Writing a summary—How to tell what’s important to include and what’s not

Posted on August 19, 2015 | Leave a comment

My sixth grade student looked at the 17 paragraphs of a news article, bewildered. Where should she begin to find the main idea in order to write a summary? Was every name important? Did her summary need a hook? How about a conclusion?

Writing a summary is a new skill to many middle schoolers. Compressing 700 words into 150 or even into a single sentence without adding any opinion or outside information is daunting. Here’s how I walk a student through the process, over and over, until she gets it.

  • First, I make sure the student has read and understood the selection to be summarized. I might ask a few general questions to see if she understands the gist of it. Little things which adults spot quickly, like the source of the information, or the significance of it, might never occur to a student. So before writing, the student needs to be aware of the who-what-when-where-and why of a nonfiction selection and which of those five W’s apply. I ask the student to identify the five W’s, verbally, and to form one or two sentences combining that information. I help her refine those sentences, and they usually become the first sentences of her summary.
  • Next we look at the reading selection’s introduction and write on the original, separating the introduction with margin lines or even drawing a large rectangle around that section. For a student new to summarizing, drawing on the “document” can help her to “see” the organization.  If the document can’t be written on, I photocopy it so the student feels free to mark it.
  • I ask the student if the introduction is a hook or is a true introduction. “There’s a difference?” she might ask. I explain that many times the hook attracts readers to keep reading, but it is not the gist of the idea in the selection. The hook can be like the pretty woman selling a car in a TV commercial. Is the commercial really about the woman or the car? The student rereads the introduction and decides if it is hook or important information. If it is hook, I ask her to X it out and we move on to the next section of the reading selection which usually is the true introduction.
  • Sometimes there are subheadings which tie information together. If so, we look at how subheadings are used. Can you organize your summary the same way, I ask, writing a sentence or two about each of the subheaded information? “You mean I don’t have to summarize each paragraph?” No, you don’t. If the paragraphs are details about the same information, figure out what the main idea is in each subheaded section. A summary needn’t summarize each sentence or each paragraph but rather each important idea. At this point the student often rereads the selection, drawing lines around sections which can be summarized as a lump. Then she summarizes each section.
  • We go back to the five W’s. Who? I ask the student if she has said  who is the source of the information she has read? “Well, the newspaper is.” But who is the newspaper quoting or getting its information from. “Oh.” She identifies the “who” (the organization issuing the report, the government agency, the scientist), and if she has not noted this in her summary, she backtracks to put it near the beginning. “What” is usually the main idea, so that should already be on paper. “When?” A general date (last week, during the summer, in November) and setting should be noted. “Where” might be important but it might not.
  • “Why” might not be on the student’s radar, but it needs to be. Why is the information in the reading selection important? The student should be able to find out why somewhere in the reading selection. Stating it is often a good way to end a summary.
  • How about names? Sometimes a name is important, but many times it can be left out in a summary, and a description of the kind of work the person does can be used instead. “Scientists at the ABC organization,” or “angry mothers in Toronto,” or “people studying Shakespeare’s plays” might be a better way to identify who is involved than actual names. However, if the selection concerns a well-known person, that person’s name should be used.
  • How about organizing the summary? Should it go in the same order as the original reading selection? If the original is a news story, then yes, since information in a news story is written in order of importance. For other nonfiction selections, the original structure is probably a good guide, but it needn’t be strictly followed. On the other hand, why not follow it unless it is incoherent?

When my student finished her summary, she glowed, knowing she had left out so much while stating the main ideas in eight sentences. Seventeen paragraphs reduced to eight sentences! Yet I know we will need to do this many more times before she feels confident enough to compress on her own. Like so many writing skills, summarizing takes practice.

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Posted in conclusions, essay introduction, summarizing

Use cubing to entice your students into prewriting activities

Posted on August 12, 2015 | Leave a comment

My favorite prewriting organizer is a mindweb because of its informality and flexibility.

But I have recently discovered another organizer—the cube—which I am sure to use more of. Let me suggest you try it to. Here’s how.

A cube is just what it says, a six-sided three-dimensional shape. You can make one out of paper easily. (Go online to http://www.wikihow.com/Make-a-Paper-Cube.com  or to other cube-making websites for easy directions).

Or you can buy an already made plastic cube or use a child’s block. The cube needs to be big enough to tape a word on each face, so even inch by inch by inch cubes will do though I prefer cubes with two-inch faces because they are easier to read.

diagram of a cube

One cube per student works, but so does one cube per group of students or even one cube per classroom for certain activities.

What words go on the faces? The options are almost limitless, but let me suggest a few for particular kinds of writing.

