The Shrinking Paragraph: A Summarization Strategy

Shrinking Paragraph Template

The Shrinking Paragraph: A Summarization Strategy
What is a summary and what does it mean to summarize?
Summarizing is how we take larger selections of text and reduce them to the bare essentials.
Summarizing means including only the most important information.
A summary tells the main idea of the text. Step One: Evaluate the headlines and organizational pattern of the two articles.
Article One: Myanmar (formerly Burma) and Human Rights
Headline: Burma (officially known as Myanmar) and Human Rights
Emotional or intellectual appeal? Supported by which words?
Intellectual becaus of the word nobel prize

Format:
Inverted Pyramid or Narrative format? Supported by which evidence?
Inveted Pyramid because important details are clustered within the opening sentences of the article, followed by less important details in the additional sentences.

Article Two:The Repression of Ethnic Minority Activists in Myanmar
Headline: Myanmar: Abuses against Rohingya erode human rights progress
Emotional or intellectual appeal? Supported by which words?
Emotional because of the word targeted dattacks Format:
Inverted Pyramid or Narrative format? Supported by which evidence?
Narrative because the author is giving his verdict

Step Two: Write a summary of each article you have read in 75–85 words.
Article One: This article is about human rights violations in Burma that have been well reported by various groups.Burma, as it was then known, suffered many problems due to the division policy of British colonialism. Burma faced civil war after building thier democracy. After the human rights have been oppressed many innocent people have been killed.

Article Two:Myanmar (formerly Burma) and Human Rights
This article is about attacks and violations by security forces against certian Rohingyas and other Muslims. The violence is very high in the sate and the government passed a state emergency in Rakhine State on 10 June. After Myanmar’s Border Security Force army, and police have conducted massive sweeps in areas that are