Why They Can't Write: Killing the Five-Paragraph Essay and Other Necessities

by John Warner

Student difficulties with argument summary tend to cluster around a few common issues. Some paraphrase rather than summarize, essentially repeating the original piece idea to idea in the order of appearance. Ideally, a summary should be significantly shorter than the original—it is meant to be an aid to understanding for those who do not know the text being summarized—so a line-by-line paraphrase doesn’t work. I often restrict students’ first attempt at summary to three hundred or so words, significantly shorter than what they’re summarizing. Some students hit the word count having dealt with only the first few paragraphs. Having been conditioned to locate their thesis at the end of the first paragraph, they sometimes assume the same is true of all writing, but in much of the more sophisticated texts they’ll read in a typical first-year writing course, the thesis may be implied rather than explicit.