- [David] Hello, readers.
Today, I'm going to be talking
about the skill of summary,
which you might be
familiar with in the form
of summarizing stories.
It's like a retelling, but shorter,
and in your own words.
This is an important
skill, summarizing fiction,
but it's not what we're
talking about today.
This kind of summarizing is
used when you want to sum up
the information in a nonfiction passage
like a magazine article,
a book, a news story,
a scientific paper.
Most scientific papers
begin with a quick retelling
of what the paper's about.
So say you're a scientist
and you discovered
a cure for roboflu.
Let's say robots can get
the flu, first of all.
And the abstract, the summary retelling
at the very beginning of your
paper about your cure says,
"Hey, under these conditions, we learned
"that this medicine cures roboflu."
And then, the reader goes on
to look at everything else
you've written in your
long scholarly paper.
So how do you do it?
To make a summary, you
will need your own words,
the order of events or
information from the text,
and important details from the text.
So what's not in the summary?
Every last detail from the original text.
I think I first read something like this
in a Neil Gaiman novel,
but here's the deal.
Imagine you were coming to visit me
and you asked me for a
map of my neighborhood.
Now if I included every
single detail in my map,
who lives next to me, every
tuft of grass under a tree,
it would stop being a map and just become
a one-to-one scale drawing
of my neighborhood.
In other words, it would
be useless as a map.
A summary is a map of my neighborhood
with only the important bits in it,
my apartment, a metro
stop, Rock Creek Park.
When we make a summary of a text,
we are in effect making a
simple map of that text.
And it's your job to determine
what details are necessary,
the most needed.
Like say somewhere deep in that paper
on how you discovered
a cure for the roboflu,
you had written, "It
was raining on the cold,
"the November day
"our team first identified
the robomedicine."
Like would that be an
important enough detail
to include in the summary?
I'd say no.
The big picture is that the
team discovered the medicine,
not that it was raining when it happened.
But if the cure for
robotflu involved garlic
and motor oil, yes, that's
an important detail,
because it relates back
to the big picture.
We discovered a medicine,
and here's what's in it.
To conclude, let me summarize.
A summary is a short
retelling of a piece of text
with only the important details included.
It's like a simple map of a place.
You can learn anything, David out.
