Learning to summarize large bodies of text will be beneficial for me the rest of my life. To start, being able to sum up a few paragraphs in a few sentences is useful in the classroom, workplace, and everyday life. For example, if someone misses an article that was read in class and the class intends on having a discussion about the article next class, it may be beneficial to summarize the article to them. This will save time and provide enough information for the absent student to participate in the discussion. Also, many corporations and politicians read tons of magazine and newspaper articles and then summarize them. In addition, after reading an article (business, political, etc.) if you summarize it to yourself it will better help you understand the author’s reasoning behind writing the article.

Being able to learn to think critically, I believe, is more essential than summarizing. However, in order to create a well-written summary, one must be able to think critically. Thinking critically allows a reader to not only understand the author, but to elaborate or expand on the topic. Also, thinking critically allows an audience to challenge the author. This is extremely important for many reasons. For example, if readers never challenged any authors, humanity would be simply incorrect. What I mean by that is this: hundreds of thousands of scientific papers have been written since man-kind began. If everyone believed exactly what the author said, we would not understand gravity, or mass, or motion, or really anything in this world. The point is, it is important to think critically about what someone is writing/saying because it is beneficial and educational.

Viewing different texts has also been beneficial. Reading and analyzing different texts has allowed me to better understand an author’s purpose. For example, the tweets that our class produces is a much different text than the articles we tweet about. In a tweet, anyone that has a twitter account may comment to spark discussion; however, in a scholarly article, in order to respond, one would have to find a way to contact the author, and even then, it may be impossible to get in contact with them. There are many useful techniques for both writing and reading, but summarizing, thinking critically, and understanding different texts are some of the most essential techniques to understand.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FIdOKqga8NU

Please watch! As a student-athlete for a few years in college, please watch.

            In, “Should College Athletes be Paid? Why, They Already Are,” by Seth Davis, he begins by clarifying that his article is not in response to the essay by Taylor Branch, but he is, “actually referring to an article that appeared in the June 1905 edition of McClure’s,” (Davis 298). Davis (as one can tell by the title of the article) is in full support of continuing to not pay college athletes. Davis disagrees that student-athletes generate billions of dollars worth of revenue while receiving nothing in return. He supports this by stating that, “student-athletes earn free tuition, which over the course of four years could exceed $200,000,” (Davis 299). Davis then continues to write how much money each big conference and the NCAA made last year; however, he immediately shuts it down by explaining, “the profit-and-loss structure of college sports,” (Davis 300). In addition, Davis continues by stating that if players want to be paid, and have access to the fair market, then they should go pro; however, because there is an age restriction in sports such as the NFL and NBA, “the fair market value for a freshman or sophomore in college is actually zero. Yet, the NCAA is still compensating those players with a free education,” (Davis 300). As the article comes to a conclusion, Davis mentions that many schools do not make much money to begin with, so why should all their profit go back to the student-athletes who are not producing much? Davis, at the end, continues to mention Branch’s article and states, “I kept waiting for him to acknowledge that the student-athlete gets something of value from all this,” (Davis 303). To conclude, Davis clearly believes that student-athletes are already well compensated for their work and efforts, and should be given nothing more than a scholarship.

                                                                     Works Cited

Davis, Seth. “Should College Athletes be Paid? Why, They Already Are.” 2013. Ethics In Higher             Education. 1^st edition. Ed. Nancy Henke, Lisa Langstraat, Adam Mackie, and Emily     Morgan. Jouthlake, TX: Fountainhead, 2013. 297-303.

I tried to indent it in here and it wouldn't work, so I copy and pasted from word and this keeps happening.