Rules for paraphrase and critique (English 111 and 112)

Note on format: The text of this handout may contain some errors in the structure of internal lists, especially in the critique section under specific hints for examining writing. Margins may not be what they should be, and numbering may be incorrect. If this is the case, please assume that normal list structure and numbering is what I intended. I was not able to post all my corrections on the Annandale web server. I'm still learning how to over-ride hypertext mark-up. Thanks.

Rules for paraphrase:

1. Read the whole passage first. (In a longer work like a book, a whole passage would probably be a single chapter.) Identify the author's purpose and intended audience. This will help you distinguish major points from minor ones.
2. Reread the passage. Divide the passage into sections for the stages of the author's thought. Be aware that you may have to rearrange information, and you'll probably be leaving out some of the less important points. Later when you write your summary, your paragraph divisions may differ from the author's and you may not even present his main points in the same order he does. For example, one common variation is to present the author's conclusion first rather than last. Paraphrasers often sacrifice the author's interest in building a sense of mystery and suspense in order to achieve greater clarity at the outset.
3. Write brief summaries of each stage of thought. (See point # 2, above.)
4. Write a thesis for the entire passage. It should express the central idea or ideas, the intended audience, and the author's agenda (what he hopes to accomplish). You'll almost always be paraphrasing persuasive writing in this class, so the thesis will be a brief summary of the author's conclusion. This is the so-called "bottom line." It should appear first in your paraphrase, even though it may not have appeared first in the original article. (See point # 2, above.)
5. Write the first draft of your summary by combining numbers 3 and 4, above. Again, you may need or want to re-arrange the information in various ways.

You definitely will want to leave out what's not important to your purpose.

6. Check your paraphrase against the original passage. Be sure you haven't said anything inaccurate or misleading. Be sure you haven't left out anything important. And be sure you've given whatever of your own commentary you need to give; for example, explanation of what you still don't understand about the article, or background about the speaker or about his agenda or audience. When checking your own accuracy, be sure you look for and correct the following:

1. passages where you copy the author's words too closely, even for only a portion of a sentence, and don't use quotation marks.
2. passages where you falsely attribute to the writer remarks he repeats, but attributes to someone else (for example, his opponents).
3. passages that can't be understood without interpreting the author's tone, especially if that tone might be sarcastic.
4. passages where the author confuses you or fails to answer all your questions, but you have not noted that problem.
5. passages where you've jumped to a conclusion the author might not have intended because you've unconsciously added your own beliefs or assumptions.

1. Revise your paraphrase. Be sure that it makes sense, especially if you created a new train of thought by re-ordering information. Include transitional phrasing or added background that makes your logic clear.

Rules for critique:

Effective argumentation is rational rather than emotional in character. You might not know that if you listen to political debate in America today. But that's why so much political debate in America today is ineffective, unsatisfying, and ultimately alienating to voters. Almost no one LIKES what modern media have done to political debate. Some politicians may think we like it. But most probably know we don't. They just don't know what to do about the problem.

Take the high road. Don't imitate the manipulative strategies of advertising writers and political speech writers. To illustrate the importance of that advice, I'll begin my list of rules with some DON'Ts. Then we'll move on to the DOs.

DON'T:

1. Criticize a man's character rather than his beliefs or ideas.
2. Knowingly exaggerate a problem, or otherwise pander to fear.
3. Try to intimidate your reader by suggesting that there's something wrong with his character or intelligence if he doesn't agree with you.
4. Appeal to popular support--for example, from opinion polls. You can tell your audience how many people support your view or proposal, but you must NOT claim that their support necessarily makes you right. Times and opinions change. Once nearly everyone thought the earth was flat. That didn't mean it was. Once nearly everyone of European descent thought Caucasians were a superior race. That didn't mean they were. Once no one thought women should vote. That didn't mean they shouldn't.
5. Ignore or distort information unfavorable to your view. (After all, YOU know it and it didn't change YOUR mind. So why should it change theirs? Just explain why this information doesn't change your view.)
6. Distort what someone says by quoting or paraphrasing out of context, or by failing to tell the whole story when you know you're leaving out details relevant to the point you want to discuss.
7. View a political discussion as an athletic contest with a winner and a loser. POLITICAL DEBATE IS A COOPERATIVE ENDEAVOR. ITS PROPER GOAL IS COMPROMISE, NOT VICTORY.

SO DO:

1. Be willing to concede points; that is, agree on some issues, values, or ideas, even if this means modifying your original views.
2. Cheerfully compliment your opponents, and give them partial credit whenever possible.
3. Help your opponents--and the discussion process--by suggesting revisions of their views.
4. Acknowledge problems with your own position, even if you can't fully address these problems.
5. Seek compromise by providing new ideas and proposals.
6. Base your views on fact, not opinion, and logic, not emotion.
7. Be willing to change your views, always partially and sometimes completely. Few people have ever lost face by admitting they were wrong; countless people humiliate themselves every day by pretending they aren't when they know better.

