Having a go at summarising

Today I went over the general purposes of the unit and what you will be doing over the next couple of months.

This unit will be largely project-based: ie you will work on researching the impact of a major event. You will be required to discuss elements of your research in a formal meeting and, finally, produce the findings of your research in the form of a formal report. The meetings will take place in November and the final drafts of reports will be due in December.

Before that, however, you will be working on the first assessment which requires you to summarise and evaluate a complex document.

We have started developing these skills already (see last week). Today, we looked at a formal government report on the legacy of the Olympics (click here to see a copy).

After taking a look at the format, structure and layout of the document, we had a go at summarising section 4 (the original text was 608 words long).

The summarising was done in groups of two and three and everyone submitted a copy of their summary at the end. We’ll take it up from there next week.

Starting to analyse texts: the legacy of the olympics

Today we started to get into the work for the course by summarising and analysing two texts.

The first text came from the official Olympic 2012 site and it is about the legacy of the event. Click here to see a copy of the "legacy" text.

The second text was an article from The Guardian newspaper and it focussed on the language used in the promotion of the event. Click here to see a copy of that article.

In groups we attempted to come up with a summary of each of the text's main points. This was easier for the official Olympic 2012 text.

After discussing this and identifying the purpose of each text, we then broke up from the groups and started to answer some questions which required you to analyse the "legacy" text in more depth. I asked everyone to complete that for next week.