Words to know
summary
A shorter version of a text in your own words that keeps its main ideas and leaves out most details.
paraphrase
A restatement of one passage in your own words and sentence structure, about the same length as the original.
patchwriting
Copying a source's sentence and swapping a few words for synonyms; it is not a real paraphrase and can count as plagiarism.
rhetorical précis
A tightly structured four-sentence summary that reports what a text argues, how, why and for whom.
rhetorical verb
A precise verb for what an author does: argues, contends, questions, concedes, explains, warns.
deletion test
Asking whether the argument would collapse if a sentence were removed; if not, it is a supporting detail.
Hook: the thirty-second version
A friend asks what the book you are reading is about. If you say It's about a lot of stuff, it's really interesting, you have shown nothing. If you say It argues that seven deaths in one city were the result of a system, not bad luck, and it shows this by tracing the history behind them, you have shown that you understood it.
The curriculum asks you to identify the most important ideas and supporting details in complex texts. The proof that you can do this is what you produce: a paraphrase, a summary or a précis. Each is a different tool.
Remember from Grade 11
In ENG3U you mapped arguments: thesis, claims, evidence (with kinds of evidence such as statistics, expert testimony and anecdotes) and turned the ideas in graphics into sentences. Grade 12 asks you to compress that map into accurate, concise writing that keeps the author's stance, and to do it for longer and harder texts.
A text to practise on
In Defence of the Long Read
(An essay written for this website.)
(1) Most of what we read now arrives in pieces: a headline, a caption, a thread of short posts. These pieces are useful. They tell us quickly what happened and what people think about it. But a diet made only of pieces leaves us unable to follow an argument that takes three hundred pages to build, and some of the most important arguments do. Schools should protect time, every week, for students to read book-length non-fiction.
(2) The first reason is that complex problems need long explanations. Why a northern community has no high school, or why a river is polluted, cannot be explained in a caption. A book can trace causes across decades and show how one decision led to another. A reader who has only ever met these issues in fragments may know that a problem exists without understanding why.
(3) The second reason is stamina. Reading a long book is a skill, built the way a runner builds distance. Students who never practise it in high school meet their first four-hundred-page university reading list as a wall rather than a hill.
(4) Some will object that students already have too much homework, and that short texts are more engaging. Both points deserve respect. But protecting time does not have to mean adding hours: twenty minutes of a class period, three times a week, would let most students finish several books in a semester. And engagement grows with practice; a reader who finishes one demanding book is more likely to choose another.
(5) Short texts tell us what is happening. Long texts help us understand why. A school that teaches only the first kind of reading prepares students to react; a school that teaches both prepares them to think.
Finding the most important ideas: the deletion test
For each sentence, ask: If I deleted this, would the argument collapse?
- Delete the thesis (end of paragraph 1) and there is no argument. Most important.
- Delete complex problems need long explanations and the first reason is gone. Most important.
- Delete a polluted river and the reason still stands; it is an example, a supporting detail.
- Delete the runner analogy and the second reason still stands, but it becomes less vivid. Supporting detail.
The counterargument and rebuttal in paragraph 4 are important too: a summary that leaves them out makes the writer seem less fair than they are.
The rhetorical précis
A rhetorical précis is a four-sentence summary developed by writing teacher Margaret Woodworth. It is used in many university courses because it forces you to report not just what a text says, but how, why and for whom.
- Who and what: author, form, title and date (in parentheses if known), a rhetorical verb (argues, contends, asserts, questions), and a that clause with the thesis.
- How: how the author develops and supports the thesis (by contrasting..., by tracing..., through an analogy...).
- Why: the purpose, with an in order to phrase.
- For whom: the intended audience and the tone or relationship the author sets up with them.
Hands-on activityThree lengths, one article
You need: one opinion piece or feature article of 800 words or more from a Canadian newspaper or magazine (online or in print), a pencil and paper, and about 40 minutes.
- Number the paragraphs. Apply the deletion test and mark each paragraph's main idea as essential or supporting.
- Paraphrase the thesis sentence without patchwriting.
- Write a 100-word summary, then cut it to 50 words without losing the thesis, the main reasons, or the counterargument if there is one.
- Write a rhetorical précis.
- Ask someone at home who has not read the article whether your précis tells them what the writer argues, how, why and for whom.
What to look for: the summary keeps the writer's stance and does not add your opinion; sentence 1 of the précis uses a precise verb; the 50-word version is a real compression, not just the first 50 words.