English 1180 1

W2020

SUMMARY AND RESPONSE ASSIGNMENT

Theme: Body Image

Content: In this assignment, you will select an article from the selection provided below by the instructor. The written essay will consist of two parts. In the first part of the essay, the article will be introduced and summarized. In the second part, the writer will raise and respond to at least three statements, issues, or themes. Your response can go in any direction you would like, as long as the idea originates in the article.

· “With This Tattoo, I Thee Wed” http://www.nytimes.com/2008/09/14/fashion/14tattoo.html?ref=tattoos

· “Joan Rivers Cure: Will Plastic Surgery Make You Happier” http://www.time.com/time/printout/0,8816,1874121,00.html

· “On Tyson’s Face, It’s Art. On Film, A Legal Issue” http://www.nytimes.com/2011/05/21/business/media/21tattoo.html?ref=tattoos

· “Naked, With Children” http://parenting.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/04/01/naked-with-children-but-for-how-long/?scp=9&sq=men%20and%20body%20image&st=cse

· “Scrawn to Brawn: Men Get Muscles or Pay for Them” http://www.nytimes.com/2000/08/20/style/view-scrawn-to-brawn-men-get-muscles-or-pray-for-them.html?pagewanted=all&src=pm

· Rafferty, T. (2001). Kate Winslet, please save us!. In revised edition, Baker College

composition: A custom approach. (pp. 736-741). Boston, MA: Pearson.

*Copies of the above listed articles are available on Canvas for download.

Topic: The topic is body image. It is important to explore why communication and general, and perhaps this class in particular, are important to your success as a college student and in your chosen field of study.

Purpose: The purpose of this essay is to summarize an article and critically respond to the article.

Audience: Your classmates. That means you cannot assume that your peers have read the same article you have, or that they have a basic understanding of your chosen career field. So, that means you will need to ensure that you are communicating clearly and providing sufficient explanation.

2

Claim: The claim you make will be factual in nature. For example: “Men are interested in plastic surgery because they want to keep their jobs.”

Evidence: As you move along in the summary and response, you will need to reference information from the article of your choice.

Essay Format: The essay will be 3-4 pages in length and adhere fully to the essay guidelines reviewed in class. This assignment calls for you, the writer, to personally respond to the article. Therefore, you are allowed to use a first-person (“I”) point of view.

Due Dates:

· Draft of the summary and response essay: Thursday, Jan. 30, 2020 (bring 3 copies for peer review).

· Final draft of the summary and response essay: Thursday, Feb. 13, 2020 (instructor’s marked draft and final essay).

____________________________________________________________________________

What is a summary?

A summary is a brief restatement, in your own words, of the content of a passage (a group of paragraphs, a chapter, an article, a book).

Can a summary be objective?

Objectivity can be difficult to achieve in a summary. By definition, writing a summary requires you to select some aspects of the original and leave out others. Since deciding what to select and what to leave out calls for your personal judgment, your summary really is a work of interpretation. And, certainly, your interpretation of a passage may differ from another person’s.

One factor affecting the nature and quality of your interpretation is your prior knowledge of the subject. For example, if you’re attempting to summarize an anthropological article and you’re a novice in the field, then you’re summary will likely differ from that of your professor who has spent twenty years studying this particular area. In addition, your frame of reference may also affect your interpretation. For instance, a union representative and a management representative attempting to summarize the latest management offer would probably come up with two very different accounts. However, in most cases it’s possible to produce a reasonably objective summary of a passage if you make a conscious, good faith effort to be unbiased and to prevent your own feelings on the subject from coloring your account of the author’s text.

How are summaries used?

In some quarters, summaries have a bad reputation. Summaries are often provided by writers as substitutes for analyses. As students, many of us have summarized books that we were supposed to review critically. All the same, the summary does have a place in respectable college work.

3

First, writing a summary is an excellent way to understand what you read. Second, summaries are useful to your readers. For instance, a summary would be helpful to a reader who hasn’t seen or read – or who doesn’t remember – a play. Third, summaries are required frequently in

college-level writing. For example, they can be used to demonstrate your command of a subject to your professor.

