ENGLISH GRAMMAR AND COMPOSITION

TASK SHEET (Summary writing)

TOTAL MARKS: 15
Final submission date: 23 December, 2020
Assigned Task:
Students will write a summary on the given passage “The Truest Crisis” by Maleeha Lodhi. Students will
write the summary using reported speech in third person pronoun. The summary should contain a thesis as
the first sentence of the summary that summarizes the name of the author, the title of the passage and the
main argument proposed by the author. The summary should be written as one paragraph, indented half an
inch. The summary should be approximately one-fourth the length of the original passage. Do not use
dialogues, rhetorical questions, quotations or figurative language. Avoid repetition of points within the
summary. All files submitted should be named according to the given template: Full Name (Student ERP
number)-Assignment #. All assignments submitted on the LMS must be made on a Microsoft Word or a pdf
file. The summary will be graded on the given criteria:

Grading Criteria:

a) Organization (3 marks)
The summary should be well organized and cohesive and should not simply follow the organization
of the original passage. Students will be graded down if their summary looks like a body of loosely
connected ideas strung together, or if each idea does not transition smoothly to the next one, or if it is
more than one paragraph.

b) Relevance (2 marks)
All details related to the main thesis of the author need to be included in the summary. No repetition
of points allowed. Major ideas that cannot be further condensed, need to be rephrased. Minor ideas
need to be grouped together (though not always under “umbrella terms”). Irrelevant details need to be
omitted.

c) Language (3 marks)
Any ideas incorporated from the original passage should be expressed using the student’s own words.
Stories, examples and illustrations should be abstracted to represent the point being made by the
author through those stories/examples/illustrations. The vocabulary used should be accurate,
academic, and specific. There should be no ambiguity regarding the ideas expressed, and no use of
slang vocabulary or colloquial expression.

d) Objectivity (4 marks)
 The summary needs to present the author’s thesis in a straightforward manner (even if the author has
not). As such, student cannot (a) criticize the author’s view, (b) distort the author’s view, (c) bring
their own perspective into the summary, (d) extend the author’s argument to something not discussed
in the original passage, (e) introduce a ‘tone’ (e.g. sarcastic, jovial, critical, etc.) in their summary, or
(f) present the author’s argument as their own by using the personal pronoun.

e) Length and Format (1 mark)

The summary length needs to be approximately one-fourth the length of the assigned passage. It also
needs to be formatted according to the guidelines discussed in the course outline and the assignment
outline given above.
f) Grammar (2 marks)
Students are expected to proofread their assignments before submitting them. Punctuation and
grammar errors will result in being graded down. Do not use past tense and be consistent in tense use.

