Review Questions

I am stuck attempting to write my review of my summary. These are the questions that arose (after diana_coman had to step away from IRC today) Since there are a lot I decided to make a post rather than start several threads on the channel.

  1. What is the relationship of exercise to needed step? Is the exercise a necessary step, or is it something else that achieves a different end that I'm missing? Not understanding this got in the way of me properly attempting to put my goal into my own words.
  2. Does the conclusion go at the beginning or end of the review in it's final form?
  3. How do I decide what is detail and what is top level?
  4. I do not understand how I changed the subject when summarizing the first paragraph. What is meant by subject? The person talking? The topic of the paragraph?

2 Responses to “Review Questions”

  1. Diana Coman says:

    1. "as an exercise" aka you are practicing reviewing stuff; ie it is an exercise *in reviewing*, regardless of any other considerations.
    "needed step" there comes with clear reference to "next attempt" aka to the original goal of summarizing content; in other words, you are reviewing your first attempt at a summary so that you learn and do better on the next attempt at a summary of the same thing (if you do not review your broken attempts, how are you going to improve? repetition by itself won't do much)

    2. one structure works with a brief statement of the "conclusion of the review" aka "it sucks because A, B, C and partially D, rather works on E" or similar in the beginning; this effectively gives the reader an idea as to what is being discussed in more detail afterwards; if you want, think of it as a sort of "table of contents". Separate from this, there will be of course an overall conclusion to your text and that comes naturally at the end as it is the result (and should flow from) all the rest.

    3. Heh; this is something you need to practice really and the very meaning in the end of a thorough understanding: being able to tell what is detail and what is core and being able to tell the same thing at arbitrarily chosen levels of detail. As a basic rule, detail is any non-mandatory part but of course it all depends on the chosen level at any given time.

    4. Grammatically speaking, any sentence has a subject aka the entity *doing* something. There is an action (the verb) and potentially an object (the passive thing, on/to which stuff is done). If you read your summary you'll even notice the jump from "people" to "she, the auhtor". The original text does no such jump, she is talking about herself, from her own perspective. The jump to a generic "people" is entirely yours and utterly not warranted. I suspect it's because you couldn't get your head around at all to her mushroom metaphor and what might be "those enjoying" etc. It might help to know her context really, in particular her personal context since this is quite a personal text.

  2. thimbronion says:

    > 4. Grammatically speaking,

    I understand subjects and objects in sentences. I tripped up on "subject of paragraph" which is what I got from that line. I do recall intentionally making the switch because I was trying to extract a general principle out of what she was saying. Also it sounded weird in my mind to be constantly writing "hanbot this and the author that" throughout the summary.

    EDIT:

    And now I notice the entire first paragraph of the original piece is ONE sentence.

Leave a Reply