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Course: 3rd grade reading & vocabulary > Unit 2
Lesson 5: Reading for understanding: informational textSummarizing nonfiction | Reading
Summaries are retellings of texts that contain only the most important details and events. Let's explore how they work for nonfiction!
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- How would you know if the summaries are correct? can you use any methods to check it.(40 votes)
- Great question!
There are a few things you can consider when evaluating if you have written a strong summary:
1. Compare: Look at the original text and see if the summary includes the main points.
2. Key Details: Make sure the summary has the important details, not every tiny thing.
3. Own Words: The summary should be in your own words, not copied.
4. Length: It should be shorter than the original text.
Additionally, please know that there can be more than one correct summary for a text! Different people might focus on different important details, but as long as the main points are covered and it's in your own words, it's correct.(1 vote)
- Why do you summarize fiction if it's not important?(6 votes)
- Summarizing fiction is important too! It helps you understand the main points of a story without getting lost in all the details. It's like telling a friend about a book you read, but just the exciting parts!(2 votes)
- Why do we need summaries?(5 votes)
- Summaries help us understand the main points quickly without reading everything. They save time and make it easier to remember important information.(1 vote)
- How long should summarizing a fiction text be(1 vote)
- why can't you add every detail in the summary(1 vote)
- why cant you put it was raining on the cold
November day our team first in identified the robomedicine be a important for the summmery(1 vote) - When will we use summaries?(1 vote)
Video transcript
- [David] Hello, readers. Today, I'm going to be talking
about the skill of summary, which you might be
familiar with in the form of summarizing stories. It's like a retelling, but shorter, and in your own words. This is an important
skill, summarizing fiction, but it's not what we're
talking about today. This kind of summarizing is
used when you want to sum up the information in a nonfiction passage like a magazine article,
a book, a news story, a scientific paper. Most scientific papers
begin with a quick retelling of what the paper's about. So say you're a scientist
and you discovered a cure for roboflu. Let's say robots can get
the flu, first of all. And the abstract, the summary retelling at the very beginning of your
paper about your cure says, "Hey, under these conditions, we learned "that this medicine cures roboflu." And then, the reader goes on
to look at everything else you've written in your
long scholarly paper. So how do you do it? To make a summary, you
will need your own words, the order of events or
information from the text, and important details from the text. So what's not in the summary? Every last detail from the original text. I think I first read something like this in a Neil Gaiman novel,
but here's the deal. Imagine you were coming to visit me and you asked me for a
map of my neighborhood. Now if I included every
single detail in my map, who lives next to me, every
tuft of grass under a tree, it would stop being a map and just become a one-to-one scale drawing
of my neighborhood. In other words, it would
be useless as a map. A summary is a map of my neighborhood with only the important bits in it, my apartment, a metro
stop, Rock Creek Park. When we make a summary of a text, we are in effect making a
simple map of that text. And it's your job to determine
what details are necessary, the most needed. Like say somewhere deep in that paper on how you discovered
a cure for the roboflu, you had written, "It
was raining on the cold, "the November day "our team first identified
the robomedicine." Like would that be an
important enough detail to include in the summary? I'd say no. The big picture is that the
team discovered the medicine, not that it was raining when it happened. But if the cure for
robotflu involved garlic and motor oil, yes, that's
an important detail, because it relates back
to the big picture. We discovered a medicine,
and here's what's in it. To conclude, let me summarize. A summary is a short
retelling of a piece of text with only the important details included. It's like a simple map of a place. You can learn anything, David out.