PLAGIARIZED ASSIGNMENTS WILL BE CANCELLED

 “The Truest Crisis”
by
Maleeha Lodhi

ONE of the key political issues in the global debate today is the steady erosion of
people’s trust in governments across the world. More than evident in the pre-pandemic era this
came into sharper relief after Covid-19 struck. The issue of trust was in the spotlight when
handling of the coronavirus crisis was assessed and it was found that where people had greater
trust in their government, they listened to health advisories and complied with restrictions. This
enabled authority to manage the crisis better. The reverse held true in countries where trust was
low, which compromised the government’s ability to tackle the disease.
This has not been a function of the type of political system of a country. Instead, it has
been a reflection of people’s confidence in how competent their leaders have been in responding
to the challenge. Positive perceptions helped build trust in governments.
But why has trust been declining in governments which today is accepted as a global
phenomenon? A review of the literature on this — books and knowledgeable essays — reveals
that multiple factors and their interplay may be responsible. The more plausible among those
identified are the sheer scale and complexity of governance today, rising and unmet expectations,
growing disconnect between political elites and the public, governments becoming too remote
from citizens, economic performance becoming the touchstone of people’s evaluation of
competence, conduct of leaders, and the information revolution that has empowered people in
ways that are truly unprecedented.
With a world moving at hyper speed, governments struggle to keep pace and are seen to
act and deliver much too slowly. The short-term approach usually adopted by political leaders
often overrides acting in the public interest in the long term. Many political leaders operate with
mental maps of the past and do an unedifying job of understanding and responding to people’s
sentiments and grievances. All these factors undermine trust between rulers and the ruled.
There is little doubt that a more informed citizenry with access to multiple channels of
information is more empowered and has several platforms available to make their voices heard.
This empowerment also produces higher expectations which morphs into popular discontent
when governments are unable to deliver and address public demands. Therefore, technology has
much to do in being a driver of mounting expectations.
 The trust debate is hardly new even if its context has been changing. Reports that track
global risks published annually by the World Economic Forum (WEF) have been highlighting
this phenomenon for over a decade now. One of its reports, in assessing trust, called attention to
a “legitimacy deficit” which referred to a sense that “we might nearly be better off without
rulers”. The report observed this trend across the world in countries in very different stages of
development.
Harvard scholar Joseph Nye, writing in one of WEF’s Global Outlook Reports, stressed
the need for democracies to adjust to the long-term decline of trust in elected governments and
the new challenges of the information age. This decline has been confirmed by several surveys.
For example, a report last year found only 45 per cent of citizens in OECD (Organisation for
Economic Cooperation and Development) countries trusted their government.
Scholars such as Nye tackled this rising trust deficit mostly from a Western perspective.
A book that comes to mind in this regard is The Fourth Revolution published some years back
but still relevant for its insights. Its authors, John Micklethwait and Adrian Wooldridge, argued
that the West must address what they called the “7 deadly sins” which seemed to lie behind
falling confidence. They include overlapping areas of responsibility in oversized governments,
surrender of too much power to special interests and political paralysis and gridlock.
More recently, well-known scholar Francis Fukiyama wrote about the crisis of trust in the
US and again, his observations have wider applicability. He argued that trust is built on two
foundations. One, “citizens must believe that their government has the expertise, technical
knowledge, capacity, and impartiality to make the best available judgments” — which of course
speaks to government competence. The second foundation is “trust in the top end of the
hierarchy”, in leaders and whether they inspire public confidence in knowing what they are
doing and acting in the public interest.
A recently published book, Democracy and Globalisation: Anger, Fear and Hope by
Josep M. Colomer and Ashley L. Beale, examines the issue from a fresh angle. Its authors
explore the causes of what they see as the current crisis of democracy and why trust in
governments and satisfaction with the way democracies work has been declining. They see more
democracy across the world but less governance. They attribute much of the rising public
disaffection to unfulfilled expectations and aspirations. Disruptions caused by technological
change and globalisation have undermined the effectiveness of governments to deliver the
policies needed for sustained economic growth. What they call the Great Disruption has
produced anger and fear. “People hurt by social and economic changes and lack of public
delivery get angry and react against the rulers and the rules when their expectations are not met.”
Whether practicable or not, the authors’ recipe for effective governance is “democracy at
multiple levels” with “reallocation of power at local, national, continental and global levels with
innovative combinations of direct democracy, representative government and rule by experts”.
A key factor that emerges in the discussion of trust is the negative impact of political
polarisation prevailing in countries — in both East and West — on the public’s view of leaders
and governments. This has rightly been seen to cause waning public confidence in political
institutions and those in charge of them. This should strike a familiar note in Pakistan and is
directly relevant to the present state of play in the country. With political polarisation reaching a
record level and the government and opposition locked in unremitting confrontation this cannot
but affect the public’s opinion of their leaders especially at a time when their focus should be on
the challenges facing the country. The lesson from the ongoing power struggle is that both sides
can end up losing the trust of the people they seek to serve.
(Word Limit: 1022 words)
The writer is a former ambassador to the US, UK and UN.
Published in Dawn, December 14th, 2020