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GUIDELINES FOR SUMMARY WRITING
1. Read the original text carefully.
2. Identify the controlling idea and the relationships among the major supporting ideas.
3. Decide which examples are necessary for a clear understanding of the text.
4. Try to use your own words rather than merely quoting from the text, except when you are referring to
technical or professional terms that have a special technical meaning. In that case, you might wish to use the
original term and then indicate, in a few words of your own, what it means.
5. Write a first sentence which includes the source of your summary and the controlling idea.
6. Indicate whether the author is certain or uncertain of the facts he presents and whether the point of view is
his personal one, or one he identifies as belonging to a school of thought.
7. Omit trivial and redundant material. (The writer may express the same idea more than once, and in more
than one way, but in your summary the idea should be presented only once).
8. Wherever possible, substitute a general term for any list or items which that term would include
(regardless of whether or not the writer has used that general term). This is one way to delete more detailed
facts and ideas without ignoring them.
9. Avoid making comments about or adding information to the text. Or, if you wish to add information, a
judgement, evaluation, etc. label it specifically as your own opinion, for example: «The author conludes that ...
but I don't think the evidence presented really supports this conclusion».
Exercise:
1. Write a long summary of one of the texts in this book, providing the answers to the four questions listed
above, and including all of the essential facts (i.e., those necessary to follow the argument); and some of the
examples used to illustrate these facts and to provide supporting evidence.
2. Write a short summary of one of other texts in the book.
SECTION V
APPENDIX
UNIT 1. PARTS OF SPEECH
A. The 8 Parts of Speech are:
1. The Noun (n.)
A noun is a name of anything
a. A proper noun is the name of a single particular person or place or thing.
b. A common noun is not the name of a single particular person, place or thing.
c. A collective noun denotes a number of things that together constitute a single group (e.g., «team»;
«class»; «furniture»).
d. An abstract noun denotes an abstract idea or quality or condition (e.g., «happiness»; «intelligence»).
2. The Pronoun (pron.)
A pronoun is used as a substitute for a noun, or another pronoun e.g. «Bill gave his sister the box that she
asked him for».
Sometimes the pronoun is used as a substitute for a whole group of words preceding it: e.g. «To be or not to
be — that is the question».
TYPES OF PRONOUNS:
a. Personal Pronouns — («I»; «you»; «he» etc.)
b. Possessive Pronouns — «My»; «your»; «his»; etc.