Summary of the Case Against Hope

Article link: https://www.nytimes.com/2019/06/06/opinion/hope-politics-2019.html

Your assignment is to produce a scrupulously objective, accurate, 300-350 word summary of the article “The Case Against Hope,” published in The New York Times on June 6, 2019. The New York Times is the most prestigious newspaper in the country, often referred to as “the newspaper of record,” with highly educated readers across the country and indeed the globe. The article is the first item in the Articles folder and is also in the Week 1 folder. If the links do not work, you can access the article by going to nytimes.com and typing the title–in quotation marks–into the search box. Before beginning to draft your summary, you should read the article at least twice.

Most scholars believe there is no such thing as complete objectivity; all data our brains receive is mediated by our own personal filters. Nonetheless, your task here is to summarize the article as objectively as humanly possible This is one place where I do not want to know your opinion! In fact, one measurement of success with this assignment will be whether you manage to keep me completely in the dark about your personal views regarding the article as a whole and the topics it addresses. Seriously, for just this one task, if you share your opinion in any way you will lose points! Of course I have deliberately chosen an article likely to provoke strong reactions of various sorts, because I want to make writing an objective summary a challenging task.

Note that the readership of The New York Times is assumed to have a college education and to stay informed about current events, so there may be vocabulary words or other items with which you are unfamiliar. It is important to look up any unfamiliar words, names, or events, or your summary is likely to suffer from incomplete comprehension of the article.

Your summary must be 300-350 words long. If you compose in Microsoft Word, you can get the word count by clicking on Review in the tool bar and then on the word count icon.

Be sure your summary includes the article’s title, author, date of publication, the name of the newspaper that published it, and the type of article it is (news? feature? editorial? book review?). Note that article titles go in quotation marks and names of newspapers should be italicized. Refer to the author by first and last name the first time you mention her name, but after that refer to her by last name only. Never refer to an author by only their first name.