研究生英语summary-writing课堂笔记.doc

Summary(precis)
One form of expository writing is the summary, which requires putting into shortened form the major ideas from someone else’s writing. Writing a good summary depends first of all on your ability to read the original material and understand it thoroughly. While reading, you must identify the main point or thesis, understand the difference between the major points and supporting details, and restate these points in your own words.
How you summarize will partly depend on whether you are dealing with a narrative or an essay. The summary of a narrative is usually called a sequential plot summary and a comprehensive summary. The sequential summary follows the order in which the main events of a narrative are presented in the original work. A sequential summary of “One Good Turn Deserves Another”, for instance would begin as follows:
With ￡50 drawn from the bank, Green was driving home along a lonely country road. At the loneliest part of the road, he gave a lift to a stranger. From the talk with the stranger, he got to know the stranger had been broken out of prison for robbery two days before. He was worried and drove over the speed limit, hoping he would be caught by the policeman. The policeman caught him up, wanted just his name and address and left instead of taking him to the police station where he could tell the policemen about the escaped robber. When they reached the outskirts of London, the robber handed him the policeman’s notebook with Mr. Green’s name and address which he had stolen and “Thank you for the lift. You’ve been good to me.”
Like all summaries, this one reduces each event to its bare essentials in the order of the essential events. While sequential summary simply recounts one event after another without saying which is the most important, a comprehensive summary immediately identifies the central action to which all other actions must be referred.
“One Good Turn Deserves Another” is the story of Mr. Green’s experience with a stranger when he was driving home with ￡50 drawn from a bank. When he was hurrying home, he was stopped by a stranger on the loneliest part of the road. He gave him a lift. From the talk with the stranger, he got to know he had been a robber broken out of prison…
A comprehensive summary such as this gives a clearer account of the story as a whole than a sequential summary does.
There is another kind of summary which summarizes an essay or an argumentative essay. In this summary, you have to have the following points:
1. Cite your source. A good summary of this kind should begin with a sentence that identifies the source, title, author, and type of writing.
2. Present the author’s controlling idea. The summary should restate at the beginning what the controlling idea is before continuing to mention the other main points. The detail or support usually is not included in the summary.
3. Clarify the author’s attitude. This is especially important in argumentative writing. Remember that the summary is not the place for you to present an opposing viewpoint or your own point. You must clarify the original point of view in the summary.
Read the following editorial from the Oregonian and see how the summary is composed:
The original:
Cut for Campus Quality

Facing the crunching consequences of Measure 5, higher education Chancellor Thomas A. Bartlett is making the best of a bad situation. The least the Oregon Legislature can do is not make it any worse.
The situation is bad because Measure 5 diverts more than $625 million of the state general fund to school districts and, probably, community colleges to replace reduced property tax receipts. Higher education’s share of the cuts looks likely to leave the system about $90 million short of what it needs to continue operations at the current level.
Even the system’s best options are bound to move it in the wrong direction. Just when the system should be getting better and preparing for growing numbers of students, it’s preoccupied with the best way to shrink.
But the challenge is to ensure that the ripple of Measure 5 doesn’t wash Oregon’s state universities into national higher education back-waters. As Bartlett notes, if Oregon is going to be competitive, its universities must be competitive, too-even in pared-down form.
Many specific choices have yet to be made at individual colleges and universities on where and how to respond to the budget difficulties. But the system is inevitably facing a combination of substantial, specific program cuts and big tuition increases.The result will be fewer course choices for studedts — and also fewer students, most of whom will be paying more for their education.
That is a tough bullet to bite. But Measure 5 wasn’t warning shot. And by eliminating whole programs where they are deemed less necessary than others, the system retains a chance at preserving quality elsewhere. And unfortunate as tuition increases are, they are a better deal for students than a cheaper but poorer education.
The Legislature needs to respect the need for these hard decisions, unhappy as they are. It needs to recognize, too, the importance to Oregon’s future of an excellent higher education system, even as an excellent primary and secondary system is important. It needs to see that this is not a budget to raid further; indeed, it’s a place to restore resources as they become available. And it needs to recognize that maintaining a high-quality system requires addressing one of the system’s most fundamental problems — uncompetitively low salaries for nationally respected faculty members.
Finally, the state — which under Measure 5 assumes primary responsibility to provide for community colleges as well — needs a more comprehensive higher education strategy for both systems, clarifying missions and what can be expected in funding support.
If the Legislature refuses to face the reality of higher education’s needs, it may find that a bad situation can always be made worse.

To write a good summary of this kind, you must keep the following in mind;
1. Read the original well. You may need to read the original piece several times, and then jot down a brief outline of the main ideas before writing your summary.
2. Restate or paraphrase the main idea without using the exact phrase or sentences of the original. This may be the most difficult part of writing a summary. The easiest way to write a good restatement or paraphrase and avoid the danger of copying is to put the original piece away while you draft the summary. Remember to use your own sentence structure and vocabulary to express the ideas in the original piece.
3. Only present the author’s main idea. The summary is not the place to present your own judgments or conclusion of the author’s idea because its main purpose is to acquaint the reader in short form with the author’s ideas, not the summary writer’s opinion on those ideas. You may present yours in another paragraph, not in the summary, if you want to.