Question 1 Skills: How to Summarise

Introduction

Question 1(f) on Paper 1 of your IGCSE evaluates your capacity to comprehend and apply both explicit and implicit information from a text, and to succinctly summarize that information using your own language.
The sections below will explain what summarising is and how to summarise information successfully: 

• What is summarising?
• How to summarise in the exam
• Summarising in continuous form

What is summarising?

Summarizing is a vital literacy skill, applicable beyond just the IGCSE in English Language. When you summarize, you condense the crucial facts or ideas from a text using your own words. A good summary effectively communicates all the significant information from a text in a clear and concise manner, focusing solely on the relevant information while disregarding less important details.
The key elements of a summary are:

• Objectivity: Summaries should adhere to facts and remain impartial.
• Concision: Summaries must condense crucial details, omitting the unnecessary.
• Structure: A well-organized summary, ideally in chronological order, ensures clarity.
• Accuracy: Summaries should provide correct and dependable information.

In the exam, for Question 1(f), your summary must effectively convey the necessary information in a clear and precise manner. This entails distinguishing between relevant and irrelevant details in the text. Although summarizing typically permits direct repetition of text, in this task, you're required to rephrase the content in your own words whenever possible. Thus, this task is essentially a blend of summarization and paraphrasing, involving rearranging the text and expressing it using your own language.

How to summarise in the exam

In the exam, it's crucial to grasp precisely what you're tasked with summarizing. Let's delve into what you're specifically asked to summarize, using the example of Question 1(f) from the June 2020 exam paper.

After dissecting the question, you can revisit the text to pinpoint information directly pertinent to the two bullet points mentioned above. Progressing through the text methodically will aid in organizing your summary. Let's explore how to accomplish this, focusing on the initial three paragraphs of the text.

Summarising in Continuous Form

Typically, when summarizing from a text, you have the flexibility to select the most suitable format, like bullet points. However, in the exam, you're instructed to employ continuous writing and your own language. Hence, you must organize your response into coherent paragraphs, ensuring that you effectively convey the essential information outlined above.
A good way to start this is by using the wording of the question. For example:

You then need to start with the first point from the text, but consider how to modify the words in order to make them your own. For example:

It is also useful to make good use of connectives in order to link your points, to give a sense of overall coherence to your answer. For example: