SOME SUGGESTED PROCEDURES FOR WRITING A SIMPLE SUMMARY OF AN ONLINE NEWS ARTICLE (Written and posted here in August, 2004, by Chuck Whitley. ESL teachers anywhere can feel free to use or copy any of this if it is is found to be useful. If copied, the writer would appreciate being given credit. Teachers can also feel free to link to this page of suggestions. and can send an email to make comments or suggestions.) Chuck's ESL 17 class at HCC Fall, 2003. Introduction       The word “summary” has different meanings in different situations.  There are a number of different kinds of summaries, and of course there are different ways of writing them.  The assignment here is just one way to write one very simple kind of summary.         A summary, here in this situation, is a one-paragraph writing assignment which students do after reading a selected news article.  This summary will give readers, in a short and clear way, a few of the most important facts in the news article.         To be able to write a good summary, a writer has to clearly understand the material being summarized. After that it is important for the writer to be able to paraphrase or to reword information in the material.  The ability to paraphrase is necessary for a couple of reasons.         Paraphrasing is important because it helps a writer to present information in a short and clear way.   The writer can condense the text, that is, use fewer words to present the same information.  The writer can also use different words that are easier for his or her readers to quickly understand.         Paraphrasing is also important because it helps a writer to avoid plagiarism.  Plagiarism is the illegal use of other people’s words or ideas.  A writer can be charged with plagiarism when he or she has copied something written by another person and/or when he or she doesn’t tell where the information being used originally came from. Writing in English academic situations often requires that students use information from articles or books written by others.  The way students present that information will often determine whether or not they are accused of plagiarism, and whether or not they pass the class.         Students usually get their first practice in writing paraphrases when their teachers tell them to paraphrase entire paragraphs.  Here practice will begin with the paraphrasing of sentences.         The goal, then, of this assignment is to be able to write a one-paragraph summary of an online news article.  The summary will include a few main points from the news article.  The summary will be made up of short, clear sentences that are grammatical and easy to understand.   The summary will not leave the writer open to charges of plagiarism.         These suggestions consist of ten steps to use in order to write a summary of an online news article.  The first few steps involve going to a news site on the World Wide Web, finding a news article, printing it out, and telling who wrote it and where it came from.         After studying the article, the next step is to write a paragraph.  This is done by using the headline to write a topic sentence, and by paraphrasing a few sentences that contain the main points in the article, and using those paraphrased sentences as the body of the paragraph.  Checking the paragraph and printing it out are the final steps in the process. Step One: Go to a news site on the Web. Step Two: Choose a news article to read and summarize. Step Three: Print out the online news article. Step Four: Document the source of the news article. Step Five: Study the article. Step Six: Write a topic sentence for your paragraph. Step Seven: Identify the main points in the news article. Step Eight: Paraphrase the main points. Step Nine: Write a summarizing paragraph. Step Ten: Proofread and print your summary. Step One: Go to a news site on the Web The teacher will tell you to go to an online news site. You may be assigned to go to one of the three Web sites below. You may be assigned to go to a different site that your teacher gives you in class. You may be assigned to go to a news site of your own choosing. The first Web site below is maintained by a well-known American newspaper called the New York Times. It is a brief collection of news articles taken from different subject groups in the New York Times and put together at a site designed to be used by students. For the people who maintain this site, “News Summaries” means a brief selection of the most important and/or appropriate news articles taken from the many news articles published in the New York Times. New York Times Student News The other two Web sites below are collections of news articles from many different sources and are not tied to one newspaper. The headlines on these sites are actually links to articles at other Web sites which are published by news organizations all over the world. These two Web sites are designed for the average adult English speaker who wants to go online for the news.. The two sites below both have a menu with general topic headings. The menu is either across the top of the window or down the left side. Find the menu with topic headings and, if your teacher assigned a topic heading, click on it. (Your teacher might ask you to choose a news article under a general heading, as in the assignment below, or your teacher might just assign a specific news article for you to read and summarize.). 