13 Evaluating a Summary
Learning Outcome
Evaluate your summary for the purpose of revising and editing.
Self-assessment and Peer Feedback
After drafting your summary, use the following checklist to read and evaluate it yourself, or ask a peer to use the checklist to review and evaluate your summary. The assessment questions are based on the summary-writing criteria presented in the previous chapters. All answers should be “yes.” If the answer to any question is “no,” then you should revisit that aspect of your summary. After making changes, make sure you reread your summary again to make final edits.
Additionally, it may be helpful to read a summary of the same text written by your peer. If you and your peer had different understandings of points in the article, you can work together to clarify the meaning.
Self-assessment/Peer Review Questions
- Does the summary have a topic sentence that states the author, title, and thesis (overall main idea) of the article?
- Is the summary complete (all major supporting points/paragraph-level main ideas included)?
- Is all of the information accurate?
- Are all ideas paraphrased? Quotes should not be used in the summary.
- Is the author referenced first by the full name and, after that, by last name (or “the author” or “the writer” or appropriate pronoun) throughout the summary?
- Are there paragraph references throughout the summary for the major points?
- Are unnecessary details excluded from the summary?
- Are the student’s opinion statements excluded from the summary?
- Is the Work Cited included, and is it correct?
Looking ahead to Response Writing
Now that you have learned the basics of summarizing, you should continue to practice. You will then be able to move forward with response writing, where you will be able to share your opinions and experiences in relation to the reading.