MAKING OF A SUMMARY

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MAKING OF SUMMARY

No matter what job a person has, he needs to read a lot, Only by wide reading can a person keep up with the latest development in his own field of work and in the world at large. But since there is too much read, people make use of summaries.

A good summary is generally one-third of the length of the Original passage. It must present all the important points in a precise form. Hence it is also called a " Precis" (Pronounced-pray-see).

To make a precis, there are five skills which are needed. The first is generalizing. This means that one must be able to give one general word or phrase for long list of words. An example is "Orange,bananas,apples,grapes,pears,preaches." all these come under the general word fruit.

A more important skill is ability to select facts which concern the main ideas in the passage, and reject details having little or no importance, for example, out of the following three sentences, the middle one could easily be rejected : "The dog was very fierce. The dog howled all nights. So the neighbor never went near it".It is useful to give the passage a title. This help us to select what is important.

The third skill is the learn is to compress several words into one word or phrase. For instance, "that which cannot be seen " can be compressed into "invisible".

One difficulty which arise is how to deal with sentences having direct speech (i.e sentence in inverted commas). If we retain the inverted commas, we should not make any reduction in the sentences, as this would not be correct. Quotations must given intact, without change. So to overcome this problem, we change the passage from direct speech to indirect speech. After this, we are free to summarize what has been said.

For example: "Please stop the noise. i want all of you to be quiet" She said. This can be reduced to: She told the, to be quiet.

Care must be taken when making precis not to state personal opinions as if they were true, for all people the times. Lokk at this.

"Wasim is the best cricketer in world, and there is no one to equal him" Obviously, this is a personal opinions. The summary is not: wasim is the world's best cricketer" but the author feels that wasim is the world's best cricketer".

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