SUNY Geneseo Department of Mathematics
Wednesday, October 20
INTD 105 17
Fall 2021
Prof. Doug Baldwin
(No.)
There’s now a “Midsemester Feedback Survey” in Canvas, which you can use to give me anonymous feedback on how this course works for you.
This is completely optional. Despite Canvas calling it a “quiz,” it isn’t graded at all.
I’ll look at results and report back on them for next Monday’s class.
Based on chapter 2 of They Say, I Say.
A summary needs to balance what you need readers to know in order for you to use the summary in your argument against providing an accurate synopsis of what the source you’re summarizing says.
You need to write transitions and framing around a summary, to describe the reasons for it. Don’t just list the main things the source says.
Both of the above are consequences of the idea that you should always summarize with a purpose in mind.
Read the “Memes” blog post at https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/history-making-and-remembering-a-case-for-critical-media-literacy/ (Alhassen and Ali, “By Any Memes Necessary: A Case for Critical Media Literacy,” Los Angeles Review of Books, May 19, 2021). Then write a roughly one-paragraph summary of the authors’ position in a Google document
To give context to the summary, pretend that you are going to write an essay that responds to Alhassen and Ali’s. You do not actually have to write that essay, but you should decide what your response would be, so you can write a summary that sets the stage for it. I have divided the Google document into sections corresponding to broad kinds of response so that similar summaries can be grouped together.
The summaries all seem to be preparing to agree with Alhassen and Ali’s position.
But one took exception to the idea of Malcolm X as a role model for unity and moderation. This would be a fine point to build a response to the essay around, but since Alhassen and Ali don’t actually present him as such (they interpret other people persistently attributing a quotation about those things to him, even though he never actually said it, as evidence that those other people are looking for a unifying leader figure), it belongs in other parts of your essay, not in the summary of Alhassen and Ali.
Should a summary mention the social media channels in which the misattributed quotation is popular? Maybe or maybe not. It depends on the goal of the summary. If the summary is laying the groundwork for a response that deals with those channels, then yes. But if the response is focused on something else (e.g., Malcolm X’s politics), then probably not. This is a good example of the importance of keeping your reason for summarizing in mind, and letting it shape how you summarize.
Quotations.
No new reading, unless you want to review chapter 3 of They Say, I Say.