Where do we find written summaries?

Academic Writing: critique papers, synthesis papers, analysis papers, research papers, literature reviews, argument papers, essay exams.

Workplace Writing: policy briefs, business plans, memos, letters, and reports, medical charts, legal briefs.

Critical Reading for Summary

· Examine the context. Note the credentials, occupation, and publications of the author. Identify the source in which the piece originally appeared. This information helps illuminate the author’s perspective on the topic he/she is addressing.

· Note the title and subtitle. Some titles are straightforward; the meanings of others become clearer as you read. In either case, titles typically identify the topic being addressed and often reveal the author’s attitude toward the topic.

· Identify the main point. Whether a piece of writing contains a thesis statement in the first few paragraphs or builds its main point without stating it up front, look at the entire piece to arrive at an understanding of the overall point being made.

· Identify the subordinate points. Notice the smaller subpoints that make up the main point, and make sure you understand how they relate to the main point. If a particular subpoint doesn’t clearly relate to the main point you’ve identified, you may need to modify your understanding of the main point.

· Break the reading into sections. Notice which paragraphs make up a piece’s introduction, body, and conclusion. Break up the body paragraphs into sections that address the writer’s various subpoints.

· Distinguish between points, examples, and counterarguments. Critical reading requires careful attention to what a writer is doing as well as what he/she is saying. When a writer quotes someone else, or relays an example of something, ask yourself why this is being done. What point is the example supporting? Is another source being quoted as support for a point or as a counterargument that the writer sets out to address?

· Watch for transitions within and between paragraphs. In order to follow the logic of a piece of writing, as well as to distinguish between points, examples, and

4

counterarguments, pay attention to the transitional words and phrases writers use. Transitions function like road signs, preparing the reader for what’s next.

· Read actively and recursively. Don’t treat reading as a passive, linear progression through a text. Instead, read as though you are engaged in a dialogue with the writer: As questions of the text as you read, make notes in the margin, underline key ideas in pencil, put questions or exclamation marks next to passages that confuse or excite you. Go back to earlier points once you finish a reading, stop during your reading to recap what’s come so far, and move back and forth through a text.

Guidelines for Writing Summaries

· Read a passage carefully. Determine its structure. Identify the author’s purpose in writing. (This will help you distinguish between more important and less important information.) Make a note in the margin when you get confused or when you think something is important; highlight or underline points sparingly, if at all.

· Reread. This time divide the passage into sections or stages of thought. The author’s use of paragraphing will often be a useful guide. Label, on the passage itself, each section or stage of thought. Underline key ideas and terms. Write notes in the margin.

· Write one-sentence summaries, on a separate sheet of paper, of each stage of thought.

· Write a thesis – a one- or two-sentence summary of the entire passage. The thesis should express the central idea of the passage, as you have determined it from the preceding steps. You may find it useful to follow the approach of most newspaper stories – naming the what, who, why, where, when, and how of the matter. For persuasive passages, summarize in a sentence the author’s conclusion. For descriptive passages, indicate the subject of the description and its key feature(s). Note: In some cases, a suitable thesis statement may already be in the original passage. If so, you may want to quote it directly in your summary.

· Write the first draft of your summary by (1) combining the thesis with your list of one-sentence summaries or (2) combining the thesis with one-sentence summaries plus significant details from the passage. In either case, eliminate repetition and less important information. Disregard minor details or generalize them (e.g., Bill Clinton and George W. Bush might be generalized as “recent presidents”). Use as few words as possible to convey the main ideas.

· Check your summary against the original passage and make whatever adjustments are necessary for accuracy and completeness.

· Revise your summary, inserting transitional words and phrases where necessary to ensure coherence. Check for style. Avoid a series of short, choppy sentences. Combine

5

sentences for a smooth, logical flow of ideas. Check for grammatical correctness, punctuation, and spelling.

