Rasmussen College Critical Summary Essay

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The ability to effectively and critically summarize a text is a crucial part of academic writing. In order to place an argument of your own in conversation with writing that has already been done on a particular subject, you will frequently need to summarize the ideas and arguments of other writers, as well as to simply summarize information in a clear and accessible way.

However, a “critical” summary is not just a regurgitation of information and arguments. In addition to identifying the main points of an article, your essay should reflect your own “critical” reading of the text. By “critical” I do not mean that you should “criticize” the text; in fact, you should not offer any opinions or arguments at all. Instead, I am asking you to read closely, interpretively, and analytically.

Graff, Gerald. “Hidden Intellectualism.” “They Say, I Say “: The Moves that Matter in Academic Writing, by Gerald Graff and Cathy Birkenstein. New York: Norton, 2014. 297-303.

Hidden Intellectualism

An excerpt from They Say/I Say:
The Moves that Matter in Academic Writing
By Gerald Graff
1 Everyone knows some young person who is impressively “street smart” but
does poorly in school. What a waste, we think, that one who is so intelligent
about so many things in life seems unable to apply that intelligence to
academic work. What doesn’t occur to us, though, is that schools and colleges
might be at fault for missing the opportunity to tap into such street smarts and
channel them into good academic work.
2 Nor do we consider one of the major reasons why schools and colleges
overlook the intellectual potential of street smarts: the fact that we associate
those street smarts with anti-intellectual concerns. We associate the educated
life, the life of the mind, too narrowly and exclusively with subjects and texts
that we consider inherently weighty and academic. We assume that it’s
possible to wax intellectual about Plato, Shakespeare, the French Revolution,
and nuclear fission, but not about cars, dating, fashion, sports, TV, or video
games.
3 The trouble with this assumption is that no necessary connection has ever
been established between any text or subject and the educational depth
and weight of the discussion it can generate. Real intellectuals turn any
subject, however lightweight it may seem, into grist for their mill through the
thoughtful questions they bring to it, whereas a dullard will find a way to drain
the interest out of the richest subject. That’s why a George Orwell writing on
the cultural meanings of penny postcards is infinitely more substantial than the
cogitations of many professors on Shakespeare or globalization (104-16).
4 Students do need to read models of intellectually challenging writing—and
Orwell is a great one—if they are to become intellectuals themselves. But they
would be more prone to take on intellectual identities if we encouraged them
to do so at first on subjects that interest them rather than ones that interest
us.
5 I offer my own adolescent experience as a case in point. Until I entered
college, I hated books and cared only for sports. The only reading I cared to
do or could do was sports magazines, on which I became hooked; becoming
a regular reader of Sport magazine in the late forties, Sports Illustrated when
it began publishing in 1954, and the annual magazine guides to professional
baseball, football, and basketball. I also loved the sports novels for boys
of John R. Tunis and Clair Bee and autobiographies of sports stars like Joe
DiMaggio’s Lucky to Be a Yankee and Bob Feller’s Strikeout Story. In short,
I was your typical teenage anti-intellectual—or so I believed for a long time.
I have recently come to think, however, that my preference for sports over
schoolwork was not anti-intellectualism so much as intellectualism by other
means.

