1.

Summarizing is like paraphrasing. For some reason, it's considered easy, and students often get assignments telling them to summarize an article or essay. Yet, in my experience at least, many students have no idea how to go about fulfilling such an assignment. Thus, it really helps to do several summaries as a group with your students all reading the same selection and deciding sentence by sentence if the content is essential to a summary or not.

2.

If you decide to try summarizing as a class, take a passage and number all the sentences (you can also just take one of the numbered selections in Reading for Thinking). Tell students to divide a piece of paper into two columns and list the essential sentences in one column, the non-essential in the other. Then call out each sentence number and ask the class how they classified the content of the sentence, as essential or non-essential. Ask for volunteers to explain the reasoning behind his or her choice.

3.

Stress that, although it is time consuming, summarizing chapter sections is a great way to deepen and monitor comprehension. Readers who summarize while looking at the text are forced to truly engage with the material in order to decide what's critical and what's not. Readers who close the book while summarizing and discover they can't remember a single point developed in the selection know—or should know—that a second reading is in order.

4.

I believe synthesizing is one of the most essential and most ignored skills in reading instruction. At the most basic level, it's absolutely essential to figuring out how to make sense of the various ideas that appear on a single page. At the most sophisticated, scholars can't very well make use of their research if they don't synthesize different points of view and figure out how their own particular position is similar to or different from others. All of which is to say, spend as much time as you can working on synthesizing, if possible going beyond the synthesis statements introduced in Reading for Thinking.

5.

One way to encourage synthesizing is to assign three websites that deal with the same person, e.g., Oliver Wendell Holmes, Paulo Freire, or Dorothy Day. Ask students to create one synthesis statement for each site that generally sums up the material. Here are some examples: "Although initially willing to place limits on freedom of speech during war time, Oliver Wendell Holmes eventually changed his mind and developed what has come to be known as the 'clear and present danger' test for allowing freedom of speech;" "On one thing, both supporters and critics alike agree: Paulo Freire's theory of education is student centered rather than teacher centered;" and "In her younger years, Dorothy Day hardly seemed a candidate for sainthood, but her decades-long work to improve the lot of the poor and the homeless has made it likely that the Vatican will grant her the status of saint." The following links to biography sites provide concise and colorful life stories: Lives, the Biography Resource (all posthumous), biography-center, biography, and Buscabiografias (all in Spanish). You can't really turn students loose to roam the web on this assignment because some search engines will come up with pages and pages of biographical information, which will bore your students and defeat your purpose.