UNIT 3

UNIT AGENDA

Writing a Summary

In this Unit you will: find out why you need Summarizing learn which are the necessary criteria to follow in writing a good summary practise writing a summary yourself

In the Writing section of your graduation exam you may be required to summarize at least part of a reading passage. Similarly, when a writer chooses to include the information from another author's work from which only the main ideas need to be included, s/he will usually choose to summarize that information. This normally happens when a writer wants to include the main ideas of longer passages of another author's work, e.g. pages or chapters. This unit offers guidance on techniques for summary-writing Summary writing often requires you to surmount a barrier of complicated sentences and unusual words in order to reach the gist of what is being said. The exercises in Section 1 are intended firstly to help you develop an eye for the message which lies within the passage, and secondly to suggest some useful techniques for summarizing. Section 2 presents a list of steps for effective summarizing in academic setting followed by a sample text which is meant as an individual task for the students. You can check the correctness of your summary by using the check-list at the end of the unit.

SECTION 1

A Below you will find five long sentences numbered (1) to (5), and nine short sentences labelled (a) to (i). Look at sentences (1) to (5) in turn, and try to find which of the short sentences express the same meaning. (1) It is certainly true to say that one of the most serious difficulties confronting the immigrant community concerns the standard of their accommodation which typically is not very high. (2) In the first instance, coloured people arriving from countries of the Commonwealth to live in Britain left their native countries to fill employment vacancies which would otherwise have remained unfilled. (3) It is regrettably a fact that many educational establishments for the young have failed to respond adequately to the requirements of that proportion of the population which is coloured. (4) One of the most significant changes in Britain over the last thirty years has been its evolution into a society in which people of a variety of ethnic origins live together. (5) It is a sad reflection on our society that a large number of the black and brown people who came from Commonwealth to live in this country are obliged to endure conditions which favour them neither financially nor socially.

(a) Britain is a multi-racial society. (b) Britain is a tolerant society. (c) Colored immigrants have taken low-level jobs. (d) Colored immigrants came to Britain to take up surplus jobs. (e) Schools have not responded effectively to the needs of minorities. (f) Universities have relatively few colored students. (g) Many colored immigrants suffer from social and economic disadvantages. (h) Poor quality housing is a major problem for ethnic minorities. (i) Many colored immigrants live in old houses in city centers. B Each of the following five sentences could be written more briefly without changing the meaning to any great extent. Try to rewrite each sentence, preserving the original meaning, in fewer than twelve words. (1) It is undeniably the case that the economy of this country has benefited enormously from the fact that considerable numbers of colored people from the Commonwealth have come to settle here. (2) To our shame, there is clear evidence that members of ethnic minority groups do suffer discrimination when they complete for jobs against members of the white population of this country. (3) It would appear reasonably to assert that the principal cause of discrimination against colored people in our society is a profound feeling of fear fear of the unfamiliar, the unknown among negative-born residents. (4) There is no doubt that the failure of immigrants to acquire an adequate command of English effectively creates a barrier to communication with other members of our society and constitutes a major problem for a significant proportion of the colored population. (5) As an illustration of the sort of discrimination which exists in our country, it has to be said that it is a relatively uncommon occurrence for colored members of the community to be offered jobs which afford a very large measure of responsibility. C Below you will find two contrasting opinions on the same issue. Read them carefully and try to express the point of view of each speaker in fewer than thirty words. (1) Does color prevent people from getting jobs which suit them? There is in this country wholesale discrimination against colored people who try to get jobs which are appropriate to their training and qualifications. Most jobs available to coloreds are in fact the ones that white people do not want. In those instances where colored people aspire to better jobs, it seems as though the higher the jobs expectations, the more likely a rejection on the grounds of colour. If this is the case, colored school-leavers in the future may well face even greater frustrations than their parents. They are likely to be better educated, more highly qualified, and therefore more ambitious. They are also likely to be less willing to accept prejudice, as they were born there. (2) Does color prevent people from getting jobs which suit them?

