WRDS 150

Dr. Ferreira
Short Summary (5%)

Due: Weds, Sept. 28 (upload to Connect-see submission instructions on the syllabus)

Instructions:
 Write a 200-250 word summary of the scholarly expert provided on this handout.

 Use the introductory sentence provided to begin your summary.

 Provide an original title that reflects the big issue of the summary.

 Follow MLA citation style guidelines.

 Format your assignment according to the instructions on the last page of the course syllabus.

 Before handing in the summary, review the rubric and the student sample provided.

 Hand in your gist notes and levels of gist diagram with the final draft (you can either scan or
take a picture and attach them to your assignment or bring them in hard copy to class on the due
date)

Required Introductory Sentence:

Please begin your summary with the following sentence. Fill in the blanks and choose the reporting
verb that best fits with the research question and/or goal of the research that you identify:

In Tyler Evans-Tokaryk’s study on/of [identify the big issue here], Evans-Tokaryk [choose one
of the following verbs: argues or seeks or claims or asks] [identify the claim or argument or
question here].

In Tyler Evans-Tokaryk’s study on/of_________________, Evans-Tokaryk

argues/seeks/claims/asks__________________________.

Guidelines:
Where to begin?
 Read the excerpt in its entirety, taking careful gist notes as you read.

 Look up any words that you do not understand.

 Identify the topic, reading question, knowledge gap and research goal.

 Decide what to remember and what to forget.

 Create a levels of gist diagram.

What to include?

© Ferreira 2016. Not to be copied, used, or revised without explicit written permission from the copyright owner
Your summary should incorporate the following scholarly moves. These scholarly moves form part of
my genre expectations as a reader and evaluator of your work:

 Create an original title. It might mention the author’s main abstraction and/or big issue, since these
will be the main point(s) of your summary.

 Use the introductory sentence provided to introduce the scholars that you are summarizing and to
identify the big issue/topic and goals of the research. This will provide your reader with a focus for
your summary.

 Organize your summary according to the levels of gist and not in order of the gist’s appearance in
the original.

o In other words, synthesize instead of list information.

 Include reporting expressions throughout to let your reader know who is speaking.

 Choose between paraphrasing and quoting the speaker(s) directly (including reporting reporting
or indirect speech). Remember that the shorter the summary the less direct quoting will be used.

o Provide a synthesized overview of the whole in your own words—no straight copying, very
little quoting, ideas grouped by concept rather than order of appearance (no listing!).

o When paraphrasing, remember to substantially change the wording of the original, even
while keeping the same gist.

Scholarly Excerpt:

Evans-Tokaryk, Tyler. “Academic Integrity, Remix Culture, Globalization: A Canadian Case Study of
Student and Faculty Perceptions of Plagiarism.” Across the Disciplines: A Journal of Language,
Learning, and Academic Writing 11.2 (2014): n.p.

This paper seeks to identify and clarify the epistemological problem at the core of the ongoing
discussion around plagiarism in post-secondary institutions. It does so through an analysis of two sets
of empirical data—a survey of faculty members and a set of focus groups with students—collected at a
mid-sized, primarily undergraduate university in eastern Canada. When read in the context of recent
theoretical literature on plagiarism, our data suggest that the forces of globalization and contemporary
"remix culture"[4] are complicating both students' and faculty members' understandings of "plagiarism,"
making it difficult for stakeholders to agree on the terms of the discussion let alone strategies for
addressing the problem. Taken together, these two sets of data tell a provocative story about a
fragmented community of students and faculty members struggling with competing, often contradictory
understandings of a single set of conventions for appropriate source use; they tell a story about a loss of
trust—students don't trust the faculty, faculty don't trust the students, and neither party trusts that the
institution is equipped to remedy the problem.

Complicating Factors: Remix Culture and Globalization

© Ferreira 2016. Not to be copied, used, or revised without explicit written permission from the copyright owner
Two significant socio-cultural developments in the last decade have contributed in profound ways to
the fragmentation of the notion of plagiarism in the academy. The first is the evolution of so-called
remix culture where uncited intertextuality is an accepted and respected form of communication; remix
culture uses sources in a very different way from traditional Western academic culture which puts a
high premium on originality and has developed an elaborate set of rules for acknowledging other
writers' original work. The second is, broadly speaking, the impact of globalization on the university;
the forces of globalization are transforming student demographics, faculty demographics, educational
technologies, and the basic processes by which intellectual capital is produced and shared. The
discourses of globalization and remix culture are complicating, challenging, and in some cases
undermining the concepts of originality, intellectual property, text, and author that are foundational to
our understanding of the notion of plagiarism. To further confound the problem, many universities
seem reluctant to address these changes, either through revisions to academic codes or with educational
interventions.

