Produce an analytical summary of Trinh T. Minh-ha’s Not You/Like You or Edward Said’s Orientalism using the following guidelines ( feel free to work in groups with other colleagues from the course):
This is an exercise designed to help make summaries more analytical. Part of the challenge is to work with a text that is dense, and which forces you to read slowly and very carefully. Here is what you will do:
1. Read the text once through.
2. Read again, taking careful notes.
3. Using your notes to prompt questions and observations, identify key terms, context, and purpose of this text. Use passage-based, focused free writing to help dig into the text even more deeply.
4. Write a summary of the text. Here are some of the principles of good, analytical summaries:
Take your text as a problem to solve. What is it about? What are its key arguments? What are its examples and conclusions? Imagine that you are writing for readers who have read the essays (although they won’t have the pages in front of them). You will need to take time to present and discuss examples from the text. Your job is to help your readers figure out what the essays say. You get the chance to take the lead and be the teacher. You should feel free to acknowledge that you don’t understand certain sections even as you write about them.
So, how do you write about something that you don’t completely understand? Here’s a suggestion. When you have completed your summary, read it over and treat it as a draft. Ask questions like these: What have I left out? What did I ignore or finesse? Revise by adding discussion of some of the very sections you don’t understand — you can, that is, be cautious and tentative; feel free to admit finding your text hard to read. You don’t have to master this text. You do, however, need to see what you can make of it.
Save your work and post to the discussion board.
