Summarizing

Why use summarizing?

• It helps students learn to determine essential ideas and consolidate important details that support them.

• It enables students to focus on key words and phrases of an assigned text that are worth noting and remembering.

• It teaches students how to take a large selection of text and reduce it to the main points for more concise understanding.

Retrieved from "Reading Rockets"

https://www.readingrockets.org/strategies/summarizing​

How to use summarizing?

1. Preview and read. Preview and read the text closely. You probably will find that you need to read the paragraph more than one time.

2. ​Ask yourself the following framework questions:

   1. What are the main ideas?

   2. What are the crucial details necessary for supporting the ideas?

   3. What information is irrelevant or unnecessary?

      3. Use key words or phrases to identify the main points from the text, make a list if you can.​

Retrieved from "Reading Rockets"

https://www.readingrockets.org/strategies/summarizing​

IMPORTANT

It is important to understand the difference between a summary and a paraphrase. A paraphrase is simply a rewriting of a passage in your own words. A summary, on the other hand, contains only the main idea and the supporting ideas of a passage. A summary will be much shorter than a paraphrase.

Retrieved from "Long Beach City College WRSC"

https://www.lbcc.edu/sites/main/files/file-attachments/summarizingparagraph.pdf​

“The Northern Lights”

There are times when the night sky glows with bands of color. The bands may begin as cloud shapes and then spread into a great arc across the entire sky. They may fall in folds like a curtain drawn across the heavens. The lights usually grow brighter, then suddenly dim. During this time the sky glows with pale yellow, pink, green, violet, blue, and red. These lights are called the Aurora Borealis. Some people call them the Northern Lights. Scientists have been watching them for hundreds of years. They are not quite sure what causes them. In ancient times people were afraid of the Lights. They imagined that they saw fiery dragons in the sky. Some even concluded that the heavens were on fire.

Retrieved from "Long Beach City College WRSC"

https://www.lbcc.edu/sites/main/files/file-attachments/summarizingparagraph.pdf​