Pattern for Summarizing

1. Determine the author’s purpose. (Read—Reread—highlight)

2. Divide up the target article, determine its structure, and underline key ideas/terms.

(Divide into stages of thought)

3. Summarize the central idea. (Write a brief summary of each stage of thought)

4. Combine the thesis with one-sentence summaries. (Write a thesis: a brief summary of

the entire passage)

5. Draft, revise, and recheck to ensure that what you have written faithfully captures what is

said, in your own words. (Write the first draft of the summary)

____________________________________________________________________________

Templates for Introducing Summaries and Quotations

Template for Disagreeing, with Reasons

· I think X is mistaken because she overlooks __________.

· X’s claim that ________rests upon the questionable assumption that _____________________.

· I disagree with X’s view that ____________because, as recent research has shown, _______________.

· X contradicts herself/can’t have it both ways. On the one hand, she argues ____________. But

on the other hand, she also says ______________________.

· By focusing on _________, X overlooks the deeper problem of ________________.

· X claims ______________, but we don’t need him to tell us that. Anyone familiar with ______

Has long known that ______________.

“Twist it” move

“X argues for stricter gun control legislation, saying that the crime rate is on the rise and that we need to restrict the circulation of guns. I agree that the crime rate is on the rise, but that’s

6

precisely why I oppose stricter gun control legislation. We need to own guns to protect ourselves against criminals.”

Templates for Agreeing

· I agree that _______ because my experience ____________ confirms it.

· X is surely right about ___________ because, as she may not be aware, recent studies have shown that _____________.

· X’s theory of _______________ is extremely useful because it sheds insight on the difficult problem of _________________.

· I agree that __________________, a point that needs emphasizing since so many people

believe ______________.

· Those unfamiliar with this school of thought may be interested to know that it basically boils down to _________________.

Templates for Agreeing and Disagreeing Simultaneously

· Although I agree with X up to a point, I cannot accept his overall conclusion that ___________.

· Although I disagree with much that X says, I fully endorse his final conclusion that __________.

· Though concede that __________, I still insist that _______________.

· X is right that ____________, but she seems on more dubious ground when she claim

that ______________.

· While X is probably wrong when she claims that __________________, she is right

that _______.

· Whereas X provides ample evidence that _______________, Y and Z’s research on __________ and ______________convinces me that ____________instead.

· I’m of two minds about X’s claim that _______________. On the one hand, I agree that ________. On the other hand, I’m not sure if _______________.

· My feelings on the issue are mixed. I do support X’s position that _______________, but I find Y’s argument about _______________ and Z’s research on ____________to be equally impressive.

7

Templates for Introducing Summaries and Quotations

She demonstrates that ___________________________.

In fact, they celebrate the fact that _________________.

_______________ he admits.

Verbs for Introducing Summaries and Quotations

Verbs for Making a Claim

argue insist assert observe

believe remind us claim report

emphasize suggest

Verbs for Expressing Agreement

acknowledge endorse admire extol

agree praise celebrate the fact that reaffirm

corroborate support do not deny verify

Verbs for questioning or Disagreeing

complain disavow complicate question

contend refute contradict reject

deny renounce deplore the tendency of repudiate

Verbs for Making Recommendations

advocate implore call for plead

demand recommend encourage urge

exhort warn

_________________________________________________________________________

Detailed Outline Skeleton

I. Introduction

a. Attention Getter:

II. Summary of the Article

III. Response Issue 1

Supporting Example 1:

Supporting Example 2:

Supporting Example 3:

8

IV. Response Paragraph 2

Supporting Example 1:

Supporting Example 2:

Supporting Example 3:

V. Response Paragraph 3

Supporting Example 1:

Supporting Example 2:

Supporting Example 3:

V. Conclusion

______________________________________________________________________________

Don’t Blame the Eater

Zinczenko, D. (2002). Don’t blame the eater. New York Times. 23 Nov. 2002.

If ever there were a newspaper headline custom-made for Jay Leno’s monologue, this was it. Kids taking on McDonald’s this week, suing the company for making them fat. Isn’t that like middle-aged men suing Porsche for making them get speeding tickets? Whatever happened to personal responsibility?

I tend to sympathize with these portly fast-food patrons, though. Maybe that’s because I used to be one of them.

