Bok Summary Comparision

Taylor Effling
25 May 07

When writing my summary about Derek Bok’s, "Protecting Freedom of Expression on the Campus", I tried to keep in mind the ideas that make up a good a summary. According to the text book a good summary should not contain ideas other than those found in the original piece and should give the reader a sense of the context of the original piece. These rules for writing the summary seemed difficult to follow at times, because when different people read the same piece they usually have a different perspective about the piece and what the main idea is that the author is trying to express to his audience. In this essay I will compare and contrast the different ways in which my classmates and I chose to summarize this article.

When reading through my classmates summaries, I chose to compare the essays of Beth Guthmiller, Laura Lukes, and Michael Noel with mine. Right away I noticed that all three of them chose to include that the items of controversy were a confederate flag and swastika. This information does help to clearly define the particular problem that Harvard experienced. I chose to omit this information as I felt that Bok’s main point was the dilemma all universities and communities face when trying to promote free speech while preventing any and all offensive material that insults or upsets certain members of the perceptive communities. All of us agreed that trying to determine what materials are offensive and should be banned is difficult to do without encroaching on the right of freedom of speech. We all combined the paragraphs differently when writing the first summary. Michael and mine were combined the most similarly and shared many of the same points. We both mentioned the issue of censorship, which Beth and Laura did not. Maybe the reason is that we are both males and have the same train of thought, no offense to the girls in any way. Beth wrote a separate point for each paragraph, while the rest of us combined some of the paragraphs. It is interesting to see how different people combine paragraphs while others see them as separate points. Also everyone seemed to write their whole essay summaries different. Some chose to follow their paragraph by paragraph summaries conclusively while others introduced new information into this summary. Some followed the order of their first summary while others combined the points into a new order when writing their paragraph summary.

Everyone had their own style of summarizing this article. Even though each person had a different perception about the essay, we all seemed to arrive at basically the same conclusion. Sometimes, just the way in which someone writes something can give the reader a different feeling about the essay. Summarizing should not be an editorial exercise, you should try very hard not to include any personal opinions within the summary’s context, which sometimes is hard not to. It is not ethical to take someone else’s ideas and claim them as your own, or to question their ideas when you’re simply summarizing their essay. I think many times people do take what others write and put a twist on it to support what they are trying to say. Again, I do not know if this is ethical or not, but it does happen.