The article we looked at in our GVD class today is here on the Independent website. Below is the paragraph that we collaborated on beforehand...I think it's pretty goood.Indian scientists are checking the usefulness of traditional ways of forecasting the weather, such as the old saying which links the arrival of the monsoon rains to the flowering of Cassia fistula, a common tree. This has been used by farmers to select either peanuts or castor to sow in wet or dry conditions respectively. Dr Kanani of Gujarti Agricultural University has found that the tree successfully predicts “the appropximate date of the monsoon’s arrival”.
...or in just one sentence:
Indian scientists have proved the usefulness of traditional old saying to farmers, forecasting the monsoon’s arrival using the flowering of a local tree.
After our "fascinating" discussion of nuts and seeds, I thought I'd share this incredibly exciting explanation of why a nut IS a seed , and for those of you who might be getting hungry, a nutritional guide to nuts and seeds, a highly intellectual discussion on what a coconut is, and some Jamie Oliver recipes (which may contain nuts, seeds, and coconuts).
2 comments:
I have a problem with summarizing even in my own language. This weekend I read a lot about how to summarize effectively. However I still have some questions:
when we summarize, should we mention every single piece of information given in the original text? When we do that, I think we are paraphrasing rather than summarizing!
while we are summarizing, can we neglect all details and give only the core meaning in few words?
It seems to me that you may be worrying about this unduly. In Academic Writing, Stephen Bailey describes summarising as "a versatile tool" and points out that the length of a summary and the amount of detail included within it depends on its purpose. When you have to write a 1000 word summary, you will be expected to include quite a few key details, but when you summarise the findings of some research in just two sentences (for a literature review for example), the details will be limited.
In my experience, the biggest problem for international students are the elements of paraphrasing and quotation, since avoiding plagiarism while summarizing is absolutely vital.
In class recently we have written summaries that are half the size of a source text, and from there reduced them further still. Perhaps it would be a useful exercise for you to start by reducing a source text to just one sentence and then build form this with what you consider to be the most important details, until you've written about 50 words. If you then show this to me (or anyone in fact), you can receive feedback on any question marks that your reader feels are still hanging over your summary.
Finally, I think it's worth noting that with skilful writing you can pack a lot of detail into just a few words. For example, if you have written the sentence:
The new government have criticised the previous government.
With only a few extra words and some clever vocabulary choices, you can produce a much more detailed statement:
The Liberal-Conservative coalition have criticised the previous government on their management of the economy.
I'll provide some more examples when I get more time...
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