How to revise your summary/commentary

Think about the elements you already have in your s/c. Identify the strongest main idea that YOU have about the essay or about the ideas that the essay led you to develop. Make this idea the focus of your revision.

Your revision will incorporate the elements from the original s/c, as listed below, but it will NOT follow the format you originally used. You will be rewriting this s/c into a coherent, unified essay with one main idea of your choice. This main idea can be about the essay itself OR it can be about an idea in the essay OR it can be about an idea that you developed as you read and responded to the essay. You may also choose to combine these kinds of ideas into a thesis statement.

Here is the original format of your s/c:

I. Date of your writing.
Title of reading.
Author of reading.
II. A brief summary of the article. Identify the key ideas in the work.
III. Your commentary about the ideas in the reading. State your opinion about the author’s key ideas and explain your ideas.  Be specific about your opinion—explain how and why you feel the way you do. You should bring in personal observations, experiences, or ideas as relevant to your explanations.
IV. List two quotations from the work that you think are interesting, significant, difficult to understand, or nicely expressed. Explain why you have chosen these sentences. Write at least one paragraph in response to each quotation. Identify the page number parenthetically for each quotation.

Here are the elements about your revision that I will be assessing when I grade your revision:

1. Focus: Clear, purposeful and focused presentation of main and supporting ideas throughout the writing. This essay should have analytical thesis that you support with your own opinion.
 2. Voice and clarity: You have used an appropriate tone for the purpose and audience of the work, and you have used language accurately, effectively, clearly and correctly. Spelling, punctuation, grammar, usage, and typeface conventions all count.
 3. Organization: Your essay should be easy to follow and it should be convincing because you use topic sentences and arrange your paragraphs in a meaningful and logical sequence.
4. Development: You explain your ideas thoroughly, using appropriate strategies of development, such as illustration, examples, narration, argumentation, description and explanation.
5. Intellectual depth: your ideas are appropriate for college level consideration, and you have presented them in interesting and thoughtful manner, with originality and insight.
6. Accurate representation of quoted material from the essay: when you use a quotation from the essay you are writing about, be sure to use quotation marks around the words that you are repeating accurately and exactly. After the quotation, insert a parenthesis, and inside that parenthesis, put the page number of the page on which that quotation can be found.
7. Works cited: at the end of your essay, list the author of the essay, the title of the essay, and the citation information for the book, followed by the page numbers for the essay. Your citation should look like this (this information can be found in 50 Essays on page 473):

Bordo, Susan. "Never Just Pictures." Fifty Essays. Ed. Samuel Cohen. 2nd ed. Boston: Bedford, St. Martin's, 2007. 85-92.

Example of Structure for this Essay

This is one example of the way in which you could organize and develop your revision. There are as many ways to write this essay as there are moments that you sit down and work with it. Use this example to help you see how to use key words, terms, and ideas to create links through your essay.

As you are rewriting, you will want to blend together the components from your original s/c so that your ideas are emphasized. For example, you might have as your thesis a statement like this:

I loved Dave Barry's essay, "Lost in the Kitchen" because of his humorous, satiric voice, but I also found myself objecting to the stereotypes he promotes about gender roles in our society, and in particular, his insistence that men are useless in the kitchen.

Such a thesis could lead you to structure your essay around key ideas such as these:

1. Barry's satiric, humorous voice helps me connect to the ridiculous scenes that sometimes occur in households--including mine--during Thanksgiving.

        This paragraph would then incorporate sentences from Barry's essay that you identify as humorous and satiric and ALSO lead you to discussing the kitchen "scenes" from your family.

2. Even though I laughed out loud all the way through Barry's essay, I found myself yelling out loud to my roommate, "This guy's hysterical, but I know lots of good male cooks!" He's wrong and he's right about gender roles.

    These sentences would shape a paragraph that would include your commentary about Barry's emphasis on gender roles. You would bring in quotations from his essay that you feel show him stereotyping gender roles. You could also then write about how you know these roles aren't always fair.

3. Barry might be right most of the time about how men are useless in the kitchen at Thanksgiving, and he might make us laugh about the silliness that occurs during this holiday in families, but I'd like to think that we can go beyond these stereotypes and expectations about roles.

    This sentence would shape a concluding paragraph in which you comment on your own ideas about how gender roles are and are not changing, and what you really would like to see evolve in our culture.