TERM 2

Subject: English

Topic: Summary Writing Process

1 Skim-reading
Skimming is letting your eyes and mind ‘skim’ over the text to get a quick but very
general idea of it. You can’t read the text closely when skimming it, but instead, you
aim to pick out keywords and sentences and get the general feel and meaning of the
text.

Read the passage for a gist of time, place, genre and topic.

A topic sentence is often the first sentence in a paragraph. You should always read it
fully even when skimming as this will give you a summary of that paragraph’s subject
and help you to gain a general idea of the content. Identify unknown words using one
of the four methods: syllabic breakdown; similarity to another English word; similarity to a
word in another language; guessing from context.

2 Scan-reading
Scanning is the method of looking for keywords or phrases to find out specific
information.

After reading the summary question and underlining its key words, return to the passage
and highlight the relevant material. Select only the essential word or phrase. Do not
include examples, repetitions, direct speech, figurative language or trivial details.

3 Transfer to plan

Transfer the highlighted material to make a list of 10 points, changing some of the words
and phrases into your own words at the same time. Some technical words cannot be
changed. You may use some individual words from the passage, but do not repeat
long phrases.

4 Structuring the plan

Group the points in the plan logically and reordered (using brackets and arrows) to
enable you to combine more than one point per sentence. This will make it possible to
get all 10 points into a response of about 120 words.

5 Writing the summary

Write the summary in informative style, in complex sentences (avoiding ‘and’). Use the
same tense and person as the question (i.e. objective third person) and not that used in
the passage (which is often narrative in the first person and past tense). Check
afterwards for clarity and concision, and for repetition. The summary should be purely
objective and without narrative, comment, introduction or conclusion.

When summarising a text:

● look for the key information

● look at each paragraph, locate the topic sentence
(often the first one) and decide what the main point
is
● list the key points
● only include the main ideas of the text
What does this topic sentence suggest that the
paragraph will be about?

Fare dodging is becoming a serious problem.

More and more grannies are being caught
pretending to be under 16. Mums have been
wearing hoodies on their journeys to avoid
payment. This is all causing a dramatic rise in fare
prices.

The topic sentence is: Fare dodging is becoming a

serious problem.

Also, look at the information in the sentences that

follow the topic sentence. This is being used to
back up and add detail to the topic sentence, in
this example, examples of how fare dodging is
happening.

In this case: "More and more grannies are being

caught pretending to be under 16 and mums have
been wearing hoodies on their journeys to avoid
payment. This is all causing a dramatic rise in fare
prices."

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