Source: “keeping tabs,” iainsimmons, Flickr
A summary is an abbreviated version of the most significant points in a written text. Summaries condense material and inform a reader of the main ideas and most important points.
Writing a good a summary actually begins with careful reading! Before you can write, you need to read the text. Then you can use “chunking” to discover the main ideas and most important points. “Chunking” a text means dividing it into sections of related paragraphs or ideas. With chunking you can break a large block of text from an article or short story into smaller, more manageable sections. Follow these steps to chunk a text:
Source: Twister: The Science behind Making the Movie
- Decide where the introduction ends. Place a sticky note or draw a line across the page where the introduction ends, as shown in the picture. Ask yourself this question: “Does the introduction end after the first paragraph, or are there several paragraphs in the introduction?”
- Determine where the conclusion begins. Again, place a sticky note or draw a line across the page where the conclusion begins. Does the conclusion begin with the last paragraph, or are there several concluding paragraphs?
- Divide the remaining paragraphs into sections by identifying what each section is about and where the author moves from one idea to another. Don’t worry if your chunked text doesn’t look exactly like your teacher’s or peer’s text. There isn’t always one correct way to chunk a text.
Source: Young adults in the park with a laptop, MS Office
Read through the following article that talks about how much time teens and young adults spend online. Look for the paragraphs that could be grouped together. Sometimes one paragraph may be a chunk by itself; other times a chunk may include several paragraphs.
Link to article
Now that you have read through the text, see if you can chunk it. Check the boxes below that you think are the end of a chunk. You may want to find where the introduction ends first and then where the conclusion begins before you chunk the rest of the article.
Teens Tune out TV, Log on Instead: Young People Spend an Average of 16.7 Hours Online a Week
By Jane Weaver
(1) Teens and young adults spend more time online than watching TV or talking on the phone, according to a new study from Yahoo! and ad agency Carat Interactive. The Internet has passed television in the amount of time spent a week, the Web portal and media firm found in a report called “Born to Be Wired” released Thursday.
(2) Young people, ages 13-24, spend an average of 16.7 hours a week online, excluding e-mail, compared to 13.6 hours watching TV. After TV viewing, they listened to radio for 12 hours, talked on the phone for 7.7 hours and spent six hours reading books and magazines for personal entertainment.
(3) For young people, the Internet is the primary media choice. Being in “control” of how they surf the Web and the ability to personalize their media content online is most appealing to them.
(4) On a typical day, the average young person can be confronted with at least 200 cable channels, more than 5,000 consumer magazines, thousands of radio stations and millions of Web sites.
(5) But young people don’t feel overwhelmed by the abundance of media choices available to them, the study, which polled more than 2,500 teens, found.
(6) According to Yahoo!, which relies on advertising revenues, the media preferences of the “wired” generation are significant to consumer marketers who want to reach young people. Already a growing number of youth-oriented industries such as movie studios, video games and snack foods have embraced the Internet as an important marketing tool to reach their customers.
(7) Moreover, the Yahoo! study counters data from Nielsen Media Research, the leading audience measurement firm for the TV industry, which says the average person watches television an estimated 28 hours a week.
(8) Yet Yahoo!’s findings match numerous other studies tracking the cyber-habits of young Americans.
(9) Earlier this year an AOL survey said that U.S. teens spend an average of 12 hours a week online. The AOL study also found that nearly 81 percent of teens age 12 to 17 use the Internet for e-mail and almost 70 percent use instant messaging when they’re online.
(10) In May, Pew Internet and American Life Research found that one-third of all American teens are online.
(11) Pew director Lee Rainie says the Yahoo! research appears “credible,” adding that it’s not so much about the horse race of online usage versus the Internet, but how young people multitask and consume a wide variety of media at the same time.
(12) In a 2000 study, Pew found that one-third of young people said multitasking was a common activity.
(13) In other words, teen life is about juggling numerous instant messages, answering e-mail and researching school papers, while watching TV and calling in to vote for their favorite “American Idol” contestant, all at the same time.
(14) “The media permeates all they do except when they’re sleeping,” says Rainie. “Theirs is a multimedia life.”
Source: “Who’s Texting Me Now?!?” JPott, Flickr
Now that you have chunked the text, look for the main ideas in each chunk. The main ideas will form the basis of your summary. Although you may not agree with how we chunked the text, play along as we look for the main ideas in each chunk.
The boxes below contain the chunks that we created in the article about teens, television, and the Internet. Read each chunk again. Afterward, use your notes to write down the main idea. When you’re finished, check your understanding to see a possible response. Do this for each text chunk that follows.
Chunk 1
Teens and young adults spend more time online than watching TV or talking on the phone, according to a new study from Yahoo! and ad agency Carat Interactive. The Internet has passed television in the amount of time spent a week, the Web portal and media firm found in a report called “Born to Be Wired” released Thursday.
Young people, ages 13–24, spend an average of 16.7 hours a week online, excluding e-mail, compared to 13.6 hours watching TV. After TV viewing, they listened to radio for 12 hours, talked on the phone for 7.7 hours and spent six hours reading books and magazines for personal entertainment.
Main idea of this chunk: A new study has found that teens and young adults spend more time online than watching television.
Chunk 2
For young people, the Internet is the primary media choice. Being in “control” of how they surf the Web and the ability to personalize their media content online is most appealing to them.
On a typical day, the average young person can be confronted with at least 200 cable channels, more than 5,000 consumer magazines, thousands of radio stations and millions of Web sites.
But young people don’t feel overwhelmed by the abundance of media choices available to them, the study, which polled more than 2,500 teens, found.
Main idea of this chunk: Young people like the availability of many media choices, and the Internet is their number one media choice.
Chunk 3
Source: Surfing the Web, Viktor Hertz, Flickr
According to Yahoo!, which relies on advertising revenues, the media preferences of the “wired” generation are significant to consumer marketers who want to reach young people. Already a growing number of youth-oriented industries such as movie studios, video games and snack foods have embraced the Internet as an important marketing tool to reach their customers.
Moreover, the Yahoo! study counters data from Nielsen Media Research, the leading audience measurement firm for the TV industry, which says the average person watches television an estimated 28 hours a week.
Main idea of this chunk: Yahoo’s research indicates that the Internet is the number one marketing tool for reaching youth.
Chunk 4
Yet Yahoo!’s findings match numerous other studies tracking the cyber-habits of young Americans.
Earlier this year an AOL survey said that U.S. teens spend an average of 12 hours a week online. The AOL study also found that nearly 81 percent of teens age 12 to 17 use the Internet for e-mail and almost 70 percent use instant messaging when they’re online.
In May, Pew Internet and American Life Research found that one-third of all American teens are online.
Pew director Lee Rainie says the Yahoo! research appears “credible,” adding that it’s not so much about the horse race of online usage versus the Internet, but how young people multitask and consume a wide variety of media at the same time.
In a 2000 study, Pew found that one-third of young people said multitasking was a common activity.
Main idea of this chunk: Other research confirms that young people end up spending a lot of time multitasking online.
Chunk 5
Source: “Multitasking,” –sel, Flickr
In other words, teen life is about juggling numerous instant messages, answering e-mail and researching school papers, while watching TV and calling in to vote for their favorite “American Idol” contestant, all at the same time.
“The media permeates all they do except when they’re sleeping,” says Rainie. “Theirs is a multimedia life.”
Main idea of this chunk: Teens spend a lot of their waking hours multitasking in different kinds of media.
The main ideas that you wrote about each chunk of text will be the building blocks for summarizing the article.