Summarising and note-making
English · Key Stage 3 · The School
What a summary keeps
A summary keeps the main claim and the reasons for it, and drops examples, repetition and decoration. The test is whether someone who reads only your summary could state the writer's position and why they hold it. Length is not the measure — a short summary that loses the argument has failed, and a longer one that keeps it has not.
Notes you can reuse
Notes written as full sentences take too long; notes written as isolated words are unreadable later. The workable middle is short phrases, one idea per line, with your own headings. Write the SOURCE at the top — title, author, page — because a fact you cannot attribute is a fact you cannot use in an essay.
Quoting properly
A quotation must be word for word, inside quotation marks, with the source named. Keep it short: quote the phrase that does the work, not the whole paragraph around it. Changing a quotation to fit your sentence, even slightly, misrepresents the writer — and if you need to cut from the middle, mark the cut with an ellipsis.
Take any page of a textbook. First, copy out the key sentences: you get about a hundred words, and rereading them is nearly as slow as rereading the page. Now do it properly — close the book and write what it said in your own words in twenty. You will find you have to understand it to do that, which is the entire point, and the twenty words will still make sense to you in a month.