Standard 2: Reading and Writing Process

Students will use a variety of recursive reading and writing processes.

Student Actions 

Teacher Actions 

• Students will condense ideas keeping the meaning, essential information, and order of the text.

• Students will paraphrase ideas by changing the vocabulary and structure of statement while keeping the author's intended purpose.  

• Teachers provide examples of effective and ineffective summaries for students to study.

• Teachers provide time for students to write summaries from a variety of literary and informational texts.

• Teachers provide examples of effective paraphrases for students to study.
• Teachers provide time for students to paraphrase a variety of literary and informational texts.

Supporting Resources 

Teacher Insights 

OWL Purdue: Summarizing vs. Paraphrasing (website)

OWL Purdue: Paraphrasing Tips (website)

elaokframework.pbworks.com: Summarizing Literacy Progression (website)

elaokframeworks.pbworks.com: Paraphrasing Literacy Progression (website)

• Summarizing is reducing large selections of text to their base essentials: the gist, the key ideas, the main points that are worth noting and remembering.

• Summarization of both literary and informational text should be concise, yet they should include the text’s central idea or themes and important details.  Summaries should also be objective, rather than including the reader’s personal opinion or thoughts.

• What is an Objective Summary

• How to write an objective summary

• Summarizing requires students to determine what is important in what they are reading and to put it into their own words. Instruction in summarizing helps students:

• Identify or generate main ideas

• Connect the main or central ideas

• Eliminate unnecessary information

• Remember what they read

• Students can write summaries in reading notebooks or deliver summaries verbally to peer.

• A good objective summary:

• Begins with a topic sentence that identifies the main idea

• Contains facts that support the topic sentence

• May use transitions

• Uses a formal tone

• Avoids expressing personal opinion

• When students give a summary of an informational text, they should state the main idea, then the supporting details in order of how they were presented in the text. The informational text should have been written in a logical sequence, so it is safe to use this order.  

• Students should maintain a logical order in the summary of the text.

• Paraphrasing is to restate another writer’s words into one’s own words.

• A paraphrase should maintain the same meaning as the original text and will usually be about the same length--as the intent is to restate rather than shorten. Paraphrasing will include more than just main ideas.

• This differs from summarizing as its aim is to simplify and clarify, rather than just restate main ideas.

Due to recursive nature of the standards, it is essential that teachers are aware of how all objectives within and between strands work together for optimal instruction.