How to make a summary

• eng
• Middelbare school
• vmbo g
• Leerjaar 1

How to make a

Goal:

You know how to make a summary.
What are the most important parts of a text / film / story?

Why is this a useful skill?

Less is More

A summary is a long text distilled to its essentials, the key points worth noting, without examples and details. The specific form, the sentence structure and the vocabulary, has been changed, but the main ideas remain.

Discussion of summaries: what is summary?

Example:   “How long is the movie "Titanic"? 

Over three hours!
If someone asked you tell her about Titanic, would you talk for three hours? Of course not! What would you do?”

Summarizing is something we all actually do in our everyday lives.

How to start: underline the main ideas as you read.

Marking text is a good study skill. You can use this marked text as an outline to review later for quizzes, as a way of testing yourself.

Paraphrase the sentences. (use your own words)

An important concept related to summarising is changing the text from the original. 

Titanic example : “Would you use the exact words as the film when describing it to your friend? Or would you use different words that mean about the same thing?”

Now you try

Choose a text. 
One is about the 'International day of happiness' and the other one is about NASA. (both come in 3 levels, A1, A2, B1).
In pairs, summarise the text.

Top five main ideas for the 'happiness' summary.

Top five main ideas for the NASA summary

What did you learn today?