Summarizing Including the Key Details

What Is a Summary? A summary is a short restatement of the important ideas and details in a work. © clipart.com

Summarizing A summary should restate the main ideas include key, or important, details sum up the underlying meaning of the text be much shorter than the original work be written in your own words

Identifying Key Details Key details are details that support the main idea or underlying meaning of a text. Key details must be included for the summary of a text to make sense. If a key detail is not included, the summary falls apart, has a big gap, or is illogical.

How to Write a Summary Step 1:Identify the title, author, and topic of the text. What text are you summarizing? Who wrote the text? Whom or what is the text about? Step 2:Tell about the main ideas, in the order in which they occur in the text. Use transition words, such as first, next, and later. What is the writer’s first point? second point? third point? How are the ideas related?

How to Write a Summary Step 3:Include the key, or important, supporting details. What details have to be included for the summary to make sense? What details can be left out of the summary? Step 4:Place quotation marks around any words from the text that are quoted exactly. Did you copy a sentence or phrase word for word from the original work? If so, use quotation marks to set the writer’s words apart from your words.

Green Buildings How do you make a building green without paint? You make sure it damages the environment as little as possible. Green, in this case, does not mean “olive colored.” Green means “environmentally safe.” Architects employ several strategies to turn a building green. First, they try to minimize the amount of energy needed to maintain a building. They also reduce water use whenever possible by creating landscapes with native plants that require little watering. In addition, green builders use recycled building materials rather than new materials in their projects. For example, crushed light bulbs can be recycled into floor tiles, and recycled cotton can replace fiberglass as insulation. Let’s Practice

Summary of “Green Buildings” In the article “Green Buildings,” the writer explains that green buildings are designed to do as little damage as possible to the environment. Then the writer explains how architects create green buildings. Architects try to minimize the amount of energy needed to maintain a building. They also use native plants that require little watering to reduce water use, and they use recycled building materials rather than new materials. Let’s Practice

On Your Own Shunning the Limelight When journalist Ernest Lawrence Thayer submitted “Casey at the Bat” to the San Francisco Examiner in 1888, he had no idea it would become the most famous baseball poem ever written. In fact, he didn’t even sign his own name to his work, choosing instead to use a nickname from his Harvard college days, Phin. Shortly after the poem appeared in the California newspaper, a copy was given to a vaudeville entertainer named William De Wolf Hopper, who was about to appear in a Baseball Night performance in New York. Hopper must have recognized a winner. After quickly memorizing the poem, he went onstage and recited it; the audience went wild. Hopper went on to make a successful career of touring the country reciting “Casey at the Bat.” Despite the poem’s popularity, Thayer considered it badly written and for years would not admit authorship.... When the author was finally identified, he refused to take money for the poem’s many reprintings. “All I ask,” he said, “is never to be reminded of it again.”

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