1stHeadlines Google News Step Two: Choose a news article to read and summarize. If your teacher assigns a specific article at The New York Times Student News Web site, go directly to that site and that article. (Skip the remaining steps in this section. After finding the article, go to number three in the next section.). If your teacher assigns you to choose an article under a specific topic heading, click on that heading. Read through the headlines of the different articles that are available under that heading. Click on some of the headlines that seem interesting to you, and quickly read through, or scan, the news article. Select a news story to read and summarize. Try to choose a news story that isn’t too long. It should not take you an hour to read through it. Choose an article that is interesting for you and one that you can mostly understand. (If you don’t understand at least 60 to 70% of an article, do not choose it.) Don’t choose an article that requires registration or payment.. Step Three: Print out the online news article. Look for a “printer friendly” tab and click on it. If there isn’t one, highlight the article, and copy it. Open a new word processing document and paste the news article into the word-processing document. In your new word processing document, highlight the article and convert it to Times font, size twelve. Reformat the article to fit neatly on the lines across the page. (If you don’t have special software to do this, it might mean removing a zillion returns, either by using the delete key for each one or by using the find-change feature in the word processing program.) There should be one-inch margins on all four sides of the page. You can either single or double space the lines across the page. Step Four: Document the source of the news article. Whenever people write something in English that is based on something that was published earlier, the writers are required by law to properly cite the source. That means basically that writers are required to tell their readers where the information originally came from, when it was written and who wrote it. To do that is to cite a source. Following the news story in your word processing document, write a citation that includes information about the article and when you downloaded it. Here is a made-up example of how a citation can look. This example cites a signed article taken from an online newspaper. (Notice that this citation begins with the name of the writer. If the writer’s name isn’t given, the citation will begin with the name of the article.) Smith, John, “Collecting Useless Silly Little Glass Things Getting Hot.” New York Times Student News. August 16, 2004. < http://www.nytimes. com/learning/students/index.html > (August 17, 2004). To write a citation, you should include the name of the writer, if it is given, then the headline or name of the article, the name of the source, i.e., the place the article came from, and the date it was published. You should then give the Web address for the article itself. Finally, (in parenthesis) write the date that you downloaded and printed out the article. Step Five: Study the article. After printing out the news story in a word processing document, study it. Use dictionaries (online or print dictionaries) to look up some of the vocabulary. (A feature of the New York Times site is a built-in dictionary that allows you to click on selected words for a dictionary meaning.) Don’t get stuck here and spend hours looking up and trying to understand words. If you have to look up more than twenty to thirty words to generally understand the article, it is too hard for you. (If that is the case, you should scrap it and find another one.) Step Six: Write a topic sentence for your paragraph. Open a new word-processing document in which to write your summary. Make sure there are one-inch margins on all four sides. For writing assignments, always use Times font, size 12 and always double space the lines across the page. Type your name and the date the assignment is due in the upper right corner. Type the headline or title of the news story a couple of lines down. Center the headline on the page. Remember that a headline often broadly summarizes, in one abbreviated statement, the main topic of a news article. That makes it very important to clearly understand the meaning of the headline of the news article you choose to summarize. (Headlines are written to get readers’ attention while taking up a limited amount of space. Because of that, the meaning of a headline isn’t completely clear sometimes until after reading at least part of a news article.) Here is an example of a made-up headline: Collecting Useless Silly Little Glass Things Getting Hot. Two lines down from the title, rewrite and expand the headline into a complete, grammatical sentence. Indent this sentence and it will be the first sentence, and the topic sentence, of your one-paragraph summary. An example of how the above headline (in the second paragraph above this one) can be expanded into a sentence is: Collecting small glass things which are both useless and silly is becoming very popular with people. (That headline could, of course, also be rewritten and expanded in other, slightly different, ways.) Be careful not to change the original meaning of the headline when you convert it into a topic sentence. Step Seven: Identify the main points in the news article. Carefully read through the article. Go back to the beginning of the article and identify sentences that give some of the most important pieces of information in the article. These are sentences that contain the main points in the article. Main points are often the topic sentences in each paragraph in the article. Main points will all be directly related to the headline. Don’t include examples, supporting