Summarizing and Paraphrasing

Literacy Strategy: Summarizing

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When you read your textbook or need to collect information for a report or a research paper, you will need to know how to summarizethe information you read.When you summarize you are restating someone else's ideasin your own words.To summarize you must condense the original material—in other words, use fewer words to cover the same idea. A summary is always shorter than the original passage; it does not include all of the smaller supporting details. The most important thing to remember when you summarize is that you must not borrow too much from your original source. You must use your own words and your own phrasing. If you do not change enough of the vocabulary and sentence structure of the original passage, you have plagiarized.

Read the paragraph below. Then read the summaryon the back of the page.

ORIGINAL PASSAGE

Effects oftheFrench and Indian War

The British victory in the French and Indian War had a great impact on the British Empire. Firstly, it meant a great expansion of British territorial claims in the New World. But the cost of the war had greatly enlarged Britain's debt. Moreover, the war generated substantial resentment towards the colonists among English leaders, who were not satisfied with the financial and military help they had received from the colonists during the war. Many English leaders believed that the colonies needed a major reorganization and that the central authority should be in London. The English leaders set in motion plans to give the King and Parliament more control over the government of the colonies.

The war had an equally profound but very different effect on the American colonists. First of all, the colonists had learned to unite against a common foe. Before the war, the thirteen colonies had found almost no common ground and they coexisted in mutual distrust. But now they had seen that together they could be a power to be reckoned with.

With France removed from North America, the vast interior of the continent lay open for the Americans to colonize. But The English government decided otherwise. They issued the Royal Proclamation of 1763 that prohibited settlement west of the line drawn along the crest of the AlleghenyMountains and to enforce that measure they authorized a permanent army of 10,000 regulars to be stationed in the 13 colonies.This British Army would be paid for by taxes collected from the colonies. This infuriated the Americans who, after having been held back by the French, now saw themselves stopped by the British in their surge west.

For the Indians of the Ohio Valley, the third major party in the French and Indian War, the British victory was disastrous. Those tribes that had allied themselves with the French had earned the enmity (hatred) of the victorious English. The Iroquois Confederacy, which had allied themselves with Britain, fared only slightly better. The alliance quickly unraveled and the relationship with the British began to crumble. The Iroquois fought against the English for control of the Ohio River Valley.

SUMMARY

The British won the F/I War. British territory expanded but so did British debt. Many English leaders resented the amount of help they got from the American colonists. The British government tried to have more control of the colonists. Colonists had learned that they were more powerful if they worked together. The French lost control over the interior of the continent but the Proclamation of 1763 prohibited the colonists from crossing the mountains. American colonists were mad that the British were stopping them from moving west. The war was disastrous for the Indians; they continued to lose their land.

TEXTBOOK EXAMPLE

Title of the Section

First (blue) Section Heading or (red) Sub-section heading

Write a sentence that explains the main idea of the first paragraph. Write a sentence that explains the main idea of the second paragraph. Write a sentence that explains the main idea of the third paragraph…and so on. Write a complete sentence that explains the definition of any bold print or blue print vocabulary word. All of these sentences should be in your own words…

Second (blue) Section Heading or (red) Sub-section heading

Third (blue) Section Heading or (red) Sub-section heading

Fourth (blue) Section Heading or (red) Sub-section heading

And so on….

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