Summary Against Paraphrase

Step 1: Before You Read

Watch the idea first — 70 seconds. Then read on, and try it yourself in the next step.

A summary and a paraphrase are not the same job, and confusing them is the commonest mistake in this kind of work. One must be shorter. The other must not.

Today’s story

The Year Without a Summer

An account of 1816. About 300 words.

Step 2: Read the Story

One part at a time. Press Listen, or read it yourself. The tutor reads along with you.

The tutor shows

The eruptionIn April 1815, a mountain called Tambora, on an island in what is now Indonesia, blew itself apart. It was the largest volcanic eruption anybody had recorded. The sound was heard sixteen hundred miles away.

The eruption threw an enormous quantity of ash and sulfur high into the atmosphere, far above the height at which rain forms. Because rain could not wash it out, a fine veil of particles spread slowly around the whole planet and stayed there for months, reflecting part of the sunlight back into space before it could reach the ground.

What is the difference between a summary and a paraphrase?

A summer that did not comeThe following year, 1816, was cold everywhere. In June, snow fell in New England. Frost killed the corn in Vermont in July and again in August. In Europe, it rained through the whole summer, and the harvest rotted in the fields.

Food prices rose faster than they had in living memory. In Switzerland, families ate moss and boiled nettles. Thousands of people left their farms in New England and walked west, looking for land that had not failed.

Nobody knew whyNobody at the time connected any of it to a mountain on the other side of the world. Newspapers blamed sunspots, or lightning rods, or the sins of the age. The link to Tambora was not properly worked out until well over a century later.

The year had one strange consequence that had nothing to do with food. Kept indoors by the endless rain beside a lake in Switzerland, a group of writers agreed to pass the time by each writing a ghost story. One of them was eighteen years old, and the story she began that wet summer became the novel Frankenstein.

Step 3: The Whole Story

Finish reading with the tutor, and the whole story appears here with its parts named.

Step 4: My Notebook

Finish the story first. Then write down two things you noticed.

Step 5: What You Learned

A summary is much shorter than the original and leaves things out on purpose.
A paraphrase is about the same length and leaves nothing out.
Both are in your own words, and they are judged by opposite standards.

For the grown-up

Summary and paraphrase are set as though they were the same exercise, and children then apply the wrong standard: a paraphrase gets marked down for length when its length is the point, or a summary sprawls because nobody said it had to shrink.

A useful pair of questions: am I making this shorter, or making it plainer? The answer decides which job it is.