In the Chicago neighborhood I grew up in, which had become a melting

pot after World War II, our block was solidly middle class, but just a block
away—doubtless concentrated there by the real estate companies—were
African Americans, Native Americans, and “hillbilly” whites who had recently
fled postwar joblessness in the South and Appalachia. Negotiating this class
boundary was a tricky matter. On the one hand, it was necessary to maintain
the boundary between “clean cut” boys like me and working class ‘‘hoods,” as
we called them, which meant that it was good to be openly smart in a bookish
sort of way. On the other hand, I was desperate for the approval of the hoods,
whom I encountered daily on the playing field and in the neighborhood, and for
this purpose it was not at all good to be book smart. The hoods would turn on
you if they sensed you were putting on airs over them: “Who you lookin’ at,
smart ass?” as a leather jacketed youth once said to me as he relieved me of
my pocket change along with my self-respect.
7 I grew up torn then, between the need to prove I was smart and the fear
of a beating if I proved it too well; between the need not to jeopardize my
respectable future and the need to impress the hoods. As I lived it, the conflict
came down to a choice between being physically tough and being verbal. For
a boy in my neighborhood and elementary school, only being “tough” earned
you complete legitimacy. I still recall endless, complicated debates in this
period with my closest pals over who was “the toughest guy in the school.”
If you were less than negligible as a fighter, as I was, you settled for the next
best thing, which was to be inarticulate, carefully hiding telltale marks of
literacy like correct grammar and pronunciation.
8 In one way, then, it would be hard to imagine an adolescence more
thoroughly anti-intellectual than mine. Yet in retrospect, I see that it’s more
complicated, that I and the 1950s themselves were not simply hostile toward
intellectualism, but divided and ambivalent. When Marilyn Monroe married the
playwright Arthur Miller in 1956 after divorcing the retired baseball star Joe
DiMaggio, the symbolic triumph of geek over jock suggested the way the wind
was blowing. Even Elvis, according to his biographer Peter Guralnick, turns out
to have supported Adlai over Ike in the presidential election of 1956. “I don’t
dig the intellectual bit,” he told reporters. “But I’m telling you, man, he knows
the most” (327).
9 Though I too thought I did not “dig the intellectual bit,” I see now that I
was unwittingly in training for it. The germs had actually been planted in the
seemingly philistine debates about which boys were the toughest. I see now
that in the interminable analysis of sports teams, movies, and toughness that
my friends and I engaged in—a type of analysis, needless to say, that the real
toughs would never have stooped to—I was already betraying an allegiance
to the egghead world. I was practicing being an intellectual before I knew that
was what I wanted to be. 

It was in these discussions with friends about toughness and sports, I think,
and in my reading of sports books and magazines, that I began to learn the
rudiments of the intellectual life: how to make an argument, weigh different
kinds of evidence, move between particulars and generalizations, summarize
the views of others, and enter a conversation about ideas. It was in reading
and arguing about sports and toughness that I experienced what it felt like
to propose a generalization, restate and respond to a counterargument, and
perform other intellectualizing operations, including composing the kind of
sentences I am writing now.
11 Only much later did it dawn on me that the sports world was more compelling
than school because it was more intellectual than school, not less. Sports
after all was full of challenging arguments, debates, problems for analysis, and
intricate statistics that you could care about, as school conspicuously was not.
I believe that street smarts beat out book smarts in our culture not because
street smarts are nonintellectual, as we generally suppose, but because they
satisfy an intellectual thirst more thoroughly than school culture, which seems
pale and unreal.
12 They also satisfy the thirst for community. When you entered sports debates,
you became part of a community that was not limited to your family and
friends, but was national and public. Whereas schoolwork isolated you from
others, the pennant race or Ted Williams’s .400 batting average was something
you could talk about with people you had never met. Sports introduced you
not only to a culture steeped in argument, but to a public argument culture
that transcended the personal. I can’t blame my schools for failing to make
intellectual culture resemble the Super Bowl, but I do fault them for failing
to learn anything from the sports and entertainment worlds about how to
organize and represent intellectual culture, how to exploit its game-like
element and turn it into arresting public spectacle that might have competed
more successfully for my youthful attention.
13 For here is another thing that never dawned on me and is still kept hidden
from students, with tragic results: that the real intellectual world, the one that
existed in the big world beyond school, is organized very much like the world
of team sports, with rival texts, rival interpretations and evaluations of texts,
rival theories of why they should be read and taught, and elaborate team
competitions in which “fans” of writers, intellectual systems, methodologies,
and -isms contend against each other.
14 To be sure, school contained plenty of competition, which became more
invidious as one moved up the ladder (and has become even more so today
with the advent of high stakes testing). In this competition, points were scored
not by making arguments, but by a show of information or vast reading, by
grade grubbing, or other forms of one-upmanship. School competition, in short,
reproduced the less attractive features of sports culture without those that
create close bonds and community.
15 And in distancing themselves from anything as enjoyable and absorbing as
sports, my schools missed the opportunity to capitalize on an element of
drama and conflict that the intellectual world shares with sports. Consequently,
I failed to see the parallels between the sports and academic worlds that could
have helped me cross more readily from one argument culture to the other.

