Assignment 3 Summary of Sutton, Palen, and Shklovski’s 2008 article, “Backchannels on the Front Lines: Emergent Uses of Social Media in the 2007 Southern California Wildfires”

What is the summary paper? It functions as one building block in a research paper literature review.

What does this mean? Summarizing a research paper serves to let another person know what has been done in a field without having to read other research papers. This helps contextualize the new research that you would be presenting in a longer research paper.

What is the purpose of our summary paper? To allow you to practice summarizing at the paragraph (rather than sentence) level. To allow you to articulate the main points and reasoning of an article to allow someone else to understand it.

What should the summary paper look like? It doe NOT consist of your summary sentences from the matrix/chart. It does NOT follow the same order of ideas as the original article. It does NOT need introduction or conclusion paragraphs. It does not include an evaluation/interpretation. It does not include direct quotes.

So what DOES it include? Begin with the main claim of the article and the reasoning behind it: e.g. In her essay “Big Box Stores Are Bad for Main Street,” Betsy Taylor argues that chain stores harm communities by taking the life out of downtown shopping districts.

So what DOES it include? Begin with the main claim of the article and the reasoning behind it. The body paragraphs should develop the major supporting details from the article, with clear transitions between them. Maintain the distinction between your voice and the voice of our authors (e.g. using their names and signal phrases as you did in your matrix sentences). Include a bibliographic reference to the article.

That’s it!