writing a summary and reflect
WATCH “Princess Mononoke” AND SUMMARIZE this article
(Include Citations) (700 words)
• Morgan, G. (Fall 2015) “Creatures in Crisis: Apocalyptic Environmental Visions in Miyazaki’s Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind and Princess Mononoke”. Resilience: A Journal of the
DIRECTIONS:
• Your summary must clearly and accurately state the article’s title, year of publication, the journal it was published in, the author’s name, the topic, research question, and main argument. (for the citation, use MLA or APA. If you are using Chicago Manual of Style (CMS) that is fine too)
• It must also explain how the author relates their argument to other scholarship on their topic. Tell your reader what the author says they are adding to the scholarly conversation. Are they critiquing someone else’s article? Building on someone else’s ideas? Examining an aspect that hadn’t been examined before? Putting some ideas together than hadn’t previously been thought of as related?
• Lastly, your summary must describe how the author goes about proving their argument by stating the smaller supporting arguments and identifying the key evidence for those arguments.
How to do this assignment
• First, read the article carefully and closely
a. Take notes while you read. Write down the main idea of each paragraph or section.
b. Look up terminology you don’t know. Google it. If that doesn’t help, ask for help in mentor session from your peers. Don’t be afraid to enlist the help of the professor, mentor, or your classmates.
• Second, start picking it apart to see what it’s made of.
a. Identify the general topic. Is the topic really just Princess Mononoke or the other characters like Lady Eboshi or Ashitaka (relate to Fern Gully or Wall-E characters if you watched one of those)? Or is it a more abstract concept about society and culture, the environment, religion, war, industrialism?
b. Determine what key question or questions have guided the author’s research. That is (or those are) the research question(s).
c. Determine the main argument. It will be something the author is trying to prove. The topic is not the same as the argument. The topic is a general theme, the argument is a specific point or position about the topic.
d. Identify the smaller arguments that support the main argument. Put another way, what points does the author need to prove before the main argument is persuasive?
e. Identify what the author is using as evidence to support their points. You just want a few examples of whatever the author is using as proof of the supporting points.
• Third, write your summary.
a. Take some time to think about who you are writing this for and why. The purpose of a research summary is to give the reader a snapshot of what’s most important, thus the reader of such a summary would be a person who wants to understand the key points of the article, but hasn’t read it yet. Imagine your audience for this paper is someone with a college-level education that doesn’t have any specialized knowledge of the topic or field of cultural studies or film studies.
b. Keep it concise by making thoughtful decisions about what you consider to be the most important pieces of the article.
c. Use your own words and paraphrase sections as you see fit. Only use direct quotations when you absolutely must. There should be very few (if any) direct quotations in your paper.
• Fourth—Reflect
a. Reflect on your experience watching the film in terms of teaching about our relationship to the environment, our social responsibility to the environment, our responsibility to ourselves and our community—
b. What stood out to you as important, your thoughts on the characters, landscape, story line, even the sound score etc..,
c. Reflect on your thoughts about the film relation to the article you chose to summarize.
Maybe you agree with the article, maybe not, but explore your thoughts about why or why not.
Sample Outline for an Argumentative Article Summary
• Introduction
a. Introduce the article with its full title, author’s name, year of publication, and the name of the journal in which it appears.
b. General topic of article
c. Author’s research question d. How they frame their argument (or project) in relation to other scholarship on the topic
• Author’s thesis (main argument)
• Main points
a. Explain the supporting arguments, showing how they support the main argument
b. Provide a key example or two that the author uses as evidence to support these points
• Conclusion
a. Review how the main points work together to support the thesis.
b. How does the author explain the significance or implications of their article?
• Final reflection (see above on what to write about)