I grew up as a typical mid-1980’s latchkey kid. My parents were split up, my dad off trying to rebuild his life, my mom working long hours to make the monthly bills. Lunch and dinner, for me, was a daily choice between McDonald’s, Taco Bell, Kentucky Fried Chicken or Pizza Hut. Then as now, these were the only affordable options for an American kid to get an affordable meal. By age 15, I had packed 212 pounds of torpid teenage tallow on my once lanky 5-foot-10 frame.

Then I got lucky. I went to college, joined the Navy Reserves and got involved with a health magazine. I learned how to manage my diet. But most of the teenagers who live, as I once did, on a fast-food diet won’t turn their lives around: They’ve crossed under the golden arches to a likely fate of lifetime obesity. And the problem isn’t just theirs—it’s all of ours.

9

Before 1994, diabetes in children was generally caused by a genetic disorder—only 5 percent of childhood cases were obesity-related, or Type 2, diabetes. Today, according to the National Institutes of Health, Type 2 diabetes accounts for at least 30 percent of all new childhood cases of diabetes in this country.

Not surprisingly, money spent to treat diabetes has skyrocketed, too. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention estimate that diabetes accounted for $2.6 billion in health care costs in 1969. Today’s number is an unbelievable $100 billion a year.

Shouldn’t we know better than to eat two meals a day in fast-food restaurants? That’s one argument. But where, exactly, are consumers—particularly teenagers—supposed to find alternatives? Drive down a thoroughfare in America, and I guarantee you’ll see one of our country’s more than 13,000 McDonald’s restaurants. Now, drive back up the block and try to find someplace to buy a grapefruit.

Complicating the lack of alternatives is the lack of information about what, exactly, we’re consuming. There are no calorie information charts on fast-food packaging, the way there are on grocery items. Advertisements don’t carry warning labels the way tobacco ads do. Prepared foods aren’t covered under Food and Drug Administration labeling laws. Some fast-food purveyors will provide calorie information on request, but even that can be hard to understand.

For example, one company’s Web site lists chicken salad as containing 150 calories; the almonds and noodles that come with it (an additional 190 calories) are listed separately. Add a serving of the 280-calorie dressing, and you’ve got a healthy lunch alternative that comes in at 620 calories. But that’s not all. Read the small print on the back of the dressing packet and you’ll realize it actually contains 2.5 servings. If you pour what you’ve been served, you’re suddenly up around 1,040 calories, which is half of the government’s recommended daily calorie intake. And that doesn’t take into account that 450-calorie super-size Coke.

Make fun if you will of these kids launching lawsuits against the fast-food industry, but don’t be surprised if you’re the next plaintiff. As with the tobacco industry, it may be only a matter of time before state governments begin to see a direct line between the $1 billion that McDonald’s and Burger King spend each year on advertising and their own swelling health care costs.

__________________________________________________________________________

Invading Our Own Privacy

Tell-all blogs, digital surveillance, online profiling: Who needs Big Brother?

David Schimke Utne Reader  Utne Reader May / June 2007

10

It’s a good guess that the last thing the newly hired editor of an alternative newspaper would want a grizzled group of journalists to know is that the person he’d most like to meet is Howard Stern. Yet hours after Kevin Hoffman was tapped to take the helm at City Pages, staffers at the Minneapolis weekly, who had yet to meet the 30-year-old in person, were reading all about their new leader’s love of Stern, ultimate fighting, and The Real World on his MySpace page and sketching a less than favorable caricature.

That same week in late January, Jessica Blinkerd, a 22-year-old California woman charged with drunken driving and vehicular manslaughter, received a tougher-than-expected sentence, 64 months in prison. Despite having professed deep remorse in court, Blinkerd had posted pictures at MySpace of herself out on the town after the accident, drinking with friends and sporting a shirt advertising a brand of tequila. ‘Why would probation get your attention?’ the judge asked.

