7d Summarizing a text

7dSummarizing a text

When you feel that you have read and understood the text, summarize the contents in your own words. A summary briefly captures the main ideas of a text and omits information that is less important. Try to identify the key points in the text, find the essential evidence supporting those points, and explain the contents concisely and fairly, so that a reader unfamiliar with the original can make sense of it all. Deciding what to leave out can make summarizing a tricky task—but mastering this skill can serve you well in all the reading you do in your academic, professional, and civic life. (For more information on writing a summary, see 13d.)

Student summary of an assigned text

Students Fernando Sanchez and Sarah Lum, whose critical reading notes appear in this chapter, summarized the “Mistakes” article. Here is Sarah’s summary:

Begins by identifying authors, title, and date of article, and by stating main goal of study

Summarizes major findings

Closes with comment that captures main point of article

In “‘Mistakes Are a Fact of Life’: A National Comparative Study,” Andrea and Karen Lunsford investigate the claim that students today can’t write as well as students in the past. To determine how writing has changed over time, they replicated the 1984 Connors and Lunsford study of errors in student writing to find similarities and differences between the formal errors made by first-year writing students in 2006. Their findings reveal that the number of mistakes made two decades ago are consistent with the number of errors made today and that actually the rate of mistakes has stayed stable for a hundred years. The authors found that slang and shorthand commonly used by young adults do not interfere with college writing. The major difference between writing then and now is that students are writing more argument essays as opposed to personal narratives and that typical papers are two-and-a-half times longer now. We can’t avoid making mistakes, but we can document them and figure out means of improvement.