Expansion of Summary

A summary should not contain ideas other than those found in the original piece and should give the reader nothing but a sense of the original piece.

Comparing my summary with those of the three other students, I found four areas in which each one of us emphasized. These included, Harvard and many other institutions have a problem about how to balance the protection of free speech and student rights; restrictions placed on freedom of speech, even though offensive to many, often creates more problems than it solves because more attention is focused on the issue and other means of being disrespectful can be used; censorship is difficult when used to evaluate the offensiveness or the value since the messages are subjective and values differ among individuals; and education, reasoning, or ignoring offensive material is preferable to prohibiting it.

Each student I compared my essay with went through each paragraph the same as I had, so our summaries were all comparable. One summary painted out that the hanging of the Confederate flag may have been out of pride and not meant as the affront in which it was taken.

The summaries were all very similar and any variation was mostly how condensed or unabridged the content was. Each of the four conveyed the same meaning.

When summarizing an article it is imperative not to editorialize or put a certain “spin” on the article to change the original author’s intent. Summarizing is not meant to be an editorial and to do so would be unethical because the original idea would be altered.