Remix Culture
Lawrence Lessig (2008) has famously observed that university students today live in a remix culture
where the lines between authors and their sources are conflated in sometimes accidental and other
times deliberate ways. Students today have not only "seen the birth of collaborative and constructive
spaces like YouTube, Facebook, and Wikis" but they have also "observed the rise and fall of peer-to-
peer file sharing spaces like Napster and Kazaa, the emergence of torrenting, and the birth of a grass-
roots, activist copyleft culture" (Rife, Westbrook, DeVoss, & Logie, 2010, p. 162). [5] So-called
millennial students express originality or creativity through pastiche and collaboration, and they
understand "authorship" as the process of mixing two or more existing (i.e., Internet) sources
together—some obvious examples are uncited quotations or images on Facebook pages, mash-ups that
combine a song with unrelated video footage, and cut-ups of literature. As Susan Blum (2009) notes,
some millennials consider a collection of illegally downloaded songs on a mobile device to be an
original composition, reflecting and constituting their identity, providing a measure of self-definition.[6]
More importantly, the act of obfuscating the origin of a source creates pleasure for many millennials;
when they share intertexts without identifying the sources, they connect and bond with each other in
enhanced ways (Blum, 2009, p. 68). Conversely, many Western academics still associate originality or
creativity with the solitary (Romantic) genius. In this model, the author writes something completely
new to advance the body of knowledge in a given discipline and follows an established set of
conventions when citing other (original) sources.

[4] By "remix culture," we are referring to Lawrence Lessig's (2008) argument that digital technologies today
allow for a more reciprocal, democratic relationship between producers and consumers of culture. In a remix
culture, literacy is defined as the knowledge and ability to manipulate multi-media technologies; users of multi-
media technologies quote (e.g., remix) from a variety of unacknowledged sources to create something new.

[5] Of course, students entering university in 2014 were only 5 years old when peer-to-peer file sharing services
such as Napster were closed down, so the details of this reference may seem a bit out of date. The point here,
however, is that millenials have never known anything other than so-called remix culture.

[6] Chapter 2 of Susan Blum's My Word! Plagiarism and College Culture offers a number of other examples of
the ways millennials use pastiche and collaboration as "creative" techniques of self-expression. Millennials see
the process of assembling a new text from old texts as original creative work, and so do not intuitively or easily
accept the difference between originality and imitation.

© Ferreira 2016. Not to be copied, used, or revised without explicit written permission from the copyright owner
 Short Summary Rubric

 Formatting
o Provides an original title-identifies the article’s main abstraction and big issue that will
be the main point(s) of your summary_____/.25
o Follows the formatting guidelines on the course syllabus as well as MLA style for
reported speech and citation____/.25
 Displays a confident and sophisticated comprehension of the original text and of the summary
genre:
o accurately represents and synthesizes (rather than lists) key ideas of the original
passage, with a clear focus;
o understands and articulates the original’s high-level concepts (the “so what”: what it is
arguing and why), using abstractions, and then traces and explains the development of
those ideas using relevant mid- and low-level details_________/1.75
 Takes a clear position on the original:
o accurately defines key terms in own words;
o uses a variety of effective reporting expressions;
o offers persuasive, clearly-explained further applications and/or evaluation of the original
discussion;
o situates the original (discipline, or methodology, or state of knowledge);
o incorporates quoting, paraphrasing, and synthesis, using each method to its most
effective purpose, and clearly indicates source-including double
reporting_________/1.75
 Language / style / organization are:
o professional & scholarly;
o accurate (vocabulary, concepts, grammar, citation);
o coherent (ideas logically connected across sentences & paragraphs, e.g., by using
transitions and coordinating conjunctions)____________/1
 Overall meaning is clear and accurate.

© Ferreira 2016. Not to be copied, used, or revised without explicit written permission from the copyright owner
Sample Student Summary
Media Representation as a Function of Change
In their research on representations of disability in print media, Kimberley Devotta and Robert Wilton Commented [LF1]: I have been introduced to the authors.

examine how political and social developments, media representation and general public attitudes

affect and shape one another. Primarily, their goal is to gauge the role of mass media in the positive Commented [LF2]: Excellent! This phrase identifies the
big issue clearly to me. I hope that the summary will explain
how they develop and establish this focus.
effects of recent activism and legislations on alleviating the barriers disabled individuals experience in

society. To make their claim that the media shapes public opinion on issues through the selection of

topics and representations and is, simultaneously, an embodiment of current public attitudes (6),

Devotta and Wilton build upon Gamson and Modigliani’s findings that, “media discourse dominates Commented [LF3]: I see that you used the speakers’ first
and last names when first introducing them to the reader.
After that, you use their last names only. This conforms to
the larger issue culture, both reflecting it and contributing to its creation” (6). This idea of a feedback MLA citation formatting.
Commented [LF4]: Your statement hear shows me how
loop of perceptions and ideologies is central to Devotta and Wilson’s research on changes in Devotta and Wilson use this previous knowledge to support
and structure their own research and approach.
representations of disability in print media between 1998-2008. Devotta and Wilson argue that the Commented [LF5]: Nice positioning!
Commented [LF6]: This low level detail helps me to
media has the power not only to mold and shape public perceptions of disabled people, but also the identify the specific research site of the study (and how they
will test their own claim)

power to continue to reshape those perceptions should a “more nuanced and/or more holistic” (6)

representation take hold. It is the emergence of this “nuance” that Devotta and Wilton are looking for in

their research: changes in the depiction of disability in the media as a result of successful political

mobilization that could potentially lead to a positive shift in public attitude. Devotta and Wilson

suggest that these three factors working in sync could be the key to breaking down the barriers to

participation that people with disabilities experience every day. Commented [LF7]: This last section does an excellent job
for me of identifying how Devotta and Wilton’s methods and
choice of research site relate to their overarching claims
about media representation.

© Ferreira 2016. Not to be copied, used, or revised without explicit written permission from the copyright owner