Here is what is on the syllabus on this:
“Each student will be assigned to give two short introductions to readings. These should be neatly focused and concise (not more than ten to fifteen minutes) summaries of interesting points in the reading and a line of questioning to start our discussion. It is a difficult thing to properly and expertly present on a reading in such a brief period of time and you will need to be prepared. Generate notes to orient your presentation and practice to be aware of time. Fifteen minutes go by distressingly quickly and the texts we are reading are dense and difficult, so you need to be sharp. You must also post a text version of your introduction to the course blog. These should be at least 500 words each in length. These two reading introductions are each worth 15% of the course grade.”
Let me elaborate a bit more on this.
As a reading summarizer/presenter, your in-class responsibility is to give us a brief introduction to a reading. This should certainly involve summarizing some of what is in that reading, though you cannot hope to be exhaustive about this. Your best approach is to pick out a few key points to hit on and to spend some time coming up with provocative questions to put to the class to spark our conversation.
Please do not simply read directly from your written summary in your presentation. Be conversational, be concise, and be organized. Remember that you need to pose at least two questions to the class on the reading.
In addition to starting off our class discussion on that reading, the reading presenter will be responsible for writing up a 500-word introduction to that same reading for the course blog. These texts should be written in formal prose, not as outlines. You need to write a short review essay of the reading assigned, and you should attend closely to your writing to make it clear and comprehensible to the reader. These reviews should be clearly organized, and they should not be in the form of one long run-on paragraph.
Direct quotation of the text should be avoided, though you should give parenthetical page citations when you are referring to specific parts of the reading’s argument. These summary texts must be posted to the course blog before the class meeting in which the reading at issue is discussed. I will separately post instructions on how to post your summaries.