Target Grammar Application Sheet (TGAS) Assignment name: Summary
Examples
Paraphrasing
Combine ideas from several
sentences
Change the order of ideas
Change unique language
Collocations
think→
be under the impression that
could not→
be incapable of
be matched to→
a perfect match
Signal phrases/ reporting
language
the article Forget Shorter
Showers states that
Jensen implies at the
beginning of the article that
Jensen also describes(phrase)
Explanation/ details
—
I combined three paragraphs describing three different fields
(water, energy and waste) of environmental issues into two
sentences: “However, many aspects of life, like water, energy
and waste, have approved it wrong to do so. Since residential
consumption only counts a little of the total (10% of water, less
than 25% of energy and 3% of waste), agriculture, industry,
commerce and government are the main ones to blame.”
The original article talked about public’s wrong ideas about
environmental protection, the mechanism behind it, the
problems accompany, and the proposal to deal with the issue. I
change the order by moving the proposal to the first paragraph,
which, in my opinion, should be regarded as one important part
of the main ideas of the whole article. I don’t remain it on the
end of the summary since the proposal is short and author’s
idea could be clearly defined when I put it on the start.
The original article used “double bind”, which I thought was a
special way of saying this that represented the writer’s unique
voice. I changed it to “dilemma” plus a dash. Commented [MOU1]: Good choice for this ‘unique’
— language
I used the word “think” in somewhere of the summary. But in
the end I found it might be kind of informal to use this sole verb,
and I think “be under the impression that” would be more Commented [MOU2]: Good to see you’re considering these
formal and closer to the initial idea of the author. choices carefully.
I use modal verb some times in this summary, but overusing it
seems like a little bit informal. Therefore, I change it into “be
incapable of”, which looks more suitable for the task assigned.
I change the part of speech of “match” here. This noun phrase
could express the close relationship more precisely.
—
I add this signal phrase at the beginning of my summary, to
serve as an attribution line that gives article information and
the main idea of the article.
I use the verb “imply” here since the idea is not explicit on the
beginning of the article, but it is exactly what the author would
like to express, so I think the choice of this word may be precise.
Here I use the signal phrase structure “describe+phrase”, to add
to the variety of reporting language structure.