Description
After each chapter has been assigned, you will complete a chapter summary. For each summary you will have until the following Friday by 11:59 p.m. to complete. While everyone might have their own way of working through a chapter summary a suggested strategy includes the following steps:
Read the chapter
Review the chapter table of contents at the beginning of the chapter
Reread the chapter and take notes on key concepts
Edit/organize notes
Compose summary
Revise summary
An example of how to summarize Chapter 1 is described below; this approach should be applied to each subsequent chapter in the book.
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Chapter 1 is titled Thinking about photography: Debates, historically and now.
It consists of four sections:
1. Aesthetics and technologies
2. Contemporary debates
3. Histories of photography
4. Photography and social history
Each of these sections should exist as a separate paragraph in the summary, so the Chapter 1 Summary should have four paragraphs.
Each of these sections is further divided into topics. These topics are examined in depth in the text; the summary should distill these ideas into concise synopses that demonstrate understanding of the content.
Under the Aesthetics and technologies section are listed the following topics:
The impact of new technologies
Art and technology
The photograph as a document
Photography and the modern
The postmodern
Aesthetics in an era of digital imaging
Each of these topics should be described in a sentence or two; some related concepts could potentially be combined into a single complex sentence (for example, the discussion of photography in terms of modernism and postmodernism could be presented as a single sentence contrasting the two theoretical terms). The words and phrasing used in the summary will be your own writing. A good way to prevent accidental plagiarism is to read the section, close the book, and write notes describing the overall message conveyed by the text you just read. After taking notes on each topic within the section, use the notes (rather than the original text) to compose the paragraph. Avoid composing the summary while referring regularly to the text, as it is likely that phrases from the text will find their way into your writing.
Read over the paragraphs and add transitions to create a unified voice that moves from one topic to the next in a logical manner.
Check for grammar, spelling, and punctuation (have a friend read over the summary).