Summary Writing Introduction - ESL Flipping the Classroom

hello advanced low integrated skill students welcome to today's lesson about writing a summary the first thing that I want to mention about summary writing is that a summary is only facts it is objective it is not your opinion a summary is only the main ideas about it reading or any source information that you're going to write about you should not include your opinion only the main important facts from the reading so first I'm going to start off by saying when are you required to write a summary as a student often you're going to write a summary um probably for an article or reading from your class it might be an assignment possibly that your teacher gives you for a lot of different kinds of class papers possibly on a test you will be asked to write a summary and eventually you're going to be asked to write a summary response essay and summaries are also very common um for book reports so how long should your summary be the length depends on the assignment or the instructor and if you're not sure always ask your teacher how long should your summary be on the material so how long was the original source reading so the article from our book for example um your summary is going to be much shorter than anything that you're writing about for example this might depend on the number of main ideas from the reading it also is going to depend on who is reading this your audience is it your teacher is it your friend who are you writing this for and the purpose is it for a test for an assignment always ask your instructor if you're not sure so here are the steps for writing a summary and I do want you to try to follow these steps until you're comfortable writing a summary the very first step is study the text we often use the word preview whenever you have an article you should always look at the title the subtitle the subheadings on the text type any kind of pictures captions anything like this the second thing is of course read the article you can't write a summary unless you read it first so read it very carefully and while you're reading take notes some of the best readers usually read with a pencil or pen to take notes um as you're reading I want you to keep in mind what are the main ideas the most important supporting details the important parts of the reading not any of the small details the third step would be to make a brief outline and an outline is kind of a plan it's not writing out long sentences you're going to do that in your first draft what you want to do first is to make an outline of only the main points the key points and the most important details only the most important parts of the reading are what you want to include in your outline and as with any outline you want to think about the order that you're going to put this in your outline should follow the order of the main ideas from the reading so they should be in the same order as the author wrote them in the original source of the fourth and last step here is to write a draft summary you may write other follow-up drafts after this but you're going to use your outline and you're going to write a first draft um one thing I'd suggest is to try to only use your outline to write the the first draft if you look at the text you're going to end up copying many exact phrases from the text you don't want to copy exact words please in a summary use your own words and this is why I say use your outline because your outline should be in your own words then you're not going to copy exact sentences or phrases always try to use your own words but not your opinion only the exact information and the main ideas from the reading so very quickly first study the text or preview the text second read it mark it up take notes make a brief outline in all good writers often make an outline or a plan to help organize the main ideas in their writing in the final draft here final step you're going to write your draft um it may not be your final draft but you're going to write a draft of your summary and you're going to use your outline to do that um so how do you organize a summary so it does not matter on how long your summary is necessarily but you are going to want to include an introduction a middle and an end all good writing and especially longer academic essays you'll always have an introduction a middle or a body and an end um the first part is going to be your introduction this is one of the most important parts of the summary in the first sentence or the first and second sentence you're going to want to include your source information the source is what you're reading so in our case the source is going to be our the article from our class in this you're going to need the title of the article and you're going to need the author of the article sometimes we may not know the author if you don't know the author if it's not listed in your book then you don't need it but usually in this class and in most classes you're going to have the title and the author of the source um the second thing you're going to need to include in the first or second sentence is your main idea the main idea of the whole reading you're going to tell me later the details about this main ideas but in the first or second sentence you need the title the author and the big big main idea of all the reading often the title is a good kind of a hint about what the the main idea of that article probably is the second step well before we get to the second step let's look at some of some of the examples of first sentences for a summary um notice you're in your reading for this whole so this weekend to your homeworks we we have the author to Williams and she's the author of all the articles in this book we'll give her credit for them at least because we don't have any other author names here the title for reading number three is the battle for civil rights so when we write our summary we're going to need to make sure we include all this information because I'm going to have you as a class and the students write a summary of this article I'm going to use our our last article for an example in this so our last article reading number two the legacy of the Civil War so for example here's a good first sentence for this article for a summary in her article , the legacy of the Civil War in notice we have quotation marks around the title any time we have a book with many many different readings or articles in the book we want to put quotation marks around the title and this is going to show the reader or your audience that this is the title but there are probably many titles in this publication notice here we have the author we put her last name Williams then we have the verb discusses and there are many different verbs you could use here and we'll talk more about this in our next lesson you can use the verb discuss explained shows we're going to talk more about this later right now you can use the word discuss or explain as your reporting verb in her article comma the legacy of the Civil War Williams discusses that and then we're going to have the main idea here this is the main idea of the whole reading a very very general big main idea later in the body of your summary you can tell me more about the other main ideas but this is just the big big main idea which we know from the title is kind of the legacy of the Civil War but we want you to write that in your own words please don't copy the exact words here's another example of a first sentence we could use according to Williams remember Williams's our author in her article the legacy of the Civil War come on we write our main