GKT102: General Knowledge for Teachers – Reading

Summary Writing

When you know how to find the main idea and major points in a piece of writing, you can use that knowledge to write a summary. Writing a summary is one of the best ways to study. If you can put something into your own words, then you understand it – and you are well on your way to remembering it. Writing short summaries is basic to annotating a textbook, as you have seen in the annotation section.

How to summarize:

• Read through the passage once to get the general meaning.
• Go back and read it again, circling important words or phrases. (Look up any that you don't know).
• Decide which points are major, and which are minor details.
• When you have a good idea of what the important points are, compose a main idea statement. That is the first sentence of your summary.
• Next, write sentences that explain the major supporting points in the order that they appear.
• Try not to copy words or phrases from the original. Try to use your own words. (This is the secret to understanding what you've read. If you can't put it in your own words, you don't understand it. Look up every word that seems important or confusing.) If you have to use a term from the original, put it in quotation marks, like this: "Whangamata".
• Be sure to use transitions between your sentences. You can use transition words and phrases like: in addition to, furthermore, moreover, besides, also, another, equally important, first, second, further, last, finally, and so forth.
• Do not include minor details.
• Do not include your opinion – at all. Your summary should simply reflect what the original passage says.

YOUR TURN

Read the passage below using active reading and annotation. Next, write down or type into a separate document a summary including all of the major points, but omitting the minor details. Does what you wrote describe the main idea?

Ex. 5.4 Summary

In Greek mythology, Psyche was a mortal woman whose beauty was so great that it rivaled that of the goddess Aphrodite. Aphrodite became so jealous of Psyche that she sent her son, Eros, to make Psyche fall in love with the ugliest man in the world. However, Eros accidentally pricked himself with the tip of his arrow and fell madly in love with Psyche himself. He took Psyche to his palace and showered her with gifts, yet she could never see his face. While visiting Psyche, her sisters roused suspicion in Psyche about her mysterious lover, and eventually, Psyche betrayed Eros' wishes to remain unseen to her. Because of this betrayal, Eros abandoned Psyche. When Psyche appealed to Aphrodite to reunite her with Eros, Aphrodite gave her a series of impossible tasks to complete. Psyche managed to complete all of these trials; ultimately, her perseverance paid off as she was reunited with Eros and was ultimately transformed into a goddess herself.

Antonio Canova's sculpture depicts Eros and Psyche.

Psyche comes to represent the human soul's triumph over the misfortunes of life in the pursuit of true happiness; in fact, the Greek word psyche means soul, and it is often represented as a butterfly. The word psychology was coined at a time when the concepts of soul and mind were not as clearly distinguished. The root ology denotes scientific study of, and psychology refers to the scientific study of the mind. Since science studies only observable phenomena and the mind is not directly observable, we expand this definition to the scientific study of mind and behavior.

The scientific study of any aspect of the world uses the scientific method to acquire knowledge. To apply the scientific method, a researcher with a question about how or why something happens will propose a tentative explanation, called a hypothesis, to explain the phenomenon. A hypothesis is not just any explanation; it should fit into the context of a scientific theory. A scientific theory is a broad explanation or group of explanations for some aspect of the natural world that is consistently supported by evidence over time. A theory is the best understanding that we have of that part of the natural world. Armed with the hypothesis, the researcher then makes observations or, better still, carries out an experiment to test the validity of the hypothesis. That test and its results are then published so that others can check the results or build on them. It is necessary that any explanation in science be testable, which means that the phenomenon must be perceivable and measurable. For example, that a bird sings because it is happy is not a testable hypothesis, since we have no way to measure the happiness of a bird. We must ask a different question, perhaps about the brain state of the bird, since this can be measured. In general, science deals only with matter and energy, that is, those things that can be measured, and it cannot arrive at knowledge about values and morality. This is one reason why our scientific understanding of the mind is so limited, since thoughts, at least as we experience them, are neither matter nor energy. The scientific method is also a form of empiricism. An empirical method for acquiring knowledge is one based on observation, including experimentation, rather than a method based only on forms of logical argument or previous authorities.

Source: Grace Richardson, https://mhcc.pressbooks.pub/rd90-115/chapter/week5/
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License.