There is a lot of nonsense talk about racial discrimination. The problem is much smaller than one might believe. In fact, colored people are employed in a wide range of jobs, which shows that discrimination cannot be so significant. People very often jump to the mistaken conclusion that they are being discriminated against, simply because they are unfamiliar with the British way of doing things. Discrimination can also, of course, serve as a useful excuse for failure. When you fail to get a job, you rarely have the chance to know the real reason, so attributing the failure to discrimination is a good way of shifting the responsibility on to factors beyond the individuals control. D The length of the summary students have to write varies from task to task. In all probability, however, you will be required to produce a summarizing paragraph of about 1/3 of the original text. The following text is fairly typical of the sort you might be asked to deal with. How would you approach the text? Read the text carefully and try to summarize the writers definition of racism in a single paragraph of no more than i/3 of the original. When you have made your summary, try to analyze the strategies which you used. Compare your techniques with those employed by other members of your group. Racism is not the same as racial prejudice. Prejudice is a partial rejection of a man on the basis of his real or supposed specific or specifiable characteristics. A white man can be prejudiced against a black man because he thinks he is lazy, sexy, dirty, mean, unclean, unintelligent, and so on, even as a black man might be prejudiced against a white man because in his view he is selfish, inhuman, merciless, devious, emotionally undeveloped, and the like. Since prejudice is based on some assumed characteristic of the victim, it can be countered by showing that he does not in fact posses this characteristic, or it is not really obnoxious, or that he can be helped to get rid of it. Racism belongs to a very different category. It involves a total refusal to accept the victim as a full human being entitled to the respect due to a fellow human being, and implies that his belonging to a particular race has so corrupted his humanity that he belongs to an entirely different species. As is obvious, I do not use the term racist to refer to a man who holds that mankind is divisible into different races, each one distinctive, without drawing any moral and political conclusion from this, nor do I use the term to refer to a man who holds that some races are intellectually or in some other specific respect inferior to others, since they might well be, and the person holding this view might go on to advocate policies designed to remove their inferiority. I use the term racist to refer to a man or a body of men who hold that some races, however identified, are inferior not in this or that respect but qua men, and that therefore their interests and feelings do not deserve to be regarded as equally important with those of the other so-called superior race. As I use the term, racism refers not merely to a body of beliefs but also and primarily to the type of conduct it generates. Thus a person who believes that the colored people are intellectually inferior, and then goes on to propose discrimination in their favor is not a racist, but he is racist who, on the basis of this belief, argues that they should therefore be treated as less than fully human and may be exploited with a clear conscience. There are various possible approaches to making summaries. One might, for instance, try the following technique. See how it compares with the technique you employed in Section D, above. 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. Read the instructions carefully. Make sure you understand precisely what sort of summary is required. Read the text very thoroughly, underlining all the points which seem essential. Take care not to miss anything vital. Note down all the points underlined, putting them briefly in your own words. Make sure you include nothing irrelevant or redundant. Do not insert your own opinion. Order your notes differently if it will improve the structure of the paragraph. Then use your notes to make a paragraph. Do not refer to the original passage. Verify that your paragraph is indeed an accurate summary of what is said in the original. Examine your paragraph to ensure that it has a logical construction and sequence and that it is within the required word limit. Make necessary modifications and rewrite it in final form.

Sometimes when you are working under exam conditions an acronym can assist your memory. The acronym below may help you to RUN OVER the stages of summary writing as a reminder of the basic techniques: Read the instructions carefully. Underline the essential points in the text. Note down these points. Order them differently, if necessary, to make a paragraph. Verify that your paragraph summarizes the original accurately. Examine the construction of your paragraph and its length. Rewrite it in final form.

SECTION 2
Summarizing Techniques for Academic Writing It is most important when summarizing that you use your own words in presenting information. This means that the techniques of paraphrasing should be employed when summarizing. Furthermore, it is better to adopt the practice of taking notes and then writing a summary from your notes without having the original text in front of you. The amount of detail you include in a summary will vary and you may need to be selective in the information you choose to summarize from your reading material. In general, as summaries are usually meant to include only the most important information, they are shorter than the original text. Many guidelines suggest that a summary is approximately 1/3 of the length of the original text. However, the appropriate length will be determined by the intended use of the summary.

Remember: You should not include your own opinions or extra information on the topic which is not in the text you have read. You are
summarizing only the writer's information. And of course, remember to use a full citation when summarizing. The following is a suggested summarizing technique: Step 1. Quickly read through the text to gain an impression of the information, its content, and its relevance to your work; underline or highlight the main points as you read. Step 2. Re-read the text, making a note of the main points. Make sure you leave out secondary material that does not define the argument, such as examples, illustrations and quotations. Similarly, you can strike out 'decorative' elements, such as adjectives, adverbs etc. Step 3. Put away the original and write in your own words by working from your notes. However, do not attempt to reword specialized vocabulary or technical terms. Step 4. Begin writing your summary. Restate the main idea at the beginning of your summary, indicating the source of your information. Step 5. Mention other major points. Include enough support and detail so that the presentation is clear. However, do not include anything other than what is contained in the original (i.e. do not include your own comments or evaluation). Never repeat material, even if the original does. Step 6. Change the order of the points if necessary to make the construction more logical. Step 7. Re-read the work to check that you have included all the important information clearly and expressed it as economically as possible. Make sure the summary reads smoothly. Use the present tense (often called the historical present tense) to summarize the author's argument. "Green contends that the Republican and

