Assignment due in class on January 30* from students who did not complete Text Summary 1

*Since part of the value of the text summary assignment is to help you prepare the reading assignment for a particular class, it may only be submitted in class on the day it is due.  If you have to miss that day's class, please contact the instructor to make alternate arrangements.

1. Before beginning the writing assignment, please read

• Hugo Bedau, Thinking and Writing About Philosophy, pp. 7-10 top [selection in coursepack/book on reserve], on writing summaries to understand reading

• Gordon Harvey, Writing with Sources [coursepack/book on reserve], pp. 15-19, on quoting, especially item (f) on p. 17, on "reasons to quote a source directly"
  

• They Say/I Say, pp. 38-40, on "signal verbs," and chapter 8, on "connecting devices" (discussed in tutorial on January 16). 
  

2.

Please prepare a written summary (1.5-2 pages** long, approximately 500-600 words) of:

David Hume, Dialogues on Natural Religion, p. 67 – p. 74 middle (“…deduce from these phenomena”)

The purpose of the summary is to lay out what the text says, in roughly the order in which it is said, taking care to mention the aspects that you think are most important or interesting - i.e., laying out the key steps of the arguments that are being made. Your observations about the text should be backed up with references that allow your reader to see what they are based on; for this purpose, please use parenthetical page references (not footnotes or endnotes!) - for an example of these, see Harvey, Writing with Sources, p. 51, under "MLA Basic Rules."

Your summary should do the following:

• it should include instances of at least 3 out of the 4 types of connecting devices discussed in chapter 8 of They Say/I Say.  These are: (1) use transitions; (2) use pointing words; (3) repeat key terms and phrases; (4) repeat yourself with a difference.  Please find some not-too-distracting way of designating the ones you have used (e.g., underlining or marking with a colored pen; footnote)

• it should use at least 3 different signal verbs from the list on They Say/I Say, pp. 39–40 (or the list in Hacker, p. 113, or, if you like, a signal verb you can think of that is not listed).  Again, please somehow designate the ones you have used (e.g., highlighting, underlining in a colored pen).

• it should include at least one quoted phrase (e.g., embedded into a sentence of your own) or sentence that helps you convey a point more effectively or vividly (see e.g., the list of reasons to quote in Harvey, p. 17 item (f))

Note: Since this is your first reading of this text, and since we have not yet discussed it in class, the summary assignment is simply a first effort at figuring out what it says, and doing it will help you get the most of our in-class work on it.  Your fuller understanding will develop in the course of our class meetings, and with successive re-readings.

**Please print your assignment double-spaced and with one-inch margins, using a 10-12-point font.  Please number and staple the pages you hand in. 

Please keep a copy of your summary to refer to in our class discussions of Hume over the next few meetings.