help you learn to do critical research: to find questions that interest you within

the class inquiry, to learn all you can about how the question has been approached by others, and to

offer your own thinking on the question in the form of an academic essay. In order to do this, youll

need to read carefully, generously, skeptically, and with your own questions in mind. These critical

summaries are an important first step.


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Some Practice

Read Jim Dwyers Rewriting the Citys Record on Prisons and practice writing a critical summary with a

partner in class. Youll be asked to share these. Here are some guidelines to help get you started: 1. Read carefully. Be sure you fully understand what the article is saying.2. Shift your focus from whatthe article is saying, to howand whyit is saying what its sayingin

other words read for what the writer is trying to doin the text [this is what Harris refers to as the

writers project]: that is, how the writer gets from point A to point B; how the writer works

with and through a question or an issue; how the writer evolves his or her thinking. Look at the

underlying structure of the textwhats repeated? What seems significant or strange or

important?

3. Find a focal point. Select something other than simple coverage or re-presenting (Harris)the ideas in the article. Focus your summary on a smaller section or cross-section of the ideas.

What would you like to make visible to a reader through your summary? What is your

interest?4. Choose key words or phrases that help you show YOUR reader a perspective on the article.

And try to integrate a few into your summary as quotations.

Rewriting the Citys Record on Prisons

Jim Dwyer, New York Times, January 4, 2014

First to the microphone at the inauguration of Mayor Bill de Blasio, Harry Belafonte got 60 seconds into

his talkbefore grievously mangling history.

New York, he said, alarmingly, plays a tragic role in the fact that our nation has the largest prison

population in the world.

That is the opposite of true.

New York is one of the first states to significantly reduce its entire correctional population, according

to a 2013 study by the Brennan Center for Justice at New York University School of Law. It reduced

the number of people in prison and jail, and on probation and parole.

This drop was driven exclusively by declines in New York Citys correctional population.

The title of the report is How New York City Reduced Mass Incarceration: A Model for Change?

New York City sending fewer people into the justice system reduced mass incarceration in the entire

state, the study found.

In 2012, the citys incarceration rate was 30 percent below the nations, according to figures released last

month. Over the past decade, the citys rate dropped by a third, while the national rate increased by 3

percent.


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How could those numbers possibly be true, with all the stopping and frisking that went on over the last

decade?

A good question. Think about this: Hardly any of the people who were stopped and frisked wound up

being arrested, so those stops did not add to the national prison or jail population. The people werentdoing anything wrong. Their blamelessness the very fact that they couldnt be locked up helped to

expose the folly of the stop-and-friskprogram, and to persuade a federal judge that it was being

unconstitutionally practiced.

Mr. de Blasio ran against an effigy of Michael R. Bloomberg, and there was not much in the way of

nuance on the new mayors inaugural stage. Mr. Belafonte could not be reached for comment, but the

mayor stood by those remarks.

Mr. Belafonte was speaking to a truth known all too well by tens of thousands of New Yorkers that our

state and our nations drug laws, as well as broken policies like the overuse of stop-and-frisk and low-level marijuana arrests, contribute to a national tragedy of overincarceration, Phillip Walzak, a

spokesman for Mayor de Blasio, said.

He may have been speaking to a truth; he just wasnt speaking the truth about New York. The city

under Mayor Bloomberg did indeed have an iniquitous record when it came to marijuana misdemeanor

arrests, with roughly half a million people, about 87 percent of them black or Latino, being charged for

things that white people do at a much higher rate. Still, many of those pot arrests, grotesquely unfair as

they were, resulted in summonses, not incarcerations.

There is no doubt that the criminal justice system is warped by race. The federal government enacted

laws that punished the use of crack cocaine at 100 times the severity of powder cocaine; that is, the form

of cocaine used in black and Latino communities was penalized far more heavily than the one used

among whites. And race is a stronger predictor of whether someone will get the death penalty than

smoking is for heart disease.

As Mr. Belafonte said Mr. de Blasio would be fixing our deeply Dickensian justice system, the

progressive in chief on stage, former President Bill Clinton, nodded, according toMelinda

Hennebergerwith The Washington Post.

He may have been nodding on Wednesday, but as president, Mr. Clintonsigned a law extending the 100-

to-1 punishment ratiofor crack cocaine, over the pleas of civil rights leaders who correctly predicted

that this would be an anvil dropping on the black community. And Mr. Clinton suspended his primary

campaign in 1992 to oversee the execution of a brain-damaged murderer in Arkansas, a black man.

But it was Mr. Bloomberg, not Mr. Clinton, who played the role of teething biscuit for the de Blasio

chorus, and it was an unedifying spectacle.

On Thursday, as Mr. de Blasio made the rounds, he said he was comfortable with the tone of his

inaugural event. Yet incantation of the word progressive doesnt push the world forward; on the other

hand, cutting the incarceration rate substantially, in defiance of national trends, is a pretty good seasons


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work.

At a memorial service in 2000 for Lars-Erik Nelson, a writer of great wisdom for The Daily News, his

friend Pete Hamill recalled an observation Mr. Nelson once made: The enemy isnt liberalism; the

enemy isnt conservatism.

The enemy, Mr. Nelson had said, is baloney.

what is a critical summary?

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