The Summoned Life by David Brooks Summary

Adam Sadek

Dr. Walts

College Writing 1

10/14/14

An Argument-less Article

                  In his short article David Brooks tries to get one point across using two examples, but not really promote one over the other either. He tries to say that it is best for a person trying to live a well-considered life to consider two different ways in which they can structure their life, and then describes those ways. The first is to talk about the Well-Planned Life, which revolves around taking time to reflect and come up with an overall purpose for yourself and then strive to achieve it. For this example, he introduces professor Clayton Christenson and relays his interpretation of what it means to figure out what people want to do with their lives. Christenson relies on providing personal anecdotes of his younger self as he went about his educational career following the parameters of the well-planned life. Brooks utilizes both quotes from Christenson and describes aspects of his life to get his reader to understand that side of the argument. The other is the Summoned Life, which consists of taking in your environmental and situational factors and then molding yourself to fit into it and eventually change it by becoming a part of it. For his Summoned Life example, he transitions fairly abruptly from talking about the Well-planned life and uses his own argument and provides definitions for what it means to think about life in those terms. He gives his readers a situation they understand and describes how someone living a summoned life may view them and go through them. He does this to finally reveal that the Well-Planned life is common in America and the Summoned Life is common elsewhere. The author’s purpose isn’t to sway his readers to embrace one way and ignore the other, it is merely to provide a factual description of both.