To help students understand the form and function of a summary and to prepare them to write their own summary paragraphs. Students have read a sample summary (i.e., an abstract of an journal article) ...

In her 1989 book The Writing Life, Annie Dillard describes a fellow writer who was asked by a student if she thought he might become a writer. “Well, do you like sentences?” the fellow writer said.

Writing a good summary is harder than it looks. You need to capture the essence of something longer; this could be an article, a book chapter, a report. You then distil it into something brief and ...