Summary Writing

Abstract

Summaries of expository texts were obtained from undergraduate students and examined for the nature of text-to-summary mapping by asking judges to identify the text sentences of origin for every summary sentence. The analysis revealed that simple omission and one-to-one mapping of text sentences into summary sentences were the most favored strategies. Following these in order of frequency were the combining of pairs, triples, and longer runs of text sentences that were predominantly adjacent in the texts, showing a strong tendency to preserve the original order of text sentences. Although writers did not select the same text sentences for omission, it was possible to identify a core set of text sentences that was always preserved in summaries of the larger texts. These sets, when compared with randomly selected sets in their original order, appeared as meaningful and coherent “mini-texts” to independent judges. The results are discussed in the light of Brown, Day, & Jones's (1983) identification of a “mature” summarizing strategy in which narrative texts are reorganized and condensed by combining text sentences across paragraphs. It is suggested that the “mature strategy” does not appear in these results because the structure of expository text resists easy reorganization, and because a severe length constraint was not imposed.

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