Beginning Writing : Summarizing, Annotating, Paraphrasing, Quoting and Plagiarism

What is the difference between summarizing, annotating, paraphrasing and quoting from a text and how can you help to prevent your student from plagiarizing?

Summary

A summary is the main idea of a text put into the student's own words. Begin by asking your student, "what is the text about?" My students sometimes found it helpful to circle the key words first before writing their summary. Book report writing is a good way of using summaries.

Annotating

Annotating is a type of summary that also includes the student's own opinions about the text. To begin helping the student begin writing an annotated bibliography, have him include in his summaries of the texts he is going to use for a paper and the reasons why the each text would be good for his report or why support what he is saying in his report or whether the text is faulty in some way.

Paraphrase

A paraphrase is a shorter, more condensed form of the entire section of a text put into the student's own words. Your student will want to paraphrase, as an alternative to a direct quotation, to support his claims or provide evidence for his writing. He must use different vocabulary but retain the same meaning of the original text. Make sure your student doesn't just use synonyms but also changes the order of the words and/or uses a different grammatical structure. Also, make sure he doesn't change the meaning of the text by adding his own views.

The easiest way to prepare a text for paraphrasing is to first number the paragraphs so that they can be referred to easily. Next teach your student to underline and circle portions of the text with purpose. Depending on what he is planning to use the paraphrase for, he can underline claims or points to support an argument he wants to make within a paper or he can underline imagery within a poem. He can circle key terms. He will then need to use his markings to write his own paraphrase of the text he has chosen to use.

Quotation

A quotation is a word-for-word section of a text in which your student begins and ends with quotation marks. Teach your student the four ways to use a quotation : 1) introduce the quotation with a complete sentence followed by a colon. 2) introduce a quotation with a explanatory phrase followed by a comma, 3) write a sentence using only short quotes. 4) introduce a quote by paraphrasing it first. I usually begin by suggesting that the student introduce the quote, add the quote and then explain the v quote or why it is in the paper.

Plagiarism

For all of these types of writing, your student needs to cite everything that is in his paper that is not common knowledge. For his first writings, he can just cite the book's name and author's name and the page of the text he is referring to. He can add to this as his papers become more complex until he is using a MLA or APA citation format.

Beginning Writing : Making an Outline

This is the first draft of an outline my son James made. Later versions contained Roman numerals and letters to differentiate the levels of information. Using just Arabic numerals can make an outline confusing.

Making an outline is one of those skills that I  teach in several different ways before expecting them to create one on their own. They can then learn how making outlines can be used as supporting skills for larger projects such as a research paper.

I start teaching my students about outlines by writing them on the board as we go through a history or science lesson. They can easily learn the structure of going from the main topic to supporting topics and the use of numbers and letters. Start out simple with just a topic sentence or phrase which you number with a Roman numeral. Then add supporting sentences below, indenting and labeling each with a capital. Build as you go, including Arabic numerals and lowercase letters and further indenting, letting them know why you have added anything new as you do so. Learning this structure can begin at a very young age and it only takes a minute or less to explain.

Once you have shown the outline format for some time, have your student begin copying the outlines in his history and science notebooks as part of their copywork. Don't be surprised, especially if your student suffers from lack of executive functioning skills, that your student will suddenly and inextricably be unable to write it just like it is written on the board, even though they can apparently read them. Just remind them of the formula.

Next, have your student begin making his own outlines. I usually use their history or science texts for this,  but you could use anything as long as it has clear topic sentences and supporting information. Have them make simple outlines at first, and don't move on to expecting more complicated outlines until Middle School. Sometimes students will transition to more complicated outlines on their own. For his first couple of outlines, he can copy the information word for word from the text, because he needs to be able to focus his attention on the format. For these outlines, have him cite where he obtained his information at the end of the outline with the words "taken from" and then citing the tile and author of the book, so that he begins to learn that using someone else's words without proper citation is plagiarism. Explain that in an actual report if he uses someone else's words he must use quotation marks. As soon as he can, have him begin writing the outline in his own words. He still needs to cite the source, by stating the title and author of the book used at the bottom.

