Discussing Lawrence III Summary

Summaries are a good way to condense information so that one can understand it better. Summaries are also a good tool to use when one will have to go back and review what they have read. A summary can remind a person of what they have read without having to reread the whole essay or text again. However, if someone else reads a summary will that person get the real idea of what the writer of the summary gathered from the author of the text? One must remember that a summary doesn’t contain the important facts an author used, or their personality.

I believe that everyone who summarized a certain piece would write something completely different. Each person would pick out a different important point from the writing or from an individual paragraph. Everyone’s interpretation of what they read would also be unique. In the essay by Lawrence III, some people might have ventured to say that he thought racism should not be protected under the 1st Amendment, whereas I gathered from what he said that he believed it should be protected. These differences in the way the essay was read could have depended on who read it. Culture, race, gender, and other such factors could determine how someone reads something whose topic is so touchy. If a person has never experienced racism or racial speech, they may read the essay as having no need for protection because they may not understand how it can affect someone. People who have come in contact with racism or racial issues may see the need of protection and would have read the essay for the need for protection.

When a person is reviewing a summary someone has written, it is only fair to the author the piece being summarized that the reviewer is also given a copy of the original piece to conclude from it what he or she wants. Although, I do feel that the main idea of an essay would be communicated through a summary, the ways a person came to this conclusion might differ. Because of this if a person did not read the actual essay they might be confused as to what the author actually meant. Something that a person writes to remind them of what was written in a text may differ completely from how someone else might remember what was written.

Overall summaries are very useful. They can be used for studying, remembering, or even reviewing a piece of literature. An author may even go through and summarize his or her own work to make sure that they have the main ideas covered that they wanted to cover. However, no matter how useful summaries are, one has to be careful how he or she uses a summary so as not to shadow everything that the author is trying to portray. Also, even though a summary can be useful, it is not a substitute for actually reading the text.