idea we want all of this information in one sentence one or two sentences maximum okay so looking a little bit more at verb tenses for example in her article the legacy of the Civil War Williams our author explains that and then we have the main idea notice the verb here explained well explains because we our subject and verb must agree our subject Williams one person she explained that and then your main idea generally we're going to want to keep this in the present tense because it's a fact about what she explains what she wrote about those are facts that are always true generally for this class let's just use present tense reporting verbs explain shows discusses States later you will find out in your major when you study more on at the university that some majors they have different rules for present tense or past tense verbs in this situation but for our purpose right now let's just keep this simple present tense but remember to check your subject and verb agreement part 2 is the most important part of a summary and this is the summaries body the the main part of the summary so after your introduction and remember your introduction might just be one or two sentences you're going to include the all the main ideas in a summary the most important part is no opinions don't put your opinion show me the main ideas that are in the reading and sometimes we'll find the reading that's this author's opinion but a summary needs to be objective objective means we don't put our feelings we don't put our opinion we put only the facts a summary should only have the facts so we're going to include all the main ideas and we're going to provide a similar amount of detail that was in the reading but remember a summary is much shorter on someone reading a summary doesn't want to read all the readings so they're going to read a short summary of the main ideas so we really only want to include the main ideas and the very very important details not too many details a summary should be half or less of the length of the reading in some case is much much less okay in the body of your summary include only details that make the main ideas clear and generally present ideas or main ideas in the same order as they occur in the original reading so for example in our reading here the legacy of the Civil War we want to include only the main ideas in the same order that they were as written by Williams so remember in a summary do not include a personal opinion be objective this is very important in a summary also we're going to try to paraphrase paraphrase means to use your own words to explain and show the same ideas as the author showed we don't want to copy the same information though exactly in the same way it's written we can get in trouble with plagiarism if we if we do that and we'll talk more about that in this class later but for right now try to think about what you're reading and use your own words to explain it they don't have to be extremely um difficult words but your words have to mean the same thing is the author's main ideas the very last part of a summary is a very very short conclusion and this is the easiest part of a summary um so look at the conclusion of the original source reading study this a few times and think about to yourself how can I very briefly write the same idea that the author had in their conclusion so you're going to think about any recommendation that by e-solutions results or predictions that the source author might have had in their conclusion and then you're going to say your own words this should be very short and in some cases it's only one sentence and we'll work on this more the most important part of a summary is the introduction in the body a conclusion is sometimes optional and it's going to be very short so final comments about summary writing summarizing is an essential very important skill for all academic writers and it's going to be used in all majors in all classes this skill can be used in all courses even if it's a speaking class you may be asked to verbally or orally give a spoken summary or a presentation that's about a summary writers need to understand and consider that the format and the language of summaries might be a little different depending on the teacher depending on the source text and depending on the assignment but generally the beginning you want to tell us the author title and main idea the body tell us all the most important main ideas in the same order as they are in the reading and then make sure you use your own words check your grammar and make sure that you're giving credit to the author and I'll show you what I mean here in a minute this side this weekend your homework is to read reading number three called the battle for civil rights so I want you to read this take notes while you're reading after you read I want you to use your notes to make a brief outline remember an outline is going to be the step after you read and take notes about the text using this paper which is on canvas I want you to write the full first or second sentence with all the important information we included the title the author the main idea in one complete sentence I want you to write here the the four main ideas from this reading there should be at least three to four main ideas from this text from this reading number three and then also there are some supporting ideas that go with each main ideas remember a supporting idea is a detail and example or a reason but you should have at least three possibly four main ideas from this reading and then a very short one to two-sentence conclusion if you're having problems with the conclusion go back and reread Williams conclusion in reading number three and see what she wrote for her conclusion try to put that in one sentence or two sentences in your own words please complete this outline I want all of this completed bring this to class with your notes for our next class another thing I want you to think about when you're checking your summaries is the summary checklist and this is a checklist that you should use to make sure you have these things and every summary you write for this summer and for other summaries we do later in this class the first one the title author's name main idea big main idea of the whole article the second here the author's main ideas not details in the same order they are in the text the third thing is called summary language and I didn't mention this in the PowerPoint summary language is showing that we're giving credit to the author we do this in the first sentence we also want to do this a couple times throughout the summary where we say Williams shows that or the author explains or the author's next main idea is we'll work more about this once we begin to draft our summaries in class using transition words remember all good writing uses transitions they can be as simple as first the first main idea the second main idea next after that and finally try to use a couple transition words because it does make your your writing easier to read and it also helps with the organization of your writing finally please check your grammar very simple simple grammar are things like subject verb agreement capitalization punctuation things like this this is going to be the last step if you have any questions please go back to the PowerPoint review the PowerPoint give your best to complete your outline and bring your notes and your outline to class for our next class and I will see you then thank you

Channel: ESL Flipping the Classroom

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Length: 17min 48sec (1068 seconds)

Published: Mon Feb 16 2015