Less Is More: Summary Writing and

Sentence Structure in the Advanced ESL

Classroom
George L. Greaney
cllglg [at] idt.net
Hofstra University (Hempstead, New York, USA)
Anyone who has taught ESL students at the advanced level has encountered the following
problem: Student writing tends to be marked by short, simple sentences without many indicators
of transitions or logical connections between sentences. Students seem to avoid writing more
complex sentences with subordinate clauses, appositive phrases, and other marks of sophisticated
writing, because they are uncertain about how to use such structures and avoid the risk of error by
keeping their writing syntactically simple. Although such students have studied English grammar
and syntax for years, their passive knowledge of such structures as relative clauses does not
automatically generate such structures in their writing. Even if a student is able correctly to
combine sentences when doing grammar exercises in a textbook, the same student will produce
simple, choppy strings of short sentences when called upon to write an essay. After many years of
trying to teach students how complex sentences are formed in English, I hit upon a way to elicit
more complex sentence structure spontaneously in their writing.
I asked them to summarize a in a paragraph or two a short narrative assigned for homework. Then
I asked them to take these paragraphs and reduce them to one comprehensive sentence. To
illustrate the task I tried to write a one-sentence summary of my own on the blackboard. I found
that I had to use two sentences to include all the essential points as I saw them. At this point,
instead of abandoning the activity, I decided to challenge the students to play along and try to
outdo the teacher. When I read their revised summaries I discovered that, in most cases, even
when they were not able to produce a single, comprehensive sentence, students wrote more
focused summaries with more complex sentence structure than they had used in their earlier,
longer summaries.
The use of summary writing as an in-class activity involves the students in a collaborative
exercise in which the teacher plays along with the students. The element of competition, if
introduced as a game rather than as a test, stimulates the students to attempt to use their linguistic
and analytical abilities to communicate their thoughts and to aim at a clear and precise goal: the
one-sentence summary. If a student fails to achieve the goal, it is only a game. Moreover, the
process of rewriting can take place many times because each draft is only one sentence long, and
two or three revisions can be done in one class period. In this process the study of the paragraph
as a discourse unit is approached by focusing on the sentence, the building block of the
paragraph, and it is easier to see what is wrong with one sentence than to see what is wrong with
a group of sentences. Students must focus on the idea of completeness in the small unit, and this
thought process can then be applied to the development and shaping of a good paragraph.
Moreover, the sentence is the form which is best suited to writing an outline of an essay.
Exercises in outlining can follow this exercise in summarization, and students can move back and
forth between these units, as they write a paragraph, then summarize it, and vice versa.

Many aspects of rhetoric come into play: the use of the present tense in relating the plot of a
story, the choice of the third person to tell the story (the text we had read was in the first person),
and the issue of what is essential to the theme and the plot. But, above all, summary writing calls
on students to frame more complex, syntactically sophisticated sentences. The use of summary
writing is part of the tradition of writing teaching, but I believe its application to the ESL
classroom needs to be explored more fully.
The writing exercise is part of a class discussion, so that the writing, being circumscribed and
brief, is closely linked to oral summaries which form the material for the writing. Students cannot
get bogged down in the task of filling up the page; rather, the goal is the opposite, to be as
concise as possible. Instead of generating comments on a five-paragraph essay that "a tighter
focus is necessary" or that "this is repetitive," both teacher and peer criticism is controlled by the
writing task, which is simple: to say all that matters as briefly as possible. Students' reactions to
the material are judged by how relevant they are to the main idea of the story, and how well the
writing expresses this idea. By pointing out that what a student says and writes is "off the point"
the teacher and peers must use analytical skills and keep focused. Moreover, by finding that it is
not possible to sum up the reading in one sentence, the student is forced to confront the clarity
and accuracy of his or her understanding of the reading. In the process of rewriting there occurs a
great deal of rethinking and reflection.
This exercise is useful not only in the ESL classroom, but also in the native-speaker classroom
because the skill of summarizing is important to all students. Also, skill in summarizing carries
over to other kinds of classes such as history and the social sciences, where short-essay tasks are
routinely assigned as tests. Students develop thinking skills that are useful in all courses, but
these skills are developed not as ends in themselves, but rather as means to an end: concise
communication.
The choice of texts is crucial. The use of narrative that engages college students by dealing with
themes that they can identify with (peer pressure, disillusionment, authority, etc.) facilitates
writing by shifting the task from judging an argument or distilling complex and unfamiliar
information into an analysis that is approved by the teacher, to the task of explaining to each
other a story which they have enjoyed. Thus, the oral rhetorical skills they use every day in
explaining a movie they liked to a friend are called upon in the classroom. In the compass of one
sentence they must convey their understanding of a text objectively, eliminating comments about
how "cool" the story was or how they feel about it. This kind of "objectivity" is a prime
desideratum in any classroom. But by using summary assignments the teacher can encourage
clarity and objectivity by making these qualities necessary to win the game, as it were.
To illustrate my point, I will briefly describe a typical class. The class I will describe illustrates
another point as well, since in this class the "text" was a film, the Western classic High Noon. As
I stated above, I have found that narrative summaries are easier for students than summaries of
more abstract essays or arguments. Moreover, summarizing a movie they have seen is an exercise
which precludes the kind of quoting of key sentences from the text which is a common
temptation to ESL students when they are asked to summarize something printed in a book.
In fall 1996 I screened High Noon for my class in a course called Topics in American Culture,
which is both an advanced writing class and a survey of Nineteenth and Twentieth Century