64 | WHAT’S NEXT? THINKING ABOUT LIFE AFTER HIGH SCHOOL CSU EXPOSITORY READING AND WRITING COURSE | SEMESTER ONE

16 Sports is only one of the domains whose potential for literacy training (and
not only for males) is seriously underestimated by educators, who see sports
as competing with academic development rather than a route to it. But if this
argument suggests why it is a good idea to assign readings and topics that
are close to students’ existing interests, it also suggests the limits of this
tactic. For students who get excited about the chance to write about their
passion for cars will often write as poorly and unreflectively on that topic as on
Shakespeare or Plato. Here is the flip side of what I pointed out before: that
there’s no necessary relation between the degree of interest a student shows
in a text or subject and the quality of thought or expression such a student
manifests in writing or talking about it. The challenge, as college professor Ned
Laffhas put it, “is not simply to exploit students’ nonacademic interests, but to
get them to see those interests through academic eyes.”
17 To say that students need to see their interests “through academic eyes”
is to say that street smarts are not enough. Making students’ nonacademic
interests an object of academic study is useful, then, for getting students’
attention and overcoming their boredom and alienation, but this tactic won’t
in itself necessarily move them closer to an academically rigorous treatment
of those interests. On the other hand, inviting students to write about cars,
sports, or clothing fashions does not have to be a pedagogical cop-out as long
as students are required to see these interests “through academic eyes,” that
is, to think and write about cars, sports, and fashions in a reflective, analytical
way, one that sees them as microcosms of what is going on in the wider
culture.
18 If I am right, then schools and colleges are missing an opportunity when they
do not encourage students to take their nonacademic interests as objects of
academic study. It is self defeating to decline to introduce any text or subject
that figures to engage students who will otherwise tune out academic work
entirely. If a student cannot get interested in Mill’s On Liberty but will read
Sports Illustrated or Vogue or the hip-hop magazine Source with absorption,
this is a strong argument for assigning the magazines over the classic. It’s a
good bet that if students get hooked on reading and writing by doing term
papers on Source, they will eventually get to On Liberty. But even if they don’t,
the magazine reading will make them more literate and reflective than they
would be otherwise. So it makes pedagogical sense to develop classroom
units on sports, cars, fashions, rap music, and other such topics. Give me the
student anytime who writes a sharply argued, sociologically acute analysis of
an issue in Source over the student who writes a lifeless explication of Hamlet
or Socrates’ Apology.
Gerald Graff, one of the co authors of this book, is a professor of English and
education at the University of Illinois at Chicago. He is a past President of the Modern
Language Association, a professional association of scholars and teachers of English
and other languages. This essay is adapted from his 2003 book Clueless in Academe:
How Schooling Obscures the Life of the Mind.

This text is persuasive (that is, the author is trying to convince or persuade the reader of a specific argument). In your critical summary, you will:

  • Identify the author’s purpose and audience
  • Identifying and summarize the author’s primary argument
  • Identify and summarize the pieces of evidence the author uses to support his or her argument
  • Explain how the author uses rhetorical strategies (ethos, logos, pathos) to appeal to the reader

Note: You should not offer your own opinion, analysis, judgement, or critique of these texts. Your personal opinion should not appear in the essay. Your goal is to summarize your chosen text in a neutral, objective way.

In addition to these content requirements, the essay will have two formal requirements.

First, you should properly cite the text you are summarizing in MLA style. This means that you will include proper MLA in text citations and also a Works Cited page after your essay in which you cite the text. If you are unsure how to cite your source in MLA style, consult this website opens in new window. (Hint: When I list the possible texts above, they are already formatted in MLA style, so all you need to do for your Works Cited page is copy and paste the citation from this assignment.)

Second, while your essay should be primarily in your own words, you must properly quote your article directly at least twice in MLA style. One of these quotations should be a standard, in-line quotation (three lines of text or fewer) and one of these should be a block quote (four or more lines of text). For guidelines on how to quote texts in MLA Style, see the final page of this guide. In such a short paper, it will probably not be appropriate to quote the author more than three times, so you will want to choose your quotes wisely to illustrate the points you are making in your own words.

The tone you should use in your essay will be different than the tone you used in your Educational Autobiography, in that it should be an “academic” tone. You are not being asked to provide your judgement, opinion, or criticism on the text you choose, but simply to explain what the author is saying. The first-person “I” should not appear in your essay.

Brainstorming Questions

  • What is the primary argument that the author is making in the article you’ve chosen? Does he or she ever state it explicitly? Remember, there may be more than one argument made, but your job is to identify the primary argument.
  • Does the author address any “counterarguments” (naysayers) in their article? How does he or she address them?
  • What evidence does the author use to support their argument? Can you classify these points into categories or types of evidence (i.e., statistics/data, anecdotal evidence, etc.)?
  • What rhetorical strategies does the author employ to appeal to the reader? Where do you see examples of ethos, logos, and pathos in the essay?
  • Whom do you believe is the primary audience for this essay? Try to be as specific as possible. In what ways do you think the author is catering to this audience? Another way of putting this question is: What kind of person do you think the author is trying to persuade in this article?

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