Wei Xu and Hongni Gou
Assignments & Activities Archive
Activity Description
This activity is designed as part of the major project “Annotated Bibliography” in a first-year writing course. At the time the activity is implemented, students should have learned the purpose, context, and audience of an annotated bibliography and that both summaries and evaluations are required for the annotations. This activity thus aims to teach students how to write an analytic summary for each bibliography entry. In this activity, students are firstly presented with the four areas in an analytical summary for an academic source. Students then read two sample summaries and are guided to identify the four areas in each sample. Finally, by reading and summarizing an academic meme article, students were guided to learn how to locate the information in an academic source and practice writing an analytical summary in small groups and then independently. The meme article “Are cats good? An important study” (Owen & Lamon 1) that we purposefully selected for the practice writing activity well follows many conventions of an authentic academic text (e.g., the overall structure, use of academic language). Compared with a real journal article, this one-page text is more manageable and fun for students to use. Nevertheless, a reminder should be provided that a meme article has no scientific rigor, and each section is presented in an oversimplified way. The students are then guided to construct an analytic summary for the meme article collaboratively before they independently write 2 summaries for their own bibliography entries. With this scaffolded activity, students are expected to build their writing skills and internalize the genre knowledge through “deconstruction,” “joint construction,” and “independent construction” as promoted by Caplan and Farling (566).