Both cases, one comical, the other life-altering, illustrate a commercially driven cultural trend whose consequences may not be known until well after debates over the merits of wiretapping, the Patriot Act, and digital spying are resolved in Congress. People of all ages, but especially those between 18 and 34, have become so comfortable with online commerce, instant correspondence, and daily confession that personal privacy is being redefined and, some argue, blithely forfeited.

‘Young people have already embraced the frenzied commercial environment of the digital marketplace,’ says Jeff Chester, founder and executive director of the Center for Digital Democracy. ‘The prevailing paradigm is a seamless integration of content, communication, data collection, and targeted marketing.’

The technological assault on our anonymity is gaining speed: Surveillance cameras and now cell phones track physical movement; computer ‘cookies’ transmit buying habits, political affiliations, and sexual proclivities. And now, according to Science News (Jan. 13, 2007), because computer users have ‘characteristic patterns of how they time their keystrokes [and] browse websites,’ researchers are learning how to use ‘typeprints, clickprints, and writeprints, respectively, as digital forms of fingerprints.’

New York magazine (Feb. 12, 2007) points out that people of all ages are susceptible to these intrusive technologies, but it’s twentysomethings who are, paradoxically, the most savvy about how they can be watched and the least likely to self-censor. ‘In essence, every young person in America has become, in the literal sense, a public figure,’ writes Emily Nussbaum, who posits that online differences represent the first true generation gap in nearly 50 years. ‘And so they have adopted the skills that celebrities learn in order not to go crazy: enjoying the attention instead of fighting it.’

11

It’s tempting to write off those darn kids as narcissistic or obsessed with fame, as Lakshmi Chaudhry does in the Nation (Jan. 29, 2007). After all, as she points out, ‘Celebrity has become a commodity in itself, detached from and more valuable than wealth or achievement.’ What’s received little attention, though, is the ways corporations are stacking the digital deck.

‘Young people are now heavily engaged in identity exploration and development well into their 20s, and the Internet has become their primary tool,’ says Kathryn Montgomery, professor of communications at American University and author of Generation Digital (MIT Press, 2007). ‘Companies build brands by purposely cultivating this process, creating spaces where they’re encouraging people to pour their hearts out. It’s like a diary — but there’s no key.’

On February 22, ClickZ.com reported that Fox Interactive Media, a division of Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp., which owns MySpace, had hired a high-tech ad firm to mine user profiles, blog posts, and bulletins to ‘allow for highly refined audience segmentation and contextual microtargeting . . . which might put it in more direct competition with the likes of Yahoo, AOL, and MSN.’

‘I don’t think kids understand the long-term consequences of our surveillance culture. I’m not sure any of us do,’ Montgomery says. ‘But it’s the responsibility of educators and policy makers to make sure we’re educating people about the value of privacy and what it really means to give it up.’

In that spirit, according to the Chronicle of Higher Education (Jan. 12, 2007), two professors at Drake University’s law school, worried that their students’ casual approach to digital correspondence could hinder their careers, started a class stressing online discretion. The lesson, according to one student, is simple: ‘If you are not comfortable with shouting your comments from a street corner, you probably shouldn’t convey them via electronic print.’

_________________________________________________________________________

The triumph and tragedy of Michael Jackson

Originally published June 26, 2009, by Leonard Pitts Jr.

I got to interview Michael Jackson only once, at the family home in Encino, Calif. This was on the occasion of his 21st birthday, and I remember thinking that for a guy approaching a milestone, he didn’t seem very happy. Truth is, he seemed tired. Not from fatigue or exertion. It was an existential tired, as if he felt worn down by the simple act of being.

12

I remember Jackson did not walk about the place so much as haunt it, slumping from room to room as a great weight rested upon his sparrow shoulders.

He complained to me that he was lonely, told me how he wandered the streets outside the security gate sometimes, late at night, just looking for someone to talk to. I took it for image-making hyperbole until a friend of mine, singer Sam Moore of the old duo Sam & Dave, told me about driving through Encino one night and finding Michael, just walking.

One other memory from that interview: Michael was telling me in that soft, fey voice of his how some girl had climbed the security fence and been found wandering the property early one morning. She was lucky, he said, that the dogs were not out because they’d have eaten her alive. Moments later, by way of illustration, he took me to see the dogs in question.