  • Suppose you (the teacher or parent) are trying to develop higher level thinking skills in a student. You could write the words from Bloom’s Taxonomy (remembering, understanding, applying, analyzing, evaluating, and synthesizing), writing one word on each face of the cube. (Make sure the students know what the words mean.) And suppose your student has just read the novel, Hatchet. You could write six questions, one for each kind of thinking, on a separate piece of paper. The student throws the cube and gets “applying.” He refers to the question about applying, such as, “Suppose the pilot had survived. How would Brian’s summer in Canada have been different? How would he be different at the end of the book?”  Or suppose he throws “analyzing.”  The question could be “Draw a chart showing the organization of the novel chapter by chapter.”
  • Or you could write words like “main characters,” “setting,” “initiating event ,” “problem to be solved,” “climax,” and “resolution/ending.” This set up could be used for almost every novel. The student throws the cube, and for each word or phrase, he takes two or three minutes to write down every detail he can think of. When he has written information for every word or phrase, the student is ready to begin writing a summary or a book review or other kind of writing.
  • Another kind of cube could have the names of six important characters from a novel (Harry Potter, Ron, Hagrid, Malfoy, Voldemort, and Dumbledore, for example). You ask a question related to the novel throw the cube.  The student has to think how that character might respond to that question. For example, you might throw “Ron” and ask, “Should Harry, at 11-years-old, confront Voldemort?  How would Ron respond?” If the student responded for each character, he could read over his answers, and write a reply from just one character’s point of view for a grade.
  • The cube can be used for nonfiction too. Suppose your student is studying a historical event, such as the creation of the Declaration of Independence. How would different people look at that document? On the cube you could write Thomas Jefferson, King George III, Tories, King Louis of France, a slave in Virginia, and Cherokees in north Georgia. In a classroom, each of six groups could write about the perspectives of one of these people.  Or a single student might write about two or three of the people.  Students are forced to consider a historical even from different vantage points.
  • Or in a science class, students learning about minerals could use a cube with such words as color, streaking, luster, hardness, density, and stratification. They could investigate a rock, describing its attributes using the cube as a guide. Or they could study the drought in California from the perspectives of a vineyard owner, a Silicon Valley geek, a migrant farm worker, an homeless person, a home owner whose well is dry, and a car wash worker.

All students would like the variety of using a cube, but less motivated students who might need a gimmick to foster interest might be particularly interested.

For more information, see research by Wiggins & McTighe, 2005.

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Posted in point of view character, prewriting organizer

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Starting a student essay with a question can be a good idea, but some questions are better than others

Posted on August 5, 2015 | Leave a comment

What kinds of questions should you NOT use to start an essay?

• Questions that can be answered with a “yes” or a “no” are usually bad questions. Do you have any reason to continue reading when you read these questions?
–Have you ever played basketball?
–Do you really want a dog?
–Would you like to hear about my trip to the beach?

• Questions which ask about information that only a few people might be interested in are bad questions.
–How often do hockey players need to sharpen their skates?
–Have you ever wondered about all those African sculptures in the Atlanta airport?
–Have you eaten on top of the Eifel Tower?

• Questions about a student’s family or people most readers don’t know are not interesting. –How can Samanyu always beat me at Monopoly?
–Is your sister annoying, like mine is?
–So Mom and Dad, did you remember that my birthday is coming up?

• Questions about things everybody knows about are boring questions.
–Do you want to know about our teacher, Mrs. Storm?
–Do you know why we have fire drills?
–How do you get an A on a math test?

What kinds of questions should you use to start an essay?

• Funny questions make readers want to keep reading.
–Do you really want a bad-breath, farting, slobbering, snoring pet like a dog?
–What would you do if you were digging a sand castle at the beach, when a crab scooted right in the moat?

• Questions which promise adventure or mystery attract readers.
–Wouldn’t it be fun to drive cars on two wheels, spin them around and smash them into buildings like my uncle does?
–So there we were, lost in a maze, when my sister said, “Go left!” and my brother said, “Go right!” They were both right. Do you know why?

• Questions which make a person think can be good questions.
–If you could have superpowers, would you want to be invisible or to fly?
–What is the fastest running animal in the world? How about the fastest flying? And the fastest swimming?

• Questions which ask about a situation which many readers might have been in can make a reader want to continue. For example,
–What would you do if your neighborhood swim team lost every meet and the kids wanted to switch teams?
–Have you ever wanted to tattle on a bully on the school bus but you were afraid to?

In general, questions which make a reader think are good questions, while questions which can be answered with one word are bad questions.

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Posted in essay introduction

Written summaries show reading comprehension

Posted on July 29, 2015 | Leave a comment

If you want to improve a child’s reading comprehension, one of the best strategies is to ask the child to write a summary of what he has read.

A written summary can tell you, the parent or teacher, if the student understands what he has read. A written summary can also inform you about problems in the thinking of a student, such as an inability to identify main ideas, an inability to rank ideas, and an inability to sequence ideas meaningfully. If the writer has included subtleties in the writing, such as inferences and metaphors, a summary can tell you whether the student caught on or read right over them.

