Adding Friction: How Do I Teach Students to Summarize in Their Own Words?What do a scientific abstract, executive summary, résumé, obituary, search snippet, and movie trailer have in common? Although their language, purpose, subject and structure differ, all are summaries. In school, successful summarizing is strongly correlated with student achievement (Dean and Marzano 2012). Summarizing is the process of
accurately and concisely capturing the expressed or implied relationship between the main point and details in your own words. Students who can distill the gist show they understand what they read—and reading comprehension is a signature skill of researching and writing from sources.