story of my life

      In this class, I studied about summary and paraphrase. Summary is shortening or decreasing 50% or less word from original article. The purpose is to simplify the original and make it easier to digest. I have to think of the receiver of my summary as someone who does not understand the subject matter very well. By practicing this, one is more likely to do an effective job as well as save my time to identify the main idea of the topic. The basic steps to summarize are read the original document, fully understand what the topic is all about, combine two or three sentences into one, and check my work whether the main point is there and if I have missed any important parts. Paraphrase is giving the meaning in another form which required me to restate and reword. Summary and paraphrase is twin. They are not identical but always come together. So the definition of summary and paraphrase is shortening the original document in my own words. The next one is synthesizing which is one level up than the other two. Synthesize is accumulating information from various sources that are needed when I finish doing research for a term paper or thesis. Class then proceeded to the right ways to do citation and quotation. The difference between these two are citation required writer to rephrase author’s original words but maintain the meaning while quotation enable writer to take the exact words from original author without any changes. I also learnt that there are actually two types of quotation that are short quotation and long quotation and the correct way to use both of them. The lecturer gave an exercise on how to summarize and taught us about which words can be taken out and which words are not. I was not aware that when I was trying to rephrase the words to make it shorter, I was actually changing its original meaning. I am now fully aware that I cannot simply rephrase any words without checking them first. Reference list that is used by universities in Malaysia follow APA (American Psychological Association) format. There are different formats for each sources including book, journal, online website and others. I also learnt about format used for cover pages and it is actually can reflect someone’s professionalism.