22 Summarizing

Chapter & Discussion

This chapter includes a presentation that can be navigated in a classroom setting or independently. You can access the presentation via the link below.

Strategy Six: Summarizing

Work through the different sections of the chapter and discuss ideas and topics as they arise. If you’re working independently, take notes instead. Notes and active discussion will be helpful in navigating this week’s assignments.

Overview

Our next metacognitive reading strategy is summarizing what you’ve read. This is a powerful way to improve overall comprehension of text.

The ability to summarize information requires readers to sift through large units of text, figure out what’s important, and then create a new text that reflects only the important information. This is a difficult task. When you do it, you are practicing and strengthening the toughest comprehension skills.

Today, we’ll discuss three steps for summarizing effective:

• Gathering metadata
• Sifting out key information
• Putting ideas into your own words

Gathering Metadata

The first step in effective summarizing is to gather as much metadata as you can about the text. This means getting information about the nature and structure of the text. Before you start summarizing, you will want to know:

• Is this reading for information or literature?
• What type of writing is this? What are its basic goals?
• Will this text have keywords, topic sentences, or bold terms?

You will also need to think about the levels of this text. You should be gathering information about:

• Individual sentences
• Each paragraph
• The text as a whole

Sifting

The next step is to sort the information so that you know what’s most important. The most effective way to do this is to consider what is the main idea and what is supporting details.

You’ll need to consider what each sentence is trying to accomplish. You can ask yourself questions like:

• What is the author trying to convey?
• If there were one main takeaway, what would it be?
• How would I teach this to someone else?

Once you’ve separated the main idea from the supporting details, decide which of those are key details, ones that are best at supporting the main idea. You also want to set aside details that are less important.

In your Own Words

The hardest part of summarizing is putting ideas into your own words. However, this is also the most rewarding part of the process, as it creates new neural-pathways and greatly assists with your comprehension of a text.

• Consider the main ideas and supporting details
• Make a bulleted list in short-hand of the bare minimum of information someone would need to understand this passage
• Think about synonyms for some of the vocabulary introduced in the text
• For each item, try to find different words and phrases that could convey the same thing
• Read your summary and double check that it makes sense and covers everything you wanted to cover

Assigned Reading

Here are this week’s readings. Additionally, please read for your own personal enjoyment for 1/2 hour each day. This will be called your “Reading Zone” reading and it will coincide with many upcoming activities.

Reading Assignments by Thomas Frank (via Crash Course)