Here's one more example of summarizing an article in a newspaper:

Tara Bahrampour and Lori Aratani's article "Teens' Bold Blogs Alarm Area Schools" (Washington Post) write about schools "warning students [and parents] that their online activities may affect not only their safety, but also their academic and professional lives" and also even taking disciplinary action against students, including suspension and expulsion. The author quotes teenagers and parents about the youngsters' writing on the Internet.

As the article noted, teenagers have always kept diaries in which they wrote their inner thoughts, including derogatory and discrminatory comments. But now these thoughts are in the open for millions of people to read. Not too long ago, schools had the authority of parents, but no longer today. Although schools can control use of school-owed computers and resources, computers at home are private property. How schools will tackle comments by students that target others at the school is still uncertain. This topic is a new arena in which old theories of psychology and sociological can be tested.

In Citation, when you summarize an article in the abstract or comment on it in a note, all the information about the author and source is already there, it's not necessary to put that information into your abstract or comments. When posting a summary online, however, you will need to include that information, and if the information was found online (not including those in the library's database), then there should be a link to it. Here's an example for an article about text-messaging in the NY Times.

--------

Almost everyone under the age of 20 text-message. Why? According to Charles McGrath in his article "The Pleasures of the Text" (The New York Times), text-messaging is

"a kind of avoidance mechanism that preserves the feeling of communication - the immediacy - without, for the most part, the burden of actual intimacy or substance."

Besides writing about the why of text-messaging, McGrath's article covers the nature of text-messaging, giving examples of how users achieve efficiency and style, and writes about its greater use outside of the U.S.

McGrath's main claim about avoiding intimacy and substance is interesting. Is this a byproduct or a subconscious desire? Is it even an accurate description? I can imagine that when one is constantly text-messaging, not much is new, and so not much is of substance. Actually, when I ask my 6-year-old son what he did in school today, he almost always says, "I don't know." Is he avoiding intimacy? Certainly not when he climbs all over me, trying to get my attention. Similary, when someone asks me what is new, I generally respond, "Not much." Rather than an avoidance of intimacy, I imagine it's simply the reality of much being the same. Yet people ask the same questions every day as a matter of keeping social contact. It's not clear why text-messaging should be considered different from normal conversations.

------

Note that in this example, the first part is summary without any of my opinion about the article. The second part is my thoughts, my opinion, my response to the article.