how to write a research summary paper

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Summary is indispensable in preparing for and writing an argumentative essay. When you summarize a text (or describe visual material), you distill the ideas of another source for use in your own essay. Summarizing primary sources allows you to keep track of your observations. It helps make your analysis of these sources convincing, because it is based on careful observation of fact rather than on hazy or inaccurate recollection. Summarizing critical sources is particularly useful during the research and note-taking stages of writing. It gives you a record of what you've read and helps you distinguish your ideas from those of your sources.

Summaries you write to prepare for an essay will generally be longer and more detailed than those you include in the essay itself. (Only when you've established your thesis will you know the elements most important to retain.) It is crucial to remember, though, that the purpose of an analytical essay is only partly to demonstrate that you know and can summarize the work of others. The greater task is to showcase your ideas, your analysis of the source material. Thus all forms of summary (there are several) should be tools in your essay rather than its entirety.

True Summary

True summary always concisely recaps the main point and key supporting points of an analytical source, the overall arc and most important turns of a narrative, or the main subject and key features of a visual source. True summary neither quotes nor judges the source, concentrating instead on giving a fair picture of it. True summary may also outline past work done in a field; it sums up the history of that work as a narrative. Consider including true summary—often just a few sentences, rarely more than a paragraph—in your essay when you introduce a new source. That way, you inform your readers of an author's argument before you analyze it.

Immediately after his introduction to an essay on Whittaker Chambers, a key player in the start of the Cold War, Bradley Nash included four sentences summarizing the foreword to his main source, Chambers's autobiography. Nash characterizes the genre and tone of the foreword in the first two sentences before swiftly describing, in the next two, the movement of its ideas:

The foreword to Chambers's autobiography is written in the form of "A Letter to My Children." In this introduction, Chambers establishes the spiritual tone that dominates the body of his book. He initially characterizes the Cold War in a more or less standard fashion, invoking the language of politics and describing the conflict as one between "Communism and Freedom." But as the foreword progresses, Chambers introduces a religious element that serves to cast the struggle between communism and capitalism as a kind of holy war.

Every essay also requires snippets of true summary along the way to "orient" readers—to introduce them to characters or critics they haven't yet met, to remind them of items they need to recall to understand your point. (The underlined phrase in the paragraph introducing Nash's summary is an example of orienting information.) True summary is also necessary to establish a context for your claims, the frame of reference you create in your introduction. An essay examining the "usable past" created by the Vietnam Veterans Memorial, for example, might begin by briefly summarizing the history of the idea of a usable past, or by summarizing the view of a leading theorist on the topic.

Interpretive Summary

Sometimes your essays will call for interpretive summary—summary or description that simultaneously informs your reader of the content of your source and makes a point about it. Interpretive summary differs from true summary by putting a "spin" on the materials, giving the reader hints about your assessment of the source. It is thus best suited to descriptions of primary sources that you plan to analyze. (If you put an interpretive spin on a critical source when you initially address it, you risk distorting it in the eyes of your reader: a form of academic dishonesty.)

The interpretive summary below comes from an essay examining a Civil War photograph in light of Lincoln's Gettysburg Address. The essayist, Dara Horn, knew she needed to describe the photo but that simply "walking through" its details would bewilder and bore her readers. So she revealed the point of her description in a pair of topic sentences (solid underline), summarized the details of the photo (double underline), and gave the description some interpretive "spin" (throughout).

As skeptical moderns, we often have trouble accepting drawings or paintings as historical records, but we tend to believe in photographs the way that we believe in mirrors; we simply accept them as the truth. Alexander Gardner's photograph Trossel's House, Battle-Field of Gettysburg, July, 1863 might therefore be viewed as evidence rather than commentary. Unlike some of Gardner's other "sketches," this picture includes no perfectly positioned rifles, no artistically angled river, no well-posed men in uniform—indeed, no people at all. The photograph's composition could barely be more prosaic; the horizon slashes the picture in half, and the subject, a white colonial-style house, sits smack in the center. Yet this straightforward, almost innocent perspective sets the viewer up for the photograph's stealthy horror. At first glance, the photograph appears to be a portrait of a house, perhaps even a poor portrait of a house; in a Òsketch bookÓ of war, one might flip right by it to the gory pictures before and after. But the terror in this photograph lies in its delayed shock, the gut-wrenching surprise when the light on the house leads the eye to the light on the fence and the viewer notices that the backyard fence is broken, and then thatthe backyard is a mess, littered with—what are those?—horses, dead horses, twelve dead horses. What must have happened to topple twelve nine-hundred-pound horses, and where are the people who rode them? Crushed underneath? The viewer doesn't know, because Gardner's picture doesn't tell us. All we see is a house, a broken fence, twelve dead horses, and an empty sky.

Some Cautions

Remember that an essay that argues (rather than simply describes) uses summary only sparingly, to remind readers periodically of crucial points. Summary should always help build your argument. When teachers write "too much summary—more analysis needed" in the margin, generally they mean that the essay reports what you've studied rather than argues something about it. Two linked problems give rise to this situation. The first is a thesis that isn't really a thesis but rather a statement of something obvious about your subject—a description. (The obvious cannot be argued.) A statement of the obvious tends to force further description, which leads to the second problem, a structure that either follows the chronology of the source text from beginning to end or simply lists examples from the source. Neither approach builds an argument.

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