American literature and music. Students were asked first to write a paragraph summarizing the
story and its themes. They then read these summaries aloud and there ensued a discussion of the
meaning of the film which went beyond the classic Western "showdown" story and explored the
ideas of individual responsibility and civic duty, as well as other themes such as the role of
women in the modern "adult Western."
For a subsequent class I asked students to refine their summaries and reduce them to one
sentence, if possible. The following are samples of the summaries before and after the challenge
to produce a single summary sentence.
A young woman from Japan wrote the following first draft:
This is my very first Western movie. I got a lot of information about the culture in
this era. Like the relationship between people, buildings which made a town,
hotel, saloon--had different meanings from today.
I noticed about two women. One was a bride. She wore white dress very purely
and the other was a Spanish woman in black dress. They are very contrasted.
Actually I don't like this movie. Because though some of the actions are very
beautiful, the story was still not very sofisticated. This is very American. I can
smell the sand wind in this movie. And Gary Cooper was just a hero. We couldn't
see his weak part. He was too perfect. It made this movie far from reality. And one
more. Usually girls don't have any interest in gun fight, though gun fight in this
movie was not main point.
When asked to reduce this to one sentence she chose to focus on the theme of the movie and
wrote the following:
This is a story about human relationships taking the form of western.
I was very pleased with this result because the student who wrote it had been very reticent in
class discussion. This sentence showed that she was thinking and closely following our
discussion of plot and theme.
A young man from Brazil wrote the following first draft:
"High Noon" was an interesting movie that was able to show a different type of
drama, and, on top of all, it was also able to let its audience decide to themselves
what message they were getting. Maybe the black and white influenced me,
making me a felling that I was watching and old classical movie: one of those
movies that trap the viewer felling like that he or she was inside the picturer, with
the characters and their problems; or, maybe it was the different stale of filming
that most of the modern day time movie goers don't see anymore or never
experienced where we could see the fear in the characters' face, especially when
we could see and tell the character's face consumed by fear.

Time may be mean to let great movies like "High Noon" be forgotten by the mass,
but it cannot erase its true place or a legacy that was one of the building stone of
the twentieth-century movie.
When asked to reduce this summary he wrote the following:
To those that are going to watch "High Noon", it will feel a sense of good vs. evil
cowboy type movie. The movie was made in early 1900's [sic], with a typical
script: the wording, the attitude, and close up to the face. Maybe because of black
and white movie, gives the viewer the sense of classic; but the classic was how it
was made and worded.
It is interesting to see what this student chose to focus on when pressed to reduce the summary:
genre, motion picture history, and the quality of the screenplay.
A young man from Turkey wrote a first summary which was almost a page long:
The film, "High Noon", is a traditional American western film which was made in
1952. The reason this film was very special is that, all actors in that film were very
talented. Besides that, it was the first adult-film [sic] in America.
The main character in the film is Sheriff Marshall, who is just married with a
young and beautiful lady called Emly. However, their happiness does not last for a
longtime because, a bad guy is coming to the town to kill Marshall who is called
Frank Miller. Marshall does not run away because, he has never ran away in his
life before. Even if his wife Emily threatens him by saying that, she is going to
leave him, if they don't run away at that moment, he stays. He wants help from his
friends and the people he served for years but, nobody accepts to help. They were
all scared from Frank Miller and his friends.
Now it is 12 o'clock; the noon train arrives to the town. Miller and his friends are
coming to hunt Marshall. Our sheriff realizes that, he is all alone when the guns
starts talking. Fortunately, he was mistaken. His wife Emily leaves the train at the
end to help the person who she is in love with. She kills one of the bad guys even
if she is against any kind of violance by heart. When the smoke is cleared bad
guys were already dead on the ground.
Personally, I really liked this film. It teaches a very essential lesson from the real
life. Even the closest people around us would leave us alone, at the moment we
really need them.
When I asked him to reduce this summary he wrote the following:
Sheriff's and his new wife's amazing courage to start a new life by dealing with the
bad guys all by themselves.

