Practice in Summarizing and Paraphrasing
Read the following passages from Janet Murray's chapter on "Agency". Then make a new Scalar Page, copy and paste your assigned passage and write a paraphrase. Be sure to put the concept in your own words and to accurately represent the author's idea in this passage. In-text citations are also required! See the Handout on Summarizing and Paraphrasing on Canvas.
1. All of them allow us to experience pleasures specific to intentional navigation: orienting ourselves by landmarks, mapping a space mentally to match our experience, and admiring the juxtapositions and changes in perspective that derive from moving through an intricate environment. (Murray, page 129)
2. As I move forward, I feel a sense of powerfulness, of significant action, that is tied to my pleasure in the unfolding story. In an adventure game this pleasure also feels like winning. But in a narrative experience not structured as a win-lose contest the movement forward has the feeling of enacting a meaningful experience both consciously chosen and surprising. However, there is a drawback to the maze orientation: it moves the interactor toward a single solution, toward finding the one way out. (Murray, page 131)
3. But readers cannot easily return to the overview in order to get a sense of where they are or how much is left to read. In trying to create texts that do not "privilege" any one order of reading or interpretive framework, the postmodernists are privileging confusion itself. The indeterminate structure of these hypertexts frustrates our desire for narrational agency, for using the act of navigation to unfold a story that flows from our own meaningful choices. (Murray, page 132)
4. But a multithreaded story can offer many voices at once without giving any one of them the last word. This is a reassuring format for encountering a traumatic event because it allows plenty of room for conflicting emotions. It lets us disperse complex, intense reactions into many derivative streams so that we do not have to feel the full flood of sorrow all at once. (Murray, page 136)
