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Practice
Paraphrase/Summary
You can practice your paraphrase and/or summary skills
with the exercises below. Draft a summary and/or paraphrase on one
or more of the practice exercises. UHV students can schedule an appointment
with an Academic Center tutor who can discuss paraphrase and/or summary
with you. Stop by the Center, room 122, University Center, or call
(361) 570-4288 to find out how you can schedule an appointment. You
can also send in your paraphrase or summary to the online tutors if
you include the passage(s) you’re working with. Email your paraphrase/summary
and the passage as an email attachment to tutor@uhv.edu. Whether scheduling
a face-to-face or submitting for an online session, please note that
the tutor will only be able to tutor two or three exercises with you
at one time.
Practice Exercise 1:
In what was perhaps the first instance, the leap of
imagination that gave rise to writing took place around 350 B.C.
in Mesopotamia between the Tigris and Euphrates rivers in modern-day
Iraq. Sometimes referred to as “the cradle of Western civilization,” Mesopotamia
(meaning ‘between the rivers’) was inhabited at the
time by the Sumerians and the Akkadians. These peoples were city
dwellers
with a sophisticated economic system based on agriculture, cattle,
and commerce. Exactly how the Sumerians and Akkadians invented
writing will never be known, but we can surmise that the potential
for secondary
symbolization was discovered fortuitously as someone struggled
to formulate a visible message for which no agreed-upon visual
symbols
existed. (p. 482)
--Finegan, E. (1994). Language its structure and use (2nd ed.). Fortworth:
Harcourt Brace College Publishers.
Practice Exercise II:
The persistently poor are only a minority of the people who ever
experience poverty, but they place a disproportionate
burden on welfare resources.
Less than half of the people on welfare rolls at any one
time are persistently poor, that is, likely to remain on welfare
for five
or more years. Thus, for most welfare recipients, welfare
payments are a relatively short-term aid that helps them over
life’s
difficult times. For others, welfare is a more permanent
part of their lives. (p. 121)
--Dye, T. (1995). Understanding public policy (8th ed.). Englewood
Cliffs, New Jersey: Prentice Hall.
Practice Exercise III:
It is generally acknowledged that all organic beings have been
formed on two great laws—Unity of Type, and the Conditions
of Existence. By unity of type is meant that fundamental agreement
in structure,
which we see in organic beings of the same class, and which
is quite independent of their habits of life. On my theory,
unity of type is
explained by unity of descent. The expression of conditions
of existence, so often insisted on by the illustrious Cuvier,
is fully embraced
by the principle of natural selection. For natural selection
acts by either now adapting the varying parts of each being
to its organic
and inorganic conditions of life; or by having adapted them
during long-past periods of time: the adaptations being aided
in some cases
by use and disuse, being slightly affected by the direct action
of the external conditions of life, and being in all cases subject
to
the several laws of growth. Hence, in fact, the law of the
Conditions of Existence is the higher law; as it includes, through
the inheritance
of former adaptations, that of Unity of Type. (p. 233)
--Darwin, C. (1979). The origin of species. New York: Gramercy Books.
Practice Exercise IV:
Words and pictures that complement one another employ different
visual and verbal content, and both modes are designed to work together
in
order to help the reader understand the same main idea (the same
referent). Together, the two modes render the idea more fully than
either does
alone because each provides different information about the idea.
For example, a complementary text and diagram combination about
how a motor works might offer a 3-D presentation of the spatial
features
of the motor, a representation that would be cumbersome to provide
in prose. On the other hand, details about the purpose of the
motor and its practical uses might be best presented in words. Each
form
makes a unique contribution to strengthen and clarify the reader’s
understanding of the main idea. (p. 415)
--Schriver, K. (1997). Dynamics in document design. New York: Wiley
Computer Publishing.
Practice Exercise V:
Testing can also be stressful for developers. It is difficult to
spend months on an interface and then watch people conspicuously
fail to use it "correctly" during testing. Conducting
usability testing requires developing an outlook that sees testing
as part of
the design process, rather than as a critical activity with potentially
dire consequences. After all, it is widely accepted that all software
has bugs that need to be addressed. It is unreasonable to expect
user interfaces to emerge magically bug-free from the development
process.
When seen in this light, testing is extremely effective at helping
developers to think about users and their needs.
--Gaffney, G. (2001). Do-it-yourself usability testing. Retrieved
from http://www.infodesign.com.au/articles/diytesting.html.
Practice Exercise VI:
There is no necessary correlation between publicity, realness,
and shareability. Persons can be most alone in their experience
of the
most public of spectacles; and most together in the sharing of
the most ‘real’, yet unqualifiedly private of events.
Sharing a common experience may be a token of the most genuine bond
between
two persons, or a token of the most abject bondage. Phantasy may
or may not be experienced, by either the one person or the other,
as
inner or outer, private or public, shareable or unshareable, real
or unreal. (p. 37)
-- Laing, R.D. (1969). Self and others. Harmondsworth, England: Penguin
Books Ltd.
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