Summary Writing Basics

What is the purpose of a summary?

• to retell the story

• to give your personal opinion

• to present the writer's main ideas

• to give advice to the audience

When you write a summary, you must present whose most important points?

• The main character

• The writer

• Your own

• The teacher

When you write a summary, instead of taking sentences directly from the passage, you should do what instead?

• Paragraph

• Plagiarise

• Plan

• Paraphrase

When you write a summary, you can add your own opinions and other information that you know.

• True

• False

When you write a summary, you can present an author's ideas in any order that you like.

• True

• False

To make a summary read more smoothly and to show how ideas are linked, you should use what?

• Transitional words

• Compound words

• Descriptive words

• General words

A summary should be ___________________ percent of the original passage.

• 5%

• 25%

• 50%

• 30%

When you are summarizing, you should replace lists of specific things with a ______________________ word that describes them all.

• Compound word

• General word

• Descriptive word

• Transitional word

The original material may state "a ten year period", but in your summary, you may write what instead?

• 10 years

• a score

• a decade

• a century

BEFORE you present the main ideas in your summary, you should begin with a ____________________________.

• Transitional word

• Topic sentence

• Linking sentence

• Concluding sentence