 Exercise
10: Writing Summaries
(Return to the Unit 3 Table of Contents) (Texts from Brenda Spatt's Writing from Sources (4th edition); reprinted with permission of St. Martin's Press) Instructions:
Paragraph 1 The neurotic individual may have had some special vulnerability as an infant. Perhaps he was ill a great deal and was given care that singled him out Tom other children. Perhaps he walked or talked much later--or earlier than children were expected to, and this evoked unusual treatment. The child whose misshapen feet must be put in casts or the sickly little boy who never can play ball may get out of step with his age mates and with the expectations parents and other adults have about children. Or a child may be very unusually placed in his family. He may be the only boy with six sisters, or a tiny child between two lusty sets of twins or the source of the child' s difficulties may be a series of events that deeply affected his relations to people--the death of his mother at the birth of the next child or the prolonged illness or absence of his father. Or a series of coincidences--an accident to a parent, moving to a new town and a severe fright--taken together may alter a child's relationship with the world. Margaret Mead, from Some Personal Views
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Suppose you fly in a plane. What is more important for you: the pilot's real competence or his papers that certify he is competent? Or suppose you get sick and need medical treatment. What is more important for you: your doctor's real competence or his diploma? Of course, in every case the real competence is more important. But last year I met a large group of people whose priorities were exactly the opposite: my students. Not all, but many. Their first priority was to get papers that certify that they are competent rather than to develop real competence. As soon as I started to explain to them something that was a little bit beyond the standard courses, they asked suspiciously: "Will this be on the test?" If I said "no," they did not listen any more and showed clearly that I was doing something inappropriate. Andrei Toom, from "A Russian Teacher in America"
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I have no doubt that we will one day abolish the death penalty in America. It will come sooner if people like me who know the truth about executions do our work well and educate the public. It will come slowly if we do not. Because, finally, I know that it is not a question of malice or ill will or meanness of spirit that prompts our citizens to support executions. It is, quite simply, that people don't know the truth of what is going on. That is not by accident. The secrecy surrounding executions makes it possible for executions to continue. I am convinced that if executions were made public, the torture and violence would be unmasked, and we would be shamed into abolishing executions. We would be embarrassed at the brutalization of the crowds that would gather to watch a man or woman being killed. And we would be humiliated to know that visitors from other counkies--Japan, Russia, Latin America, Europe--were watching us kill our own citizens--we, who take pride in being the flagship of democracy in the world. Helen Prejean, from Dead Man Walking
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In the storied old days a person invented something in the attic or basement, got a patent on it, began building and selling it, and made a pile of money, all pretty much alone. Today's inventor, with some isolated exceptions, is likely to be a salaried lab hand working in almost complete anonymity for a large corporation. If he or she gets any reward for building a better mousetrap, it may only be a smile and a pat on the back from the supervisor. Those few individual inventors who do make it big--like Land, or Steve Wozniak of Apple Computer, or William Hewlett and David Packard of the company that bears their name--are all the more exceptional for being successful entrepreneurs and industrialists as well as inventors. Oliver E. Allen, from "The Power of Parents"
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Holidays were once typically days of actual common celebration, of parades, ceremonies, feasts, songs, speeches, and marches. Today, most of this has been replaced by the public holiday' s private competitor, the vacation .... The vacation is a relatively recent innovation, the product of bourgeois prosperity. The idea that wage earners could take paid vacations is an even more recent development, it only became widespread after World U/ar I. It's fair to say that even in the 1930s and 1940s ordinary workers spent much more of their leisure time attending parades, carnivals, funerals, executions, and other communal events than they do today, and a good deal less time checking into motels. Today even solemn public holidays--holidays with as much contemporary meaning as Martin Luther King's birthday--are widely seen as simply more private leisure time, which is why we routinely fiddle with their dates to create three-day weekends. Mickey Kaus, from The End of Equality
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There are many new terms and usages that seemed picky or unnecessary to conservatives when they appeared, but now are indispensable. What letterwriter, grateful for the coinage "Ms." Which lets one formally address women without referring to their marital status, would willingly go back to choosing between "Mrs." And "Miss"? There is a case to be made for "African-American," though it seems to have no marked advantages over "black" beyond its length, a quality of language many Americans mistake for dignity. Probably the term "Asian-American," vague as it is, is better than "Oriental," because it is at least decently neutral without the cloud of disparaging imagery that still clings to the older word: Oriental" suggests a foreignness so extreme that it cannot be assimilated, and raises the Fu-Manchu phantoms of 19th-century racist fiction--treacherous cunning, clouds of opium, glittering slit eyes. "Native American" for American Indian, or just plain Indian, sounds virtuous, except that it carries with it the absurd implication that whites whose forebears may have been here for three, five, or even the whole thirteen generations that have elapsed since 1776 are in some way still interlopers, not "native" to this country. By the time whites get guilty enough to call themselves "European-Americans" it will be time to junk the whole lingo of nervous divisionism; everyone, black, yellow, red and white, can revert to being plain "Americans" again, as well they might. Robert Hughes, from The Culture of Complaint
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