Summary Reflection

Robert Young

English 250

Section PN

Article Summary Reflection

I think I rushed this assignment way more that I did with my other assignments. I could keep telling myself that I had plenty of time to do it, since I had a week and a half. When it finally came down to that last day, and I still didn’t have it done, I panicked. I was up until three in the morning trying to finish it. I only ended up getting four hours of sleep Thursday night because of it. Then I got to class on Friday and found out that it wasn’t due till midnight, and I was like “screw it, I’m taking a nap.” I wrote this reflection first so I wouldn’t forget all of the points I was going to make.

Honestly, I don’t expect that my grade on this will be very good, and I know that isn’t very good because it is one of the very few graded assignments in the class. I think that is because there were multiple definitions of summary going around in my head as I was trying to write it, and it turned out almost exactly like the abstract in the actual article, except longer. The only difference is, I think I went into a little more depth than the abstract, but didn’t nearly get to the level of detail as the article.

The thing that was confusing me is I kept asking myself “Why am I writing a summary if I can just look at the abstract again?” and I kept thinking about the article we were to read about writing summaries, and how we were supposed to tie the article to our opinion. Then I kept thinking I heard you say in class that you didn’t want our opinions in our summaries, so this is what I ended up with. I have a general overview of the entire article, while going a little more in-depth than the abstract of the article itself.

Most of my thought pieces I did in about fifteen minutes. This summary took me like five hours (from 10 Thursday night to 3 Friday morning).

On the plus side, I did learn quite a few things about communication in Software Engineering: when working in groups, it is absolutely essential that everyone communicates. There are projects that need coordinated, people that need to work together to do certain things, people that need to make sure they are meeting certain specifications, etc. How well a team communicates may have a very strong influence on how good the final product is. Some of the practices discussed in this article help to increase efficiency in both communication and in development.

That is all. Ta Ta.