3 Summarizing and RespondingWhere Reading Meets Writing

Summarizing a text helps us to see and understand its main points and to think about what it says. Responding to that text then prompts us to think about—and say — what we think. Together, summarizing and responding to texts is one way that we engage with the ideas of others. In a history course, you might summarize and respond to an essay arguing that Civil War photographers did not accurately capture the realities of the battlefield. In a philosophy course, you might summarize Plato’s “Allegory of the Cave” and respond to its portrayal of knowledge as shadows on a wall.

And in much of the writing that you do, you’ll need to cite the ideas of others, both as context for your own thinking and as evidence to support your arguments. In fact, there’s probably no topic you’ll write about that someone else hasn’t already written about—and one way of introducing what you have to say is as a response to something others have said about your topic. A good way of doing that is by summarizing what they’ve said, using the summary as a launching pad for what you say. This chapter offers advice for summarizing and responding, writing tasks you’ll have occasion to do in many of your college classes—and provides a short guide to writing a summary and response essay, a common assignment in composition classes.