Democratic parties are funded by the same major corporations." Use enough transition devices and supporting detail as necessary. You do not want a collection of sentences that do not flow. Step 8. Be sure that you have identified at least the source author. Use the author's last name as a tag to introduce information: "Smith argues that population growth and environmental degradation are causally related." "Brown notes that education in the U.S. has undergone major revolutions in the past 20 years." Since many summaries you write will be woven into your own original text, it is important to identify where the work of the other author ends and where your own commentary and text begins. One way of identifying your source is to use a reporting verb, e.g. In his paper "Global Implications of Patent Law Variation," Koji Suzuki (1991) states that lack of consistency in the world's patent laws is a serious problem.

Practice Summary Writing

Directions: Summarize the following texts in one paragraph approximately one-third of the original in length. The Intelligence Quotient Still a Source of Debate1 The notion that intelligence can be measured dates back to the end of the 19 th century. Since at that time there was very little knowledge about how the brain works, the crudity of the first attempts is perhaps not surprising. Today, the modern measuring stick is referred to as "the intelligence quotient" or "IQ", and even though 100 years old, the methods and application of IQ measurement are still highly debated. Early experimental psychologists sought to measure brain capacity by measuring the size of the head. It was disillusion with this method that led the Frenchman Alfred Binet to devise the first intelligence tests. In 1904, he was asked by the French government to invent techniques that could identify those children in state schools who needed special help. This task had a dual purpose. Firstly, it was intended to identify those schoolchildren who were unable to progress at a level consistent with their peers. Secondly, it was designed to save public money. The original Binet-Simon IQ scale (1905) was revised twice before Binet's untimely death in 1911, and attracted the interest of psychologists throughout the world. Later, some of the most widely used modern IQ tests were devised in the United States by David Wechsler. The first version of the Wechsler-Bellevue Intelligence Scale was published in 1939. One of the principal aims in its preparation was to provide an intelligence test suitable for adults rather than school children. Though modern tests based on Binet's approach continue to be used, there has for some years been considerable controversy over their validity. Early proponents of testing often made exaggerated claims about the validity of their results. Some suggested that intelligence was an absolute value like height or weight. Others claimed that it was uniform and unchanging throughout the world. Criticisms of IQ testing were, in the first instance, undoubtedly a reaction to such extreme positions. However, they have also emerged due to the disturbing potential of test results as a tool of discrimination against groups who an average have scored lower than other groups. This fact has often led to justifiable accusations of cultural bias in test content. Furthermore, some recent views of intelligence have suggested that traditional testing may only account for a
1

Adapted from John Trzeckia and S.E.Mackay, Study Skills for Academic Writing: Teacher's Book (Prentice Hall: NY) 1994, pp.40-41.

limited number of abilities. Modern research has revealed the immense complexity of the brain, but little more is known today about how it works than when measuring head size was taken seriously. It may be that, as some clinical psychologists have pointed out, intelligence cannot be viewed separately from personality. Dissatisfaction with present methods will no doubt pave the way for new approaches. Wechsler's position on testing IQ reflects the views of modest modern-day proponents. They deny that any absolute value can be given to intelligence. Rather, they hope that such tests can give some indication of an individual's ability to understand and deal with the world. Most important is the fact that since IQ tests measure a mixture of cognitive skills rather than specific, acquired knowledge, they may have a higher degree of objectivity. This does not mean that they can be relied on as a sole indicator of ability, but that they may have some value in supplementing other criteria. Use the Following Checklist to Identify a Well-written Summary 1. The Summary presents the main idea of the original text. Vaguely Unclearly

Clearly

Comment_______________________________________________________________________ 2. There is adequate support and explanation for the main idea. Vaguely Unclearly

Clearly

Comment_______________________________________________________________________ 3. The summary is objective (i.e. writer does not show his/her personal opinion). Mostly, but needs improvement No

Clearly

Comment_______________________________________________________________________ 4. Yes The writer has included only information presented in the original text. Mostly, but needs improvement No

Comment_______________________________________________________________________ 5. Yes The writer uses technical or specialized terms accurately in the summary. Mostly, but needs improvement No

Comment_______________________________________________________________________ 6. Yes The writer has effectively written the summary in his/her own words by using appropriate synonyms and original sentence structure. Mostly, but needs improvement No

Comment_______________________________________________________________________ 7. The summary is good length, neither too short nor too long.

Yes

No

Comment_______________________________________________________________________ 8. The writer identifies the source and the summary (the original text and author). Yes No

Comment_______________________________________________________________________ Overall Comments:_________________________________________________________________