Once he becomes comfortable with writing his own simple outline, he can begin writing his own short one page paper, which is really more a summary or paraphrasing of the text than a paper. These summaries/paraphrases will get larger as the outlining becomes more complicated.

Once he masters this type of outlining, you will want to help him learn the new skill of creating notes from a lecture. As you give a history or science lesson, pause after you have given them a bit of information and then ask them to tell you back what was the main topic and what were some supporting topics you have just told them. Help them through making an outline by writing his responses on a white board for him. Once he is able to do this, have him come up and outline the material himself. You can lengthen the amount of material and transition him to making the outline in his notebook instead of on the board.

Once he masters these steps, he will have some of the skills he needs in order to create an outline for a multi-sources research paper, but first let's focus a bit on summarizing, paraphrasing and quoting (what are the differences between them and how to avoid plagiarism) which is the topic of my next beginning writing post.

Beginning Writing : Writing Paragraphs

After your students can write a good sentence, it is time to introduce paragraph writing. This is something that can be taught in the elementary years, but should also be reviewed as they get older and the paragraphs get more complex.  Whether simple or complex, paragraph construction has a certain structure that can be taught.

Paragraph Structure. Every paragraph begins with a topic sentence, which relays the main idea of the sentence. The next sentences, which form the body of the paragraph, are the supporting sentences. For the beginning writer,  the sentences can all just be supporting details. As the student's paragraph writing gets more sophisticated, the supporting sentences can provide textural evidence or a detail and then examples or explanations of the detail. The paragraph then ends with a concluding sentence that wraps up the paragraph and refers back to the topic sentence.

Mentoring paragraphs.  Just as we worked with mentoring sentences to learn sentence writing, we work with mentoring paragraphs to learn how to write paragraphs.  Find good, solid paragraphs in literature, science or history texts to use. Have them get small post-it notes to label the parts of the paragraph. Alternatively, you can provide the student with a copy of a paragraph so that he can write directly on the page. He can identify the parts of the paragraph using differently colored highlighters. This is the beginning foundation of annotation, which we will discuss in detail in another post.

Paragraph Puzzles. Another way to have students work with paragraph construction is for them have the separate sentences of a paragraph before them and they have to order them into a cohesive paragraph. You can do this by typing out the sentences of a good paragraph and then cutting them out for him to reassemble.

Supported Paragraph Writing. For the first paragraph I have my students write, I choose a topic that relates to a current or recent area of study, usually in their science or history studies (although I add literature as well.) I will write the topic sentence on a whiteboard that addresses the topic. I have my student then brainstorm on a piece of paper a list of information that would support the topic sentence. For the first time or even the first few times, I will conclude the lesson there. Once he feels confident in making these lists, he can then move on to writing supporting details for each of bits of information he has listed for a topic. Once he becomes proficient in this step, he can begin to write a paragraph on a topic, using the lists he can generate as a skeletal outline. (I will post more about making outlines later.) At this point, your student may need help by your illuminating irrelevant supporting details, but be gentle and helpful with this. Do not seem as if you are correcting the piece, but more like you are guiding. In other words, if he insists on keeping details that you feel are irrelevant, let it go. He will get better over time.

Writing the Topic Sentence. Give your student short answer questions taken from his history and science studies. Make sure he always starts by generating a list. Then, teach him how to restate part of the question and then how to add to it to form the topic sentence of the answer paragraph. He then can provide evidence for the answer, by the details he adds to the paragraph from his information lists. You can also begin teaching transition words or phrases such as first, next and finally.

Writing a Concluding Sentence.  I save the teaching of this until after the student has written some from brainstorming outlines because I have found that concluding sentences are the trickiest part of paragraphs for students to master. They have to learn how to refer to the topic sentence but at the same time making it a different and, hopefully, strong sentence. Be sure to look at pairs of topic and concluding sentences thoroughly before having him attempt to write one himself. You can look back at the paragraphs he has annotated for this.

Practicing. With this background, now your student just needs lots of practice. You can begin giving him daily opportunities to write across the various subjects he studies. As he does this, you can gently teach the areas in which he is weak, such as elaborating, improving word choice by using active verbs or synonyms or strengthening transitions. Once he has done this for some time, he will be ready for a multi-paragraph report.

