OCR Document - Jeff's Readings



D-reading: Reading: Headlines & Paraphrases

(Wright, 8-17)

In the last two sections we have focused on claims. We have looked at how we assess different kinds of claims and how to assess the credibility of claims. In this section will begin the move up to analyzing passages. In the next few sections we will be practicing our ability to read, paraphrase, and analyze different aspects of passages.

Note that our purpose at this point is not to criticize a passage or improve a passage. We are merely trying to lay out, as clearly as possible, the meaning of a passage. But this doesn’t mean that we only want the stale subject matter. We want our paraphrase to give us the right understanding of the piece as a whole. As such, we will want to capture, as much as is possible in a short paraphrase, the author’s purpose and mood for the piece. For instance, if the author is being dry and informative, our paraphrase should mimic this. If the author is being sarcastic and witty, our paraphrase should mimic that. For such purposes we will not want to reproduce every detail of a passage but rather to select the central items of substance and ignore less important details. To do this will still require understanding everything in a passage, but it will not require paraphrase every word. At this point we will be dealing with three types of short paraphrases, the four-word headline, the main point, and the sentence. The headline attempts to capture the central core of the passage in only four words. The point of the headline is to force us to focus only on the most important message of the piece. The main point, then, attempts to find the single claim that everything else in the passage is about. We could also say that the main point is the “spine” of the piece that everything else radiates from. In saying that the main point paraphrase is a single claim is to say that we are isolating the key assertion of the piece, and this paraphrase should be a grammatically simple sentence. That is to say, if you find yourself using a conjunction, dependent clause, or second major verb, you are probably inserting a second claim. The sentence, by contrast, can be a complex sentence where the main claim of the passage is still the focus of your sentence, but here we have room for some of the supporting claims in the passage. In future sections we will be paraphrasing passages into greater detail.

Consider the following news story:

Police searched Tuesday for an apparently ill man who was reported missing from his home in the Rio Lomas area since at least Tuesday. The man’s mother called police Wednesday to say that he was missing and had been suffering with a severe stomach illness. Robert Van Asperen, 38, was last seen walking toward Highway 95 from his home on the 1800 block of Richardo Ave. He does not drive, police said. Officers found his wallet and cell phone in his home. Police are concerned he may have become incapacitated because of his health problems.

Our ability to distill the essential content from a passage relies primarily on our reading comprehension. So we can begin to see how it is done by looking at this article. Since the context is journalism, and, as such, the order of presentation tips off what is important, the main point would look something like this.

Police are searching for a man with a severe stomach illness.

The headline and main point are meant to express the article's main point in simplest terms. Everything else in the article hangs on this spine. With a few abbreviations, it would make a decent headline. So let us adopt this as the basic test for a "shortest possible paraphrase”: would it make a decent four-word headline for the piece? The procedure would be something like this: think of the piece you are trying to summarize as a newspaper article, and write a four-word headline for it. Pare away all sorts of detail to reveal the central kernel of substance:

Severely ill man missing

Then, to turn this into a sentence paraphrase, you would add whatever detail is required to fashion a grammatical sentence the can fill out the main claim of the piece with the most important supporting details.

Police are searching for a 38 year old man who is suffering from a severe stomach illness who has been missing for at least a week.

Keep in mind that, in other situations, you may be doing paraphrases for other purposes and audiences. For instance, you may want to produce a paraphrase of a novel to remind yourself of its plot. In this course, our purpose is to paraphrase the author’s message, and our audience is the members of this class.

TECHNIQUE AND VOCABULARY

The first thing we need is a handy way to talk about the parts of a passage we omit from a paraphrase. That is, we will want descriptive names for the kind of detail that can be left out of its paraphrase once we understand it. In the missing person article, for instance, the paraphrase we gave above does not mention that his mother reported him missing Wednesday or that he is 38. What might we call these things? "Useful background" sounds right. These items are important to the investigation, but the point of the article is mainly to report the uniqueness of the case, so they will be relegated to background and not included in our headline or main point. When we turn to longer paraphrases, such as the sentence or the structure paraphrases, this content will likely make it into our paraphrase. Next consider the name of the city and street: these are details of the context in which the passage is set but not part of its substance. And these seem less important than his age or how long he’s been missing.

Padding

Let us then begin the list of things to suppress in writing paraphrases with categories such as "background" and "setting." These may at first be hard to distinguish. That won’t matter. These terms are just to guide your eye in spotting things to omit, so the category is secondary. Distinguishing among various kinds of "padding" will become more natural as we examine more cases. Another example will help us add to the list.

