Wednesday, June 5, 2013

Summarizing the Text

Dr. Burton described in his post the "seamless" jump from summarizing text to interpretation. With The Last Lecture, I feel this is something I really need to work on. Every chapter is about a different aspect of the author's life, of his childhood dreams. In one chapter, he talks about wanting to be a football player. In another, he talks about wanting to be a Disney Imagineer. These two are seemingly unrelated, but they all connect to the central theme of fulfilling your childhood dreams. Because the book does feel scattered at times, I want to summarize in the following way in order to derive a more effective analysis.

1. Summary of that paragraph
2. Summary of that chapter
3. How the above summaries relate to the theme of the book

So far that would look like this

1. Author was on the football team and was terrified of his coach, coach reprimands team for being lazy and being more excited about the water cooler than the game, coach dumps water cooler on the ground, team feels bad, team goes back out and does their best, author still discusses coach's influence on him, author can hear coach's voice in his head even as an adult
2. Although his dreams of being in the NFL were unfulfilled, author learned the importance of hard work that was applicable throughout the rest of his life
3. Author fulfilled his childhood dreams in a sense by being able to derive true lessons from football
*gaps identified: few in this chapter. Talks about football a bit more. Missing pictures from presentation

Especially since my thesis will be related to gaps between the video version and the textual version,  I want to make sure I fully understand all of the author's points. I'm looking forward to writing this paper!

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