What is the one page summary?
This is the summary, much like an abstract, of the main points you wish to convey. It represents your distillation of the interesting aspects of the topic at hand. You may include references to the literature in the summary (ideally these should be papers in your annotated bibliography). You don't have to fill a whole page if you don't feel it necessary.
What is the purpose of the summary?
This is not a substitute for the presentation; it is an abstract of it. It tells us where this topic fits into some bigger picture and lets us know what issues exist in the literature on this topic.
What should be in the summary?
It should not simply be a concatination of the notes you made for the bibliography, but an integration of the knowledge you have acquired. Provide some (brief) background: some topics are specialized and so a little context is helpful before leaping into the details. Highlight any controversies (especially any that we can examine in the field), both in terms of the interpretation and the data upon which they are based (some controversies are from different interpretations of agreed-upon observations, while others dispute the observations themselves). A brief exploration of the implications of any controversies or inferences from this topic is welcome (this addresses, to some degree, why this matters). Although references are not required (especially for widely accepted background information), they are often quite helpful. Depending on the topic, you could take a historical view of the evolution of thought on this topic. Here is an example for the Lone Pine Fault:
The Lone Pine Fault has been the focus of much study in part because it is one of the few scarps produced by a large historic earthquake in the Basin and Range, in part because original observations were confusing, and in part because it is within the recently recognized Eastern California Shear Zone. It separates the Mesozoic granitic and metavolcanic rocks of the Alabama Hills to the west from deep Neogene valley fill to the east that may approach 3 km (Pakiser et al., 1964). Many prominent geologists, including J. D. Whitney and G. K. Gilbert, examined the scarp after it came to prominence in the 1872 Owens Valley Earthquake. Whitney, in common with the thought at the time, assumed the rupture was a product of shaking and not a reflection of the cause of shaking (Bateman, 1961), while Gilbert’s reexamination of the scarp led him to correctly infer that the scarps were related both to the cause of the shaking and the rise of the mountains. Their original observations were somewhat confused about the magnitude of slip and sense of strike-slip motion on this scarp and the main rupture that extended from Lone Pine to Big Pine. This ambiguity allowed Pakiser et al. (1964) to argue for left-lateral motion across Owens Valley to explain variations in basin thicknesses in the valley. Bateman (1961) argued that the fault was actually right-lateral from original photos taken at the time but unpublished for a very long time and not generally recognized as constraining the sense of slip. The Lone Pine Fault's scarp was often represented as having formed in 1872, but detailed geological study (e.g., Lubetkin and Clark, 1988) shows that the scarp formed over three events. Additionally, the main motion in these earthquakes was found to be strike-slip (and right lateral) in 1872, confirming Bateman's (1961) inference. From the 20,000 year age estimated for the fan that is faulted, Lubetkin and Clark (1988) have estimated slip on this fault at 0.4 - 1.3 mm/yr, and using the ages from here they further estimate slip on the whole Owens Valley Fault System at 0.7 - 2.2 mm/yr. Lee et al. (2001) acquired rates directly from the Owens Valley Fault for the last three earthquakes at between 1.8 and 3.6 mm/yr, implying that the whole of the Owens Valley system moves at 2.2-4.9 mm/yr. This is the highest geologic estimate, as Bacon and Pezzopane (2007) derive rates from trenches closer to Lone Pine of about 1 mm/yr. These estimates are generally lower than estimates of slip from numerous geodetic studies in the area (e.g., Dixon et al., 1995, 2000); this discrepancy is important in understanding how the Eastern California Shear Zone functions in accommodating about 20% of motion between the Pacific and North American plates. This in turn is important for understanding earthquake recurrences in the western Great Basin.
Your text might be as detailed or richer in background; there are many different ways a good summary can be written. Remember, your audience is the rest of the class.
How polished should the first draft be?
You should view this as though it is what you are really putting in. A lazy assembly of lines from abstracts, or reading a single paper superficially will only get you tongue-lashings for the obvious sloppiness of the work. A rough draft is what you start with for yourself, not something you turn in. You want comments that will help you move up to a higher level, not comments that reinforce how incomplete the first draft was.
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Please send mail to cjones@colorado.edu if you encounter any problems or have suggestions.
C. H. Jones | CIRES | Dept. of Geological Sciences | Univ. of Colorado at Boulder
Last modified at February 21, 2017 12:13 PM