Climatologists say early signs of EI Nino, an ocean warming condition that could spawn tremendous storms, have all but disappeared. "At this point, it looks rather unlikely that we'll get anything this year," said Eugene Rasmusson of the Federal Climate Analysis Center in Maryland. "It's not out of the question," he said, "but unusually dramatic changes in the ocean would have to take place this month for an El Nino to occur this year. An El Nino is an abnormal temperature pattern in the Pacific Ocean that occurs every few years. Its effects last about two years.

To develop a paraphrase, let us try the headline trick again. Read the piece, then look away for a few seconds, thinking about what it said, and finally blurt out a brief headline. Something like “No El Nino" sounds right. Flesh it out into a main point and sentence paraphrase:

Climatologists say that an El Nino is unlikely this year.

Climatologists say that the ocean warming condition known as El Nino is unlikely this year due to the disappearance of early signs in ocean conditions in the Pacific.

Let us take this as the paraphrase and look through the article to see what we've left out. First, much of the article consists of direct quotations from a federal climatologist; but since we merely want a summary of what was said, not how or by whom, we do not use the quotations and we omit their source. If the whole point of the article was just to give the quote, then the quote would need to be paraphrased, but, in this passage, the quote was merely a piece of support for the claim being made about the likelihood of an El Nino. Because we merely want to express our understanding, not say how we reached it, helpful additions such as this will be omitted from a sentence paraphrase. Second, the main claim of the piece is stated three times, in slightly different terms, in the first three sentences. We merely want the point, so we omit the repetition. Finally, as we did in the missing person article, we omit useful background such as that offered in the last sentence and the middle sentence. These help us understand why El Nino's likelihood might be of interest, but the point of the piece is simply the (low) likelihood. So we can add to our list of categories descriptive terms such as repetition, illustration, and dispensable details.

Let us adopt the word padding to stand for all these things we omit from a proper paraphrase. Calling something padding does not mean it is unimportant to the passage. Background, definitions, and repetition can be indispensable in our understanding a piece well enough to paraphrase it. Such things are omitted only as unnecessary to expressing that understanding, once it is understood.

A letter to The Economist illustrates several kinds of padding.

In your April 13 issue you published an article called "Coquilles St Jacques". Mentioning the possible visit of President Jacques Chirac to the Academie Francaise, you say: "It was the first time a French president would have honoured a new member since Mr. Mitterrand celebrated the induction of Marguerite Yourcenar as the academy's first female ‘immortal’ in 1981." I am sorry to have to correct this "coquille". Mme Yourcenar was introduced on March 6th 1980. I was then president of France, and I attended, with great pleasure, her inauguration speech.

V. Giscard d'Estaing

Paris

This letter too has a single point: to correct an earlier story that slighted the letter’s writer. The headline, main point, and sentence paraphrases would look something like this:

The Economist forgets d’Estaing

The Economist mistook President Mitterand for President d’Estaing.

The French president who attended Mme. Yourcenar's induction into the French Academy was d'Estaing, not Mitterrand, as claimed in The Economist.

As letters to editors often do, this one begins with some background that allows the reader to appreciate the significance of the substantive points to follow. Without it we would not understand why d'Estaing had roused himself to write the letter. But it is just background, so we omit it from the paraphrase. Other background helps with the substance itself: that the writer was president of France at the time of Mme. Yourcenar' s induction. All of this is padding of a familiar sort. But two other items omitted from the paraphrase do not fit any of our categories. One is the date of the event. This is actually part of the substance, but counts as excessive detail for a sentence paraphrase. Let us call it dispensable detail. In more complicated passages we will always leave out some of the substance when it goes past a certain level of detail, so this will be a constantly useful category. In other words, we will often have to make a judgment concerning how much detail we want to make room for in our sentence. And, finally, we need another heading to cover the "I am sorry . . ." sentence, and the "with great pleasure" gesture. Let us call them frills. Polite asides; such as this, together with humor and sarcasm, will decorate much public writing. We will group them all under the category of frills. Note also that an important piece of information is left out of our paraphrase, that the author is d’Estaing himself. This fact was left out because of the very nature of what it means to paraphrase a passage, as opposed to, say, report an occurrence. In paraphrasing a passage, we become the author. We are representing, as accurately as possible, the author’s intention, speaking for him or her. If we had written about how d’Estaing is the one who wrote the letter to the editor then we are reporting an event, not paraphrasing the passage. The author and the occurrence of the piece will be omitted as setting.

