Writing Summaries

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Writing Summaries

• Why and how?

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How can writing summaries help me?

• Practice close attentive reading
• Find structure in writing
• Grasp and retain whats important in a text

3
Summaries help us distinguish between

• key points
• back up material
• specific examples
• illustrations
• asides
• details

4
The key to writing summaries

• Short and sweet!
• Read the whole chapter or article BEFORE writing
  the summary.
• Write notes on the original text

5
What to include

• Names (Vahan, Sisak)
• Places (Bitlis)
• Main, general ideas
• (gendarmes sent him
  to a childrens home)

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What to Exclude/ leave out

• Specific details
• (Vahan looked at the sky for 2 seconds)
• Quotes
• (Vahan said _____ to the gendarmes)
• 3 words in a row or more from original text
• (quoting without giving credit is plagarism)

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Also consider.

• DO NOT summarize paragraph by paragraph.
• Instead, read the whole article or section first.
  Then write a summary with an order that makes
  sense to you.
• Just like combined sentences, summaries are SHORT
  length while INCLUDING ALL important INFORMATION

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Lets Practice

• Write a summary of an olympic article ?
• Choose from downhill skiing (blue), figure
  skating (yellow), or the luge (pink)