Summarizing

Summarizing

Summarizing is retelling a story or passage in your own words using the most important details.

Why a Summary

• Summaries include the topic and important details of what has been read.

• Summaries are brief, do not contain opinions, and organize details in order of importance.

• Summarizing helps students monitor comprehension, review what they read, and focus on the key ideas in a text. 

You summarize all the time.

• For example, you “make a long story short” when you sum up what happened on a TV show for a friend.

• When readers summarize, they organize the topic and important details of a text to make a short statement in their own words.

Steps to Writing a Summary

• Step 1: Find the topic, or what the text is mostly about.

• Step 2: Look for the most important details about the topic.

• Step 3: Restate the topic and details in a short summary. Use your own words.

Multiple Choice

Steps to writing a summary

• Locate the topic, important details, and restate them in your own words.

• Locate the topic

• Locate important details and rewrite them.

• Write your opinions and judgements about the text.

Summarizing

•  I know that the topic is often at the beginning of an informational text, so I’m going to look there.

• The topic is what the text is mostly about.

• Next, I need to find the important details by asking what information tells me more about the topic.

• Now, to summarize the text, I need to combine, or synthesize, these ideas in my own words.

• I will state the topic and important details in order of importance.

The Summary

• The Topic: A crow is very thirsty (beginning)

• Important details: "He searched for water everywhere."

• "At last he saw a water pot near a wall."

• "The crow drank the water and flew away happily."

• Summary: A crow is really thirsty. He searches for water and found some in a water pot. He had to create a plan to get the water. He executed his plan, drank the water and went away happy.