All this may be summarized in the following list of seven padding categories (with key terms emphasized). The first three categories might be thought of as different kinds of background and the rest as different kinds of detail to omit. We split them into seven specific types simply to help you recognize them.

Categories of Padding

1. Setting: story location, source, and so on (when these are incidental, not part of point)

2. *Substantive Background (things the reader may not know about the substance of the passage that aid in understanding it or its significance)

3. Definition of terms (linguistic background)

4. *Dispensable Detail (details of substance beyond what is needed in a bare-bones paraphrase)

5. Restatement of substance

6. Illustration (a variation on restatement)

7. Frills (humor, polite asides, and so on)

The two asterisked categories will be heavily dependent on context: how much detail to put in the paraphrase will depend on immediate needs and purposes (typically the audience's needs, the paraphraser's purposes, and the amount of space in the paraphrase). The point of these categories is simply to help you identify things to be left out of a paraphrase when the substance is not simply obvious. By guiding your eye in this way they will help you identify the parts of a passage that go in the paraphrase, eliminating other parts from consideration. Do not think of these categories as strict or absolute. Some padding will fall on a borderline between categories, and other sorts will fall easily into more than one. In such cases you will have identified padding - something to omit from the paraphrase - even though its classification will be difficult. These headings are meant to be rough-and-ready practical tools. Use them in that spirit.

The Point of a Paraphrase: Recovering a Perception

When someone asks you to tell them about a passage they will of course not always want a simple summary of it. Instead of a paraphrase, they may want a criticism of it or of the way it is written, or an implication you might draw about its author. But this is not what we care about here. Our aim will simply be to uncover the author’s intent as best we can, to find out what he or she was trying to convey. So it will be useful to have a model of how to think of a passage in the right sort of way, to get us to try as hard as possible to uncover the author's perception.

Let’s increase the stakes to bring this point home… Suppose you have the job of dismantling an old 500-pound bomb that a French farmer has found under his milking stall. You have a set of instructions that has been successfully used on this kind of bomb for the past 50 years. As you work your way into the detonating mechanism, you read:

In removing the lead from the terminal, be careful not to ground it against the case.

Your obvious interest is to find the intended interpretation exactly before processing. For instance, does "lead" refer to a piece of wire (pronounced leed) or a glob of soft metal (pronounced led); and just what counts as grounding? The proper understanding might be expressed in a sentence paraphrase:

In disconnecting this little green wire from its post, you must avoid contact between its exposed metal end and the outside of the bomb.

Notice that in this case our paraphrase was actually longer than the original, because it took us more words to clearly paraphrase the author’s message for our audience. But this would be the right paraphrase only if it accurately rendered the intent of the passage. You will proceed only after you are confident that you have shared the author's perception of the proper procedure. If our GUS on these matters is low or mistaken, we might have made the mistake of paraphrasing this passage as:

In removing the soft metal from the case, be careful not to let the metal touch the ground.

And that would be a disaster, both as a paraphrase and for the farmer.

Empathy: The Human Roots of Reading

When we read (or listen to conversation), our understanding of what is said always rests heavily on our ability to appreciate the author as a human being, with human perceptions and interests. It is not that he or she cannot have unusual interests or special perceptions, but our sense of normalcy is the point of departure, what we must take for granted unless we are tipped off to something exotic. When we understand “The cat is on the mat” one way at home and another at a construction site, it is not because we cannot talk of bulldozers in the living room and pets at work. We can, of course, but we would have to alert our audience to what was going on. To appreciate how deeply our sense of human interest penetrates our reading, consider the following simple observation:

The sunset was beautiful this evening.

We naturally understand that these words concern the colors on the western horizon, in one way or another. And we do this because we understand the sort of thing people find entertaining in an evening sky. We do not for a moment think the author might instead be talking about the particular angle the horizon forms with the sun's axis of rotation. Another kind of creature with different perceptions and preoccupations might well be fascinated by the seasonal variations of this angle. To this extent, reading and writing are social skills. To have any idea how their words will be understood, writers must know quite a lot about the perception and expectations of their audience. As such, we would hope that the author of our bomb dismantling instructions had more empathy for our unfortunate farmer. Likewise, to find the intended interpretation a reader must grasp the writer's perception of many things, including context and audience. Understanding depends on mutual empathy, on reader and writer appreciating each other's task.

................
................

In order to avoid copyright disputes, this page is only a partial summary.

Google Online Preview   Download