My main experiences with summaries were just single paragraphs, summing up the movie, book, or article I read or saw then jumping right into analytic commentary. Summaries are not as easy as you think, especially when the purpose of one is to be your whole paper. There needs to be detail, but not including every little thing that happened in the film. You need to be able to word the summary professionally, so you avoid sounding like a teenage girl telling a story about the drama going on with her BFF Jill "And then this happened... and this happened..... and this happened". It's very easy to make your summary emulate a sports caster football play by play, or like you're rewriting the script of the film on paper. Especially since documentaries might be hard to understand if the background knowledge isn't there, or if the film uses large vocabulary and technical terms. I do think summary are a very valuable skill to have. It can help in professional life during meetings and such. Being able to pull out the important information and focus on that can really help people when in the work place.
Coming from a heap of chemistry and biology classes, the summary writing was kind of difficult for me. I've always been taught to make detailed notes and make loads of observations. While this helped me in taking notes for the summary, it didn't help when I had to sift through a whole page of notes just to write the darn thing. In science it's all about the details and the observations. That's also true for summaries to an extent, but for summaries it's more of the main picture big big details.
I like how you included that it is a good skill to have. I agree because it will allow people to summarize something quickly and to the point without dragging on.
ReplyDeleteI was also taught to tag super detailed notes in order to understand everything I needed to know, so writing summaries is difficult for me too. I just don't want to miss out on anything important (notes or summaries).