This is, of course, not a sentence, but it is an excellent place to start a discussion of what a
sentence should be. Also, while it is not yet a complete sentence, this shorter summary exhibits
the use of the gerundive phrase "by dealing with the bad guys," a more concise and sophisticated
structure than is common in the sentences in the longer version. Using the student's own writing
as the raw material the teacher can then help the student to shape it into a grammatical sentence
by discussing the concepts of subject and predicate in a more meaningful context than that of
abstract grammar instruction. The first version of the student's summary does consist of wellformed sentences, but comparison with the revised summary indicates that he either thinks a
summary is not supposed to be in the form of a sentence, or is not able to identify an incomplete
sentence when he sees one. Thus this writing task can serve as a diagnostic tool for the instructor.
A young man from Norway also wrote a long summary as his first draft:
"High Noon" is an Western-movie about a little town/village and its sheriff.
The movie is starting with that the sheriff (Gary Cooper) married a beautiful
woman (Grace Kelly). They are going to have their honeymoon. But then a bad
guy named Frank was coming to town with the afternoon train to have revenge
with the sheriff for something the sheriff did to Frank for a long time ago.
The whole movie is playing on that Frank is coming to town and that is a surprise
for the citizen. The sheriff have made the town very quiet and nice for the families
and the people who lives there. But there is some people in the town who don't
like that because when Frank was in town it was very bussie with a lot of people
and the Hotel-owner made more money and things like that.
It was also a woman in the movie who was very important (Katy Jurado) who was
a very respected and attractive woman. That woman have had an affair with the
Sheriff, Frank, and in the movie with the vice sheriff. So Katy Jurado is the old
flame.
The sheriff are in fact very tired and would gladly crawl off in a hole if he thought
that would mean and avoidance of a showdown--but he knows it won't. He is
trying to get help from the citizen but nobody will. Everybody are thinking about
themself and they think that the sheriff would not make to put Frank away this
time. Like Otto Kruger who packs his law books, folds up his American flag and
quietly steals away.
I think the story is based on that people are thinking to much about them selfs and
they would not help a man who is nearly to die. The story ends with that the
sheriff is shooting all of the bad guys included Frank by him self, all of the people
are coming out in the street when the sheriff threw he's sheriff-star away and
leaving the town with he's wife. The citizens are fealing guilty by them-self.
This long summary shows that the student has an eye for cinematic detail and visual storytelling
and that he seems to take pleasure in recounting the story. When asked to condense this summary
he wrote the following:

It's a Western movie about a sheriff who want to save a little town/village from a
bad guy who want to make the town lawless. All is based on an revenge and the
sheriff will not get any help.
This shorter summary is interesting for several reasons, among which is the use of one relative
clause subordinated to another: "a sheriff who want to save a little town/village from a bad guy
who want to make the town lawless." This seems to indicate that, if the writer is under the
constraint of the one-sentence writing task, subordination will be used by an L2 writer to
introduce elements that probably would have been separate sentences in uncontrolled
composition. In fact, this version resembles a typical blurb of the type found in TV Guide, giving
us the dramatic situation in general terms without giving away the ending. To emphasize this
point I read to the class the plot summary which appears in the University media library
catalogue listing for the film:
A retired marshal's wedding is interrupted when he learns a killer he had sent to
jail will return to town on the noon train to seek revenge. The townspeople refuse
to help him, so he is forced to take up his badge and guns again, alienating his new
bride, a Quaker who is opposed to violence.
This two-sentence summary was offered to the class as a kind of model of condensation of the
essentials of the plot. I asked them what was missing and they recognized that the ending was not
given in this summary because it was written for a reader who has not yet seen the film. This led
to a discussion of audience and purpose in writing and how these factors determine what we
write.
I believe these few examples indicate the value of summary writing as a multipurpose writing
task. In any case, such summarizing activities seem to be a useful alternative to out-of-context
drills in sentence combining or the non-communicative analysis of the structure of printed
material. Whether students are able to "win the game" by producing a one-sentence summary or
not, the attempt to do so has pedagogical value, especially if the instructor is willing to let the
students' own writing provide the starting point for discussion both of aspects of English sentence
structure and of various rhetorical issues.