S: Okay so if you
could just sign these papers right here
C: Okay.
S: This is
basically just going over that you are my subject and that you’re agreeing to
participate in this study and if you don’t agree with anything you can tell me
to stop at any time.
C: Okay.
S: So do you know what a summary is?
C: Yes.
S: Could you
define a summary?
C: A summary is a
snapshot of an entire plot where you don’t need to exactly read every word but
the summary gives you the descriptive details that you do need, they basically
give you the gist of the story, like the character, the plot, maybe the
conflict where they may at least attempt to give you the conflict in some type
of way but not unreal the whole entire thing for you but a summary is just usually
maybe a couple of sentences just to maybe give you an idea of the topic, or a
story, or a subject or anything like that.
S: So clearly you
understand what a summary is used for.
C: Yes.
S: How often would
you say that you’ve used summaries in your major?
C: For Comm, um, I
think a lot, a lot of the times with your research projects and when I’m trying
to gather sources for a paper I’ll ya know read the paper and try to give the
summary of the source that I’m using so I won’t have to read the whole
paper. When I’m ready to use the source
I can write down maybe a couple sentences about the summary that I read and it
will help me narrow it down with the sources that I need to use
S: Yeah… so do you
understand what a professor is expecting from you when they ask you for a
summary?
C: Uh, yes, I mean
I feel like we have learned that so young and it has been embedded in our minds
since we were in preschool and just the basic so I feel like now in college it’s
almost second nature to ya know to pick a summary, to outline a summary or to
do a summary.
S: Are you aware
that there are different types of summaries?
C: Um, no. I guess
not?
S: Well, you
obviously know from explaining earlier what a summary is, you would say that’s
a plot summary, right?
C: Yeah.
S: Well, there’s
summaries where the professor, if a professor came to you and said “I want you
to give me a summary”, what would you
assume that they would want you to do?
C: Um, kind of how
I described before.
S: So as a plot
summary?
C: It depends on
what class I’m in. So, if it’s a Comm or
English class I’m assuming you mean a plot summary.
S: A lot of
professors actually want you to give your interpretation of what,
C: Of what you
read in the summary?
S: Yeah
C: I could see
that
S: What you read
in the work, they want your interpretation of it so if you were say describing…
If you had to do a summary for Romeo and Juliet, how would you say? How would you say a summary for that would be?
C: I mean for that
one, since um, it is Shakespearean, sometimes it is more difficult to
understand or decode depending on how knowledgeable you are in Shakespearean
literature. I do feel that in that sense
you would probably do more um of a type of summary you described, versus a plot
summary I feel ike you would do more of an interpretation because I mean some
of the characteristics will always be the same with each of the papers the professor
reads from a student but I do feel like it would vary a little bit because the
interpretation of what you read is more complex than a regular piece of
literature.
S: Can you name a
specific example of where you have done an interpretation summary?
C: Um… That’s a
good question… Um… The class I took last semester, it was an English class. Um,
I can’t remember the name of it off the top of my head but it was where we
would read a lot of poems in that class and that was a good example of us
giving our interpretation summary because basically we presented it, what we
thought the poem was about, he was able to tell us off of our interpretation of
what we wrote for the summary, were we close to what it was trying to say or
were we not so, that’s a good example of one.
S: Were your
interpretations correct?
C: Actually, yeah,
they were pretty spot on, yeah!
S: Do you think it’s
more important to know an interpretation summary or a plot summary?
C: Uh, probably
interpretation.
S: Why do you say
that?
C: Because I mean,
anybody could write verbatim, ya know, of a summary like finding a new way to rewrite
a story without writing it the same exact way but interpretative makes it so
much more about you and how you look at it and how you angle it so it makes you
think more and think about it on your own versus kind of rewording what they
have already written as a basic summary format.
S: Yeah, would you
say it’s important to know and learn the basic concepts of a summary?
C: Um yeah I think
it would help to have it not retaught to us but maybe mentioned to us again
while we are in college because ya know some stuff you don’t always remember
from college so to have a refresher I think that’s a good idea.
No comments:
Post a Comment