Summary Reflection

     Summarizing academic literature was not the most fun task to do.  It was, however, helpful in refining my studying skills.  By reading the article once and then having to condense the material for someone else to simply know what the gist of the article is, I was forced to retain the important information of the article.  Completing the task seemed easy at first, but one actually had to think about which parts were most important and appropriate for inclusion in a summary.  The hardest part about the assignment was leaving out my own opinion.  Being opinionated about a topic is what we as students have been told to be for the majority of our written assignments, so it’s only natural to want to rely on personal perspective to add text to the page.  Although not a problem in my case, I think the length of the article was a big factor in summarizing for many of my peers.  I spoke with some students who had shorter articles and found it difficult to “summarize” a piece that was barely longer than the required number of pages for the assignment.  Other students had very long articles so their biggest concern was finding the main talking points without having to read the entire article and without skimming so much that they miss a few points.    I’m glad we read the Rosenburg piece about effective reading before this assignment because it really helped set up how I would summarize the article.   From the article that I summarized I learned the all forms of communication are imperative to a successful career in the dietetics field.  Both verbal and nonverbal language played a role in how content the clients were with their dietitians and how much progress they made.  Despite the summary being a tad tedious, writing it was a great developmental experience.