The truth is that the American society places far too little value on manners. Yet good manners are critical to the development of good thinking skills. That connection is implicit in the description of a person you like as "thoughtful." When you call someone thoughtful, you're saying not only that this particular individual is both kind and intelligent, but that these two characteristics always go together in anyone's personality. Think about it. They do.

That said, you still need some more specific hints for examining writing. I suggest that you start with the rules below.

1. Ask questions about anything you don't understand, including ground the writer may not even attempt to cover. For example, ask about what a term means or whether or not everyone agrees what it means. Or ask about how a policy will be applied. Or ask about what rules have exceptions and why. If any writer ever says anything that's not self-evident to you, and offers no explanation of why he says it or where he gets his information, ask how he knows what he knows. (But this is really point #2, which comes next.)

2. Examine a writer's assumptions. Do this by making a list of all the things you'd need to believe in order to accept his view. This requires some imagination and patience.

For example, in order to argue that abortion is wrong because it interferes with an unborn individual's destiny, you'd have to ASSUME at least the following: (a) that there are unborn individuals, (b) that individual people, born or unborn, have destinies, and (c) that some apparently free choices are actually predestined and others are not. (You were predestined to get pregnant from a particular sexual encounter, so that another individual could have the destiny of being born. But you were not predestined to get an abortion; that's always a choice and always the wrong choice.)

3. Check all the writer's main points for consistency with his assumptions. That might sound silly, but it isn't. Most people say things from time to time that are inconsistent with their own basic values or assumptions. Below are some examples from contemporary political debates.

• Many Republicans are criticized on these grounds for saying on the one hand that government shouldn't regulate personal lifestyle choices and on the other hand that abortion should be illegal.
• Many Democrats are criticized on these grounds for saying on the one hand that the government should do more to protect disadvantaged children and on the other hand that abortion should be legal, even in the third trimester.
• Many Democrats are criticized on these grounds for saying on the one hand that we must do more to protect the poor from crime and on the other hand that we have to get rid of capital punishment and shorten prison sentences for criminals who come from these urban areas.
• Many Republicans are criticized on these grounds for saying on the one hand that the public schools need to do a better job of educating America's children and on the other hand that we need to cut funds to the public schools and give parents vouchers to send their kids elsewhere.

4. Check to see if a writer uses appropriate caution in limiting his claims and generalizations. Be wary of people who tell you that "Republicans hate the poor" or "Democrats want big government" or "feminists ruined the American family" or "foreigners are taking over America" or "politicians are dishonest." To begin with, it's almost impossible for such claims to be universally true. All sweeping claims like these about large groups of people, situations, institutions, or problems should be regarded skeptically. Secondly, such careless statements also invite other logical problems, like faulty cause-effect reasoning. (Even if all feminists contributed to the destruction of the American family--and they probably didn't--it would still not be true that they were the ONLY factor in its alleged destruction.)

It isn't the act of generalizing itself that's wrong. It's careless or thoughtless generalizing that's the problem. If a writer needs to point out a dangerous trend, of course he should. But if he's a serious thinker, he'll explain what the limits of the trend are, how consistent it is or isn't, and how or why it developed. He won't just mindlessly bash people or institutions he doesn't like. Nor will he criticize them more than is absolutely necessary to make his point.

5. Check to see if all of a writer's important points are actually RELEVANT to the issue or discussion at hand. Many people will try to "win" an argument by saying anything that's obviously true, as long as it might be misconstrued as having some bearing on the matter at hand, even if in fact it doesn't. Often people will try to defend indefensible beliefs or actions this way. Here’s a classic example: Some years ago I read an article about several cadets who were kicked out of the Naval Academy in Annapolis for a mass cheating scam on engineering exams. I read with sad fascination the rationales they constructed to explain why what they did "wasn't really wrong." One said that if he'd confessed, he would have had to turn in his buddies, and betraying a buddy is worse than lying, so he had to lie. Notice that this logic fails to explain why he was cheating in the first place, not to mention why all his friends were the kind of people who cheat their way through a military academy based on the honor system. Another came up with an even more convoluted defense of both lying and cheating. He pointed out that he'd been offered a book contract worth more money than he could have made in the first five years after graduating anyway, so if his story was valued that much by society, he couldn't have been wrong to do what he did. I trust you can see the problem with this logic.

6. Be especially careful about examining cause/effect arguments. Be aware that in a persuasive paper, when someone tells you "the cause of X is Y," he's usually advancing a theory or opinion, not stating a fact. Most cause/effect explanations are faulty to at least some degree. Let me share with you some of the cause/effect explanations I've read on student themes and heard in political speeches in the past.

"The reason why kids use drugs today is that they don't go to church."

"The reason why kids use drugs today is that they smoke cigarettes."

