Homework 1: Summary

Due:

Article Title: See syllabus

Article Summary: See syllabus

Description and Specifications:

This assignment is worth two homework grades. For this assignment you are to summarize a computer-related article. The article must come from a technical journal or other approved source. Industry journals such as Datamation, PC Week and MacWorld are not acceptable. You should use the library’s online database search engines. The Association for Computing Machinery’s (ACM) Digital Library is an excellent resource for finding full, online articles from the wide array of computing journals published by the ACM. Go to http://libguides.wooster.edu/content.php?pid=74238&sid=549639 and select the link ACM Digital Library.

           
Please see "Pointers for Constructing an effective Summary".

Specifications:

·         Length: between 2 and 3 pages.

·         Margins: no more than 1 inch (all the way around the page).

·         Font: Times New Roman or Times Roman font with a font size of 12.

·         Spacing: 1 1/2 spacing. 

·         Points will be deducted for spelling and grammatical mistakes.

            You must submit a photocopy of the article with your summary.

Learning Goals:

Why are you being given this assignment? First, I want you to have a little more breadth in the discipline. If you search diligently, you will find an article on an area of interest to you: education, business, ethics, security, etc. Also, this assignment is important because it involves several skills that are tied to being an effective programmer:

• Resourcefulness - determine what information you need to solve a problem and find it on your own. You should be aware of the information resources available to you and how to use them. I have found very useful material by searching these sources. Employers look for self-starters; workers who can solve problems on their own without a lot of direction. This means being resourceful.
• Abstraction and synthesis - you should be able to read a technical article at your level of expertise and abstract the essential concepts from it: what the author is trying to say and the main points made in support of the article’s thesis. This is essential to being a good problem solver. Given a problem statement, you need to abstract out the key features, ignoring irrelevant details. A step beyond abstraction is synthesis; being able to abstract key concepts from multiple sources and synthesize them into something new.
• Analysis and critical inspection - it is not enough to be able to abstract out important concepts. You also have to be able to look at them critically. In an article, you can ask “Is the author’s point of view valid?” “Has the author provided compelling reasons to believe her perspective?” “Do these examples illustrate what the author claims they illustrate?”

This is also part of problem-solving: not taking what you are given at face value; looking for contradictions, missing pieces. This also plays an important part in software testing. Developing effective test cases means being able to look carefully (critically) at code to see how best to test to demonstrate that the code is behaving as advertised.

• Clarity and articulation - You should be able to grasp the theme of an article and summarize it in your own words. If you cannot clearly articulate even simple concepts in your own words, how will you be able to understand and explain complicated problems? This is also part of problem solving. If you cannot explain in English what a problem is, how can you possibly hope to write a program to solve the problem? Again, this has affinities with testing. If you cannot say clearly what a function is to do, how can you produce an effective test plan for it?

Pointers for Writing Effective Summaries

Answer these questions as you evaluate the appropriateness of the article:

• Can the article be summarized in 2 or 3 pages?
• Can you understand most of the article?

Answer these questions before you write your summary:

• Can the article be summarized in 2 or 3 pages?
• Can you understand most of the article?
• What is the article's subject matter?
• What is the main point of the article? What argument does it make about its topic? Look for key phrases such as "leads us to call for" or "we need to," especially in the conclusion.
• What other points does the writer make in the article? List the article's key points, as simply as possible, in your own words. 
• What kind of evidence does the writer offer to support these points? Describe the evidence, as simply as possible, in your own words.
• Determine the position you will take in your summary and prepare an outline.
• Write a draft of the paper based on the outline.
• Do rewrites and produce a finished version.

As your write your summary:

• Keep it simple-- focus on the main point and key ideas.
• Give the title, writer's name, and main point in your first or second sentence.
• Write from the third person and use the present tense, e.g., "Kline suggests" or "Thompson argues that".
• Write the summary in your own words. If you take any wording from the original article, you must put it in quotes.
• Remember to keep your summary's length within the specified guidelines.

Additional Resources:

The Writing Center will be glad to help you with your writing. They can be found in Andrews Library lower level 1.

There are several references on how to read a research paper under the how to read a library article link on the Resources page.