Reading Techniques: Summarizing

What is Summarizing? Summarizing is where we take larger selections of text and reduce them to their bare essentials: the

skeleton. What we want are the key ideas and the main points that are worth noting and remembering. Summarizing is telling the important events or ideas in a story in your own words.

What Makes a Good Summary? A summary of a story is much shorter than the story. A good summary does not give your ideas or opinions. It includes important details that take you from the problem to the resolution. For a story, it includes the narrative elements.

Setting-- Where the story takes place, usually every scene has a change of setting. Character-- Description of the character and a little of their background. Plot-- The series of events that unfold in the story. Conflict--The problem in the story. Climax-- The strongest part of the story. Resolution--Where the conflict is resolved.

When You Ask Your Students to Summarize, What Usually Happens? they write down everything. they write down next to nothing. they give complete sentences.

they write way too much. they don't write enough. they copy word for word.

What Did You Want Them To Do? pull out main ideas. focus on key details. use key words and phrases. break down the larger ideas.

write only enough to convey the gist (the central idea or essence)

take succinct but complete notes.

Methods Selective underlining

This is where you underline only the keywords, which are the absolutely necessary words, and then turn those keywords into one succinct paragraph

Write successively shorter summaries Begin writing a summary of the piece of writing, then continue to rewrite your summary, taking out

unnecessary details each time, until your whole summary is just a sentence or two. Newspaper summarizing

Only focus on the who, what, when, why, where, and how of the piece of writing Somebody wanted to but so

Fill in the blanks below: Someday… Wanted to… But… So…

Use a story map