What should you be looking for in a student summary?

  • All the main ideas of the reading selection should be present in the summary. If an idea is missing, ask the child why he did not include it. Did he think it not important? Did it seem more like a detail than a main idea? Did it seem to be included in another idea?
  • On the other hand, some students find it hard to distinguish between a main idea and a detail. Everything is important to them. Long summaries can be evidence of a student who cannot separate main ideas from secondary ones. They need help with this skill.
  • If the reading selection ranked information, did the student recognize this, or did the student report on the information willy-nilly? Perhaps the student missed clues as to the importance of certain ideas compared to others. Perhaps the student was in a hurry and thought naming three ideas out of five was plenty. Most likely, the student will encounter the same problems again and use the same strategies unless you point out the faultiness of his thinking.
  • If sequencing is important in the original reading selection, the child must note this is his summary. There might be chronological sequencing or logical sequencing which makes sense only if it is summarized in the correct order.
  • When inference or figurative language plays a noticeable role in the original reading selection, the student should note this in his summary. He might say, “Although the writer did not come out and say this, he inferred that. . .” Or he might say, “It is important to note that Mercutio spoke in puns throughout Romeo and Juliet, bringing much humor to his scenes.”

Little children who cannot write yet can still provide oral summaries as a way to test their understanding of a reading selection.

The more you ask the student to offer summaries, the better he will become at creating them.

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Writing summaries of nonfiction

Posted on July 21, 2015 | Leave a comment

By middle school, today’s students are required to write summaries even though a generation ago this kind of writing began in high school. The Common Core promotes this kind of writing, as does students’ need to be able to write research papers at younger ages than in the past.

Summaries are written for many reasons:

  • Notetaking (listening to a lecture and discerning the important parts, or reading research and paraphrasing the important parts),
  • Understanding a reading passage (rewriting the main ideas to better understand them), and
  • Identifying the main points (turning an outline into a paragraph or two, or gathering information to use for later studying).

Students encounter two problems over and over when writing summaries:

  • How long should a summary be?
  • How much detail should be included in a summary?

Unfortunately, there are no clear-cut answers to either question, but here’s what I tell my middle grade students about summarizing nonfiction reading selections:

  • First, read the whole reading selection so you know what it is about and so you can judge what is important and what is not. If you don’t understand the selection, this is the time to ask questions.
  • If a reading selection has eight paragraphs, then (for middle grade students) its summary should have about eight sentences. Summaries are concise versions of the original, with major ideas included and most supporting details eliminated.
  • However, if the first paragraph or paragraphs are there only to hook the reader, then their ideas should not be included in the summary.
  • If a paragraph is a single sentence, perhaps it can be combined with another sentence in the summary. Or perhaps it is not important.
  • If a paragraph is more than five sentences, or if it contains a series of important ideas, then more than one sentence should be written to summarize it.
  • At the beginning, even before the topic sentence, the student should name the piece of writing being summarized and its author, and any particular ideas that would be helpful to the reader. The student writer should let the reader know that he is reading a summary. Sometimes this information can be included with the topic sentence.
  • Even though a summary is not an essay, a topic sentence is essential to help the reader to understand the summary.
  • A conclusion is sometimes not necessary if it would summarize the summary.
  • A good summary should be complete; that is, it should include all the important information in the original. If an author spends five paragraphs on subtopic A but only one paragraph on subtopic B, then the summary should include more information about subtopic A (about five times more) than subtopic B.
  • If the original text shows a point of view on a topic, that point of view should be replicated in the summary (letting the reader know that the point of view is that of the original author).
  • If the original text is factual and objective, so should be the summary.
  • The student writing the summary should not include his own perspective on the topic. Sometimes this happens unconsciously, for example, by using the word “only.”

How to write a summary or a nonfiction reading selection:

  • When I am teaching summaries to a student, I ask the student to write the main idea of each paragraph being read in the margin next to that paragraph or on a post-it note pasted next to the paragraph.  If the reading selection contains chapters, then I ask the student to write the main ideas of the chapter at the beginning of that chapter.
  • After each paragraph’s (or chapter’s) main idea is identified, the student needs to read all those margin notes and ask himself how they relate to the whole. Why did the author include each of those ideas in his passage? From that musing by the student often comes the topic sentence of the summary. That sentence is the most important one, from which all the others flow.
  • Information in a summary should be paraphrased. Occasionally, quotation marks can show the original words of the author being summarized, but direct quotes should be the exception, not the rule.
  • Summaries are usually written in the present tense.
  • If the summary is more than five sentences, remind the reader that this is a summary by using words like, “as author so-and-so says,” or “as article such-and-such relates.” If the summary is several paragraphs, a reminder to the reader that he is reading a summary should be included in each paragraph.

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Posted in English Writing Instruction, Including details in writing, paraphrasing, summarizing