"The reason why kids use drugs today is that their parents neglect them."

"The reason why kids like violent cartoons is that the networks show them."

"The reason why networks show violent cartoons is that the kids like them."

"The reason why literacy is declining is that young people don't value education."

"The reason why literacy is declining is that these days everybody has to have a college degree."

"The reason why we have so much violent crime is that we don't lock enough criminals up for a long enough period of time, and prisons are too soft."

"The reason why we have so much violent crime is that we overcrowrd our prisons and lock too many people up for the wrong reasons, and prisons are just places where people grow to hate society and learn how to commit more crimes."

All of these arguments have some validity. But the mere fact that they contradict each other should tell you that no one of them is a very accurate or thorough appraisal of the situation in question. Usually when people give a fault cause/effect explanation, they're doing one of the following things.

• Saying that a problem has one and only one cause, when in fact it has several.
• Confusing an effect with a cause or a symptom of a problem with a cause, or confusing correlation with cause. A "correlation" is a "mutual relation of two or more things" that does NOT necessarily imply that one causes the other. For example, kids who go to church probably are statistically less likely to use drugs than kids who don't. But that doesn't mean that church attendance protects a kid from the potential for drug abuse. Rather, church attendance and healthy lifestyle choices are probably correlated because both are caused by a broader underlying social factor, such as a duty-oriented or family-oriented set of values.

7. Examine extended comparisons called "analogies". Analogies are useful argumentative tools. What is an analogy? An analogy is an imaginative comparison between two superficially different issues, problems, people, or situations. When drawing an analogy, a writer takes time to explore hidden similarities between two things that at first glance seem only different. It differs from simple comparison in that the important similarities are hidden, and imagination must be used to see them. See the examples below.

Comparison: A beehive is like an anthill.

Analogy: New York City is like an anthill.

Comparison: A baseball player is like a football player.

Analogy: A baseball player is like a ballerina.

Analogies are good argumentative tools, but they are NOT always valid. An analogy becomes invalid when the similarities are misleading or not really there, or when the differences between the two things compared are far more important than the similarities.

Below is a classic example of a false analogy. It dominated the political arena throughout most of the 1980s, and several congressmen were probably elected on the strength of this analogy-based argument. But the analogy is utterly false.

"You know that you can't go for long periods of time spending more money than you earn, day after day, week after week, month after month. You'll only fall further and further behind. Eventually you'll reach the point when you can't hope to make up the difference. You'll wind up going bankrupt, starting again from nothing, with no credit and no one willing to help you get back on your feet. Well, as it is with your personal budget, so it goes with the budget of our country. We can't keep spending more money than we take in in taxes and other revenue. We can't continue to run deficits day after day, week after week, month after month, year after year. If we do, we'll go backrupt as a nation."

What's the problem with this reasoning? The problem is that the budget of an entire country just isn't anything like the budget of an individual person. Nations have broad powers to set monetary policy. Individuals don't. Nations must be supported by other nations that are mutually interdependent with them for the purposes of trade. People can't claim such ties to larger groups who must bail them out.

If you had the kinds of powers nations have, you wouldn't go bankrupt either. Just think. You could print as much money as you wanted in your basement. You could go from door to door in your neighborhood demanding protection money as a neighborhood tax. You could tell the grocery store what to charge you for your food. You could tell the bank to reduce the amount left to pay on your mortgage. Your powers wouldn't be unlimited, but they certainly wouldn't be as limited as the powers of an individual. Of course this doesn't mean that balancing our national budget isn't a good idea. It just means that this particular argument used to justify that policy is logically invalid, however true it sounds on the surface.

Analogies are subjective strategies. Their validity, much like beauty, is often in the eye of the beholder. What about this analogy, used by former New York mayor Ed Koch to justify his stand on capital punishment? "Admittedly, capital punishment is not a pleasant topic" (877). "However, one does not have to like the death penalty in order to support it any more than one must like radical surgery, radiation, or chemotherapy in order to find necessary these attempts at curing cancer. Ultimately we may learn how to cure cancer with a simple pill. Unfortunately, that day has not yet arrived. Today we are faced with the choice of letting the cancer spread or trying to cure it with the methods available, methods that one day will almost certainly be considered 'barbaric.' But to give up and do nothing would be far more barbaric and would certainly delay the discovery of an eventual cure. The analogy between cancer and murder is imperfect, because murder is not the 'disease' we are trying to cure. The disease is injustice. We may not like the death penalty, but it must be available to punish crimes of cold-blooded murder, cases in which any other form of punishment would be inadequate and, therefore, unjust."

What do you think of this analogy? Are there important similarities between the battle of science against illness and the battle of government against injustice, or are the differences more important than the similarities? Is social injustice even comparable to cancer, or not? Why or why not?

For some applications of the rules for paraphrase and critique, see sample papers on other links.

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