details, or bits of information that don’t seem especially important. From the sentences you have identified, choose three to five sentences that contain the most important information. You will use those selected sentences when you write your summary. In the printout of the article, use a pencil to underline the sentences containing the main points that you have selected. Step Eight: Paraphrase the main points. Read the underlined sentence in the article that contains the first main point. Think about the meaning and make sure that you understand it. Write a sentence that paraphrases the sentence containing the first main point.. Teachers sometimes tell students to rewrite a sentence “using your own words.” That means the students are to write another sentence with the same overall meaning as the first one, but with different words and/or different grammar. That is what writers do when they paraphrase. They change the words, but they don’t change the meaning. That means when you write a paraphrase for a sentence, you must first clearly understand the meaning of the sentence that you will paraphrase. You will then try to come up with and use words and phrases that are different from those in the original sentence. Changing the grammar and the word order are also options when writing a paraphrase Try not to copy any of words or phrases in the original sentence that you are paraphrasing. Try to write a short paraphrased sentence that is simple and easy for readers to understand. Make sure that your paraphrased sentence does not change the meaning of anything in the original sentence. Make sure that your paraphrased sentence is a complete, grammatical sentence. One way to practice writing a paraphrase for a sentence is to read the original sentence and think about it. Then you can look away from the sentence and try to write it as if you were telling someone else the information. That is what many teachers would call “using your own words.” Write paraphrases for each of the other sentences containing the main points in the article that you underlined. An aside: Most English classes in the U.S. require students to paraphrase longer passages, that is, an entire paragraph or even a number of paragraphs. The assignment here, however, is for beginning practice in writing paraphrases. As a starting point, focus here will only be on paraphrasing sentences. Step Nine: Write a summarizing paragraph. Write a summarizing paragraph by putting your topic sentence (the expanded headline) together with the paraphrased sentences into one paragraph. You can use phrases in front of the sentences so that when they are together in a paragraph, they come together smoothly and nicely. You can begin your topic sentence (the expanded headline) with a phrase like this: The headline of this article tells the reader that xxxxxxxxxxxxxx. You can also choose not to use anything at the beginning of your topic sentence. You can begin your paraphrased sentences with phrases like this: The writer says that xxxxxxxxxxxxxx. The writer further states that xxxxxxxxxxxxxx. The writer makes the point that xxxxxxxxxxxxxx. The writer also points out that xxxxxxxxxxxxxx. (Notice that those phrases are always in the present tense.) Instead of using “the writer” at the beginning of each sentence, after the first one, you can use the pronouns “he” or “she,” if the writer’s name is given. Keep in mind that, your short summary for this assignment should be in one paragraph. That paragraph should contain no fewer than five sentences and no more than ten. Your teacher might also assign you to write a short, second paragraph. The second paragraph could give your general reactions to the information in the article and your feelings about that information. These sentences might begin with phrases like this: I think (or don’t think) it is good to xxxxxxxxxxxxxx. I feel that way because xxxxxxxxxxxxxx. Step Ten: Proofread and print your summary. After you finish typing your summary in a word processing document, use the spell check in the word processing program to check the spelling of all the words on the paper. After using the spell check, you, yourself, should proofread your work on the computer screen. (The spell check isn’t likely to locate every problem.) Read carefully and slowly. When proofreading like this, some people read backwards on the screen to make it easier to concentrate on spelling and typing mistakes. Use the keyboard to correct the typos and/or spelling errors as you find them. You must also check the grammar of the sentences in your paragraph. You can not depend on the grammar check in the word processing program to do this for you. Unfortunately, grammar checks are still fairly unreliable. That means that you, yourself, must carefully read through the summary while looking for grammatical errors. After proofreading on the computer screen, make the first printout of your summary. For the first printout, you might use the back side of paper that you have already used for something else. Using the first printout, you will again do proofreading, looking for spelling and/or typos and also grammatical problems. Also look at the overall layout (the arrangement) of everything on the page. Make changes in the layout if you are not satisfied with the way it looks. If you find any errors on the first printout, correct them on the computer screen. Save your work and print out a final copy of your summary. Staple the final printout of your summary to the top of the printout of the downloaded news article. Be prepared to turn those two pages in to the teacher on the day the assignment is due.