Beginning Writing: Sentence Writing

 

While you are still getting your student to write lists, but when you feel that they are soon ready to move on, begin working on sentence writing. Again, this is for students of all ages, from elementary to high school level. The example sentences and your expectations for your student may be different according to their grade or age level, but the process is essentially the same. This process has to be done over and over again, revising it from time to time, incrementally more complex. The idea is to mentor your students, not either feeding them answers nor testing them to see if they understand with a sea of writing assignments that end up being filled with red marks. That is why this process is often called, "mentor sentences" but the process is not new as Charlotte Mason wrote about these concepts in the late 19th century. However you want to look at it, the essential steps are as follows:

1. You will need to find a sentence in a good book that you want to use as your example sentence. These sentences can be the beginnings of a commonplace book. Alternatively,  you can write your own sentences.

2. You and your student look at the sentence,  noting things that make it an exceptional sentence. You may have something you have been working on that you may bring to his attention, but you might also want to introduce other concepts that you are planning on working on later. In schools this step is sometimes left to the students to figure out because of the idea that a student will remember a concept better if he discovers it himself.  It is also used in group settings in order to assess the knowledge level of each of the students. I have never found that method to be good as either a learning or assessment tool in homeschooling,  so I  guide him through this step. Don't be afraid of giving him too much because you are giving him the tools right now, not testing him.

3. Di-sect the sentence, looking at the grammar and/or punctuation. Review the concepts he already knows. Introduce a concept that the sentence uses. Think about this step when you pick your sentence to use.

4. Once you have thoroughly gone through the sentence, word by word, you can give the sentence for dictation. For younger students, you can print out the sentence, cut the words out separately, and have your student rebuild the sentence instead.

5. Now that he is very familiar with the model sentence,  he can play with the words in the sentence. What are some synonyms for some of the words used? Getting out a thesaurus can be fun. How about rearranging the words in the sentence? How about starting the sentence off with a dependent clause? How do the manipulations change the sentence? Do they make the sentence more exciting or more clear or does it change the meaning of the sentence? Take as much time with this step as you can for much can be learned by sentence manipulating.

6. Can your student now write a different but similar sentence? Change the subject of the sentence, or perhaps the predicate, or both. This is the step where you can really begin to see the rewards for all the efforts you both have put into this.

7. Armed with what your student has learned,  can he now go back and rewrite some of the lackluster sentences he has written in the past? Help him by picking out a sentence or two from his previous work that you feel lends itself to this editing. Encourage him to approach this step not as fixing something that is broken, but as an exciting application of what he has learned - a "now we can do this" attitude.  Do not use any red pens or anything that strikes one as correction. This should be fun.

8. Now it is time to start the process with another concept and another sentence.

Resources:

• Ideas by Jivey has a good post called Step by Step: The Why and How of Mentor Sentences.
• Buzzing with Mrs B has a good packet called Mentor Sentences Grammar Notebook that uses a similar method.
• Teaching My Friends! has an interesting  post about manipulating sentences called Crafting Power Sentences, in which she uses a chart to break down the words in the sentence.
• Making Meaning with Melissa has a post entitled, Why I use Mentor Sentences to Teach Writing in my High School English Classroom.

Beginning Writing: Start by Making Lists

Whether your child is struggling with writing because he is young and new at it or its because he is older and had bad experiences that have made him reluctant to write, you can begin at a simple starting point and work slowly, step-by-step until he is writing reports, papers and essays.

It all begins by making a list.

It can be a list of any sort. Have him make lots of them. About anything that interests him. Perhaps you can give him a topic once in awhile. Make lists from the other subjects he is taking such as science or history. Then it can count for two subjects and make your student very happy. Slowly begin to ask him to add in some organization to his list making. He could list his ten favorite cars in order from the best down to his tenth favorite. He could list the colors in a rainbow in order and then list a flower that is of each of the colors. He could list how he plays a particular game in likes to play in the order it is played (what do you do first, and so on). Have the ordering be in as many different ways as you can think of. Help him through any that are difficult for him, by asking questions to guide him.

Once you think he is ready, have him pick one of the lists to use for the next type of writing project, the paragraph, but first let's look at sentence writing.