北京师范大学研究生读译课程资料.doc

Summarizing The ability to summarize is an important academic skill that can be applied to a variety of purposes: reviewing lecture and text material for examinations, condensing key texts to include in term papers or class presentations, briefly retelling a narrative as part of a critical evaluation, or digesting technical material for decision making in a field situation. To summarize a book, a textbook chapter, an article, or any other long piece of writing requires that you condense the content to its essentials: Its identification—title, author, date (where relevant), purpose, audience, and writing level where this is related to purpose. Its overall main idea and the most important subtopics or supporting ideas. The most significant supporting details, examples, or methods of development. The author’s main conclusion(s) based on the material presented in the text. The length of a summary in relation to the original material varies. For shorts articles, one rough determination is to have approximately the same number of summary sentences as there are paragraphs in the original. Another is to have the summary be about 15-25 percent of the length of the original piece. Characterization of a Summary: A summary generally has the following characteristics of organization and style: * It is written in ordinary paragraph-essay form, although it may contain various kinds of lists for the purpose of brevity. * It begins with the identification of the material to be summarized. * It clearly states the overall main idea of the original work. * It discusses the author’s main points and their supporting details in the order followed in the original. * It is written in the reader’s own words, which filter and condense the author’s thoughts. * It does not include large pieces of direct quotations from the original. * It does not contain the reader’s reaction to or opinions about the piece. Writing a Summary The prerequisite to writ