Lesson Four
ELAR Level Four, Unit Eight: Paraphrasing and Summarizing
LESSON FOUR
From the last Lesson, remember that to summarize is to take a larger body of material (larger text) and condense it down to key ideas, or the parts worth listing. In other words, when you do a summary, you are capturing the main idea and supporting it with crucial details into a smaller piece of work without losing the idea and message of the larger, original material. When you summarize, you are taking away extra words and information and placing the important material into your own words.
Why would you use summaries?
1. To enrich your writing
2. To highlight a particular body of material (a phrase, sentence, etc.)
3. To give examples of certain topics
4. To draw attention to important statements
5. To give a brief account of material which is quite lengthy
6. To tell important ideas in a limited amount of time
7. To cover the important points in a passage when you have only limited lines on which to write
8. To help you and the reader learn to focus on comprehensive
statements rather than on insignificant details
PRACTICE
FINDING KEY WORDS
Being able to select the key words or phrases that will support the topic of the material is very crucial in writing a good summary. If you know how to pick out the most crucial points to support the topic, then writing a summary should be a "cake walk"!
Read the paragraph below and see if you can pick out the key points:
The various colorful rock striations at the San Andreas Fault remind me of the clay I played with as a small child. I loved receiving a new box of clay. Each long, rectangular block of clay was cool to the touch and beckoned me to start attacking it with my hands. I would roll it out flat, layer each color, and smash them together! The bands of colorful clay were then formed into waves by my little hands and were stood up on end to dry. It is funny, but those clay "mountains" that dried there on the table at my childhood home looked so much like the mountains I am climbing right now on the outskirts of Palm Springs. The formations caused by that unbelievable earthquake at the San Andreas Fault line surely remind me of the fun times I had molding the Clay Mountains on my kitchen table. Now as I am standing on this craggy mountaintop, I am in awe of Nature's creation -- the enormous folded, banded rocks alternating from light to dark to light. The multi-colored mountains definitely do remind me of my clay childhood art project!