Questions to ask and answer before turning in your summary paper
1. What academic format have you put your paper in? MLA, Chicago, APA, CBE? Is it the format that your discipline uses? It should be. Find out. You can fall back on a default format for Summary #2, but use your discipline’s format going forward.
2. Did you figure out how the author structured the article?
3. What is the author’s general purpose in writing?
4. Did you annotate your article?
5. Did you complete the template for your second summary like you did for your first summary? (optional)
6. Did you divide your article into sections? By sections I mean the structure of the article as written in by the author?
7. Did you sum up in one or two sentences the central idea of the passage (easy to do this by using “what/who/why/where/how” template)
8. Did you summarize each section with a single sentence summary?
9. Would your audience be able to read your summary instead of the original and still get the most important points that the author intended? How so? Explain what you left out.
10. Have you had anyone read your summary to help improve the paper?
11. Have you read your paper out loud to yourself or had someone else read it aloud to you?
12. Have you done a backwards reading of your paper to check your paper for errors?
13. Have you included a works cited/references/bibliography page?
14. Have you checked this paper against the original and revised to make it is more accurate and complete?
15. Have you considered what you have written from the eyes of your audience? For example, is there a nice flow from start to finish that reflects the organization of the original? Have you left out too much, left out too little?