What is A Summary? And summary writing
Summary involves writing down a brief and concise account of a long passage. In other words, summary can be described as a shortened form of a long passage after removing all irrelevant points from the main points and giving a short account of the passage using your own word. In line with the above brief description of summary, summary writing is therefore an act of or means of noting down important part of a comprehension passage in your tone (Word) without loosing the original content as to show or test your understanding ability of the comprehension subject matter.In order, to avoid lose of marks in English language, its very important you pay serious attention to the below five things to note and know before summarizing any given comprehensive question either on exam, classwork or test. External or internal examinations requiring summary attempts. One fact to know about summary is that its a brief totality of write ups. Without a comprehension passage there can't be summary to answer.
There are five main things students need to check upon in order to write a good summary. These are:
(1) Read the Passage Very Carefully: Most students fail simply because they fail to read the given passage carefully to understand it. You cannot write a good summary if you don't understand the given passage. Most students feel that they can have a look at the questions first before reading the passage. This approach is wrong as this may tempt you to start reading the passage piecemeal within paragraphs, searching for where the answers are and thereby putting it down verbatim or word for word.
Writing a good summary demands that you read the passage very well so as to have a proper understanding of its before attempting to put down your answers. Having said this, reading and understanding the passage may take you more than one reading.
Firstly, read the passage.very quickly to know.the subject matter of the passage. SSCE are never titled.
This is deliberate as it is meant to make students read through the passages and to forestall students' attempt to guess at answers to the questions.
After reading you can read the passage once again to intimate yourself better with the subject matter of the passage. After the second reading you can then proceed to read the questions as this will provide an insight to what you will now focus your attention in when you are reading for the third time.
- --- Re-read the passage for the third time and you can now underline or note where the required information for answering your questions are. Of course after reading you should be ready to go back to the questions, and answer them.
(2) Brevity: This demands that they must be brief and concise in their answers. There is no room for the use of flowery language or any other additional information aside from the main poins.
(3) Relevance: This calls for a candidate's answers to be relevant to the points mentioned in the passage. Students are not expected in summary writing to give any fact or point outside the passage, however relevant they think the fact or point is.
(4) Proper Coverage of the Passage: This demands that students must read and understand every aspect of the passage. This calls for proper understanding of the passage since the passage is unlikely to lend itself easily to them.
(5) Clarity: This means that students are expected to put down their answers clearly.
It is possible to score all the marks in summary in School examinations and in other examinations, and it is also very easy to score zero. Student's success in summary depends on how well they follow the procedure given above on how to write a good summary. A student who fails to take the step-by-step approach to summary writing may end up flopping the whole exercise.
You are advised to take the given above approaches to Summary writing.
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