Reflective Pieces

The third piece I chose is one that demonstrates my ability to write analytically. In our second week of the quarter we began learning how to summarize. Our first assignment on the topic was to read and then summarize a selection called, “Two Ways of Viewing the River” by Samuel Clemens. The idea of summarizing is to write the main ideas of the writing in our own words while keeping the author’s same ideas. We also needed to use a few exact words from the article, but not too many that made it sound like we were just stating a bunch of quotes. The idea was to keep it short and sweet while still getting the author’s point across. While writing this first summary, I felt pretty confident, but ended up doing better than I imagined. My summary was even used as an example for the class on how to write an effective summary. One of the best parts of my summary was my first sentence which needed to state the author’s full name, title in quotes, and a summary of the article. Here was my first sentence, “In this selection called “Two Ways of Viewing the River” from Samuel Clemens book, Life on the Mississippi, he describes how someone’s view of something can change so drastically from over exposure to it, like in this case a river he steam boated on”. I have done well on all the summaries we have done this quarter, but I am especially proud of this one…