summary writing resources

Summary Writing | Julia Rodriguez | March 10th, 2000

Andrew Packett wrote:

Summary writing: know of any decent books, articles etc - for EFL, undergraduates?

Hi Andrew,

This is Julia from France, I started the MSc last April. I don't know if it can help because it is a book for graduate students:

Academic Writing for Graduate Students, A course for Nonnative Speakers of English, by Swales & Feak. Unit 5.

And also:

Progressive Writing Skills, by W.S. Fowler.

Hope it can help!

Regards,

Julia

Re: Summary writing sources | Julian Brasinton | March 9th, 2000

Someone (Andrew? Simon? Both?) asked about sources for undergrad summary writers. I'd agree with Julia that Swales and Feak is well worth using, and, despite being targeted at graduates, more than useful for undergrads on this count. Other texts that spring to mind include:

Frank, M. 1990. 'Writing as thinking: a guided process approach'.
Frank gives examples of outlining as a technique, the product, and plenty of practice.

Leki, I. 1989. 'Academic Writing: Techniques and tasks'
Provides a chapter on summarizing and paraphrasing (again with tasks).

Trzeciak, J. and McKay, S.E. 1996. 'Study skills for academic writing'
This has some useful exercises and offers a range of summaries of a text for students to compare (quite a challenge).

The biggest problem I find with student summaries is the tendency to evaluate the text, rather than to summarize it (almost as if the summary is taken as an opportunity to display knowledge about X)- don't know if anyone else experiences this.

Julian

Summary writing- student tendencies | Simon Cole | March 10th, 2000

Julian (and Andrew and Julia),

I don't know your teaching context, but, that you find your students tend to "evaluate the text" when they're supposed to summarize it is interesting. Do you mean they evaluate the content, or the text itself?

I usually get (in Japan) an abbreviated copy (verbatim), without much attempt to interpret the underlying message (which is one way of summarizing, I believe).

Thanks for the references!! They will be very handy! I have more I can add, too, Andrew, if you want more. Julia, thank you for introducing yourself off the list and for the complete reference of Swales and Feak. Also, the other book you referenced looks VERY relevant! Thanks heaps!!!

Simon

Re: Summary writing | Andrew Packett | March 12th, 2000

Many thanks Julian + Julia for the references. Still a relative novice at teaching summary writing, so I'm grateful for any recommendations.

Following your response, Simon, to Julian's post, you may be interested in the following. We had a progress test recently on a first year grammar course I teach at the University of Coimbra, Portugal, which included a summary writing question. They were given a short academic text from media studies on moral panics around violent films. Over 90% of the students failed to see that the text was skeptical about drawing links between violent films and teenage crime. I suspect that some powerful cultural schemata were to blame here, which led so many to ignore the clear textual signals distancing the authors from the views they were reporting.

Could send you the original text with 12 summaries if you're interested, Simon.

Best wishes

Andrew Packett
Coimbra, Portugal

Summary writing for EFL undergrads | Simon Cole | May 3rd, 2000

Way back in early March, Andrew Packett asked me if I knew of any decent books or articles on summary writing for EFL, undergraduates. I have found some very good texts for US college students and I have searched for research articles on the subject, but to be honest I haven't done an exhaustive search of EFL publishers' catalogues. However, from what the researchers tell us, there aren't any (Swales, J. 1990. Genre analysis. Cambridge: CUP.). Swales, give an excellent brief on abstract writing, by the way. I will, nonetheless, do another search of publishers' catalogues because, last month my own (first) EFL textbook on composition and summary writing came out and it was a product of not being able to find such a text. Perhaps I just didn't look hard enough? I hope not! If you want to know the titles of the U.S. college texts, Andrew, I will give them to you.