We were standing before a pen in which the canines were lounging. And Michael said, “Pretend you’re attacking me.” I said, Beg pardon? He repeated it: “Pretend you’re going to attack me.” So I did as he said, hesitantly raising my hands toward his throat. In an instant the dogs had gone zero to bloodlust, barking and snarling, climbing the fence and trying to chew through the chainlinks. Suddenly, I was doing a statue imitation and wondering if I had soiled myself. Michael was laughing his head off.

He was an odd guy.

And this was before “Thriller” made him the most successful recording artist in history. It was before Bubbles the chimp and the elephant man’s bones, before Elvis’ daughter and plastic surgery, before the hyperbaric chamber and skin the color of bones. And yes, it was before sordid rumors and eventually a trial — and an acquittal — on charges of child molestation.

The pinnacle of ‘thriller’

Michael Jackson’s life will always separate out like that, into epochs of before “Thriller” and after. Before: an apple-cheeked adolescent, child prodigy of the Motown stable, obsessed with fantasy and reptiles, and possessed of a raw talent (listen again to that explosive lead vocal on “I Want You Back”) years beyond his age. Years beyond anyone’s age.

And after: a star bigger, perhaps, than any human being ever should be, so big he redefined the very meaning of success.

Before “Thriller,” an artist might call himself successful if he got a gold record, signifying 500,000 copies sold. He might call himself a superstar if he got platinum, signifying a million copies sold. To sell five times or 10 times platinum was to have one of the biggest albums of the year.

“Thriller” has gone at least 48 times platinum worldwide. It has sold 28 million in the United States alone.

13

It made him bigger than Elvis, bigger than the Beatles, bigger than popular music itself. That the album produced videos (Billie Jean, Beat It, Thriller) that changed the face of music video seems almost incidental. That its grab-bag approach, its something for everybody style, was a work of prescience and marketing genius, seems almost irrelevant.

Because the truest statement of “Thriller’s” success is simply this: It made the man historic. It opened a whole new stratosphere of success. This was his great triumph. And his great tragedy.

Because the very magnitude of the achievement isolated him from the ordinary human contact he claimed to crave, made him prey for the leeches and hangers-on who troubled the last years of his life. The charming eccentric who walked the streets of Encino looking for companionship was suddenly unable to poke his head out of a window without causing a riot.

Worse, his success made him a man no one could say no to. Not when he altered his very visage with a series of plastic surgeries that, some said, were designed to remove every trace of Africa and of the father with whom he had a famously troubled relationship. Not when he made his home into an amusement park complete with a train and a zoo and a tree he climbed in order to be alone. Not when he spent a fortune on garish baubles and tchotchkes and drove his finances into the ground. Not when a series of scandals and public oddities ruined his image, and left one of music’s greatest showmen an object of pitiable scorn.

And not when he began sharing his bed — innocently, he always said — with little boys.

The truth within

“Thriller” consumed Michael Jackson. It raised the stakes on everything he did, and until his last day he was always competing with it, always looking to top what he had done. He never did. And yet, you wouldn’t have been surprised if he had. That’s how good he was.

Which is why for those of us who remember Michael Jackson before, those of us who memorized his little ad libs in “ABC” and stayed up late to watch him dance the robot on Carson, those of us who saw him move seamlessly as liquid, or sing in a voice that shifted without apparent effort from saw-toothed rawness to a sweet and ethereal falsetto, there is a poignancy beyond mere grief here. We were waiting for him to get back to what he had been before all the extraneous madness: a singer and showman of astonishing genius. We were waiting for that, even those of us who thought we weren’t.

Just the other day, I exchanged e-mails with a friend who, like me, covered Jackson in the old days. We were talking about his recently announced comeback show and I asked my friend what he thought of it. My friend didn’t think much. He was sick of Michael’s self-centeredness, his manipulation of others, his general weirdness. As far as he was concerned, the comeback could pass him by. I agreed.

And we were both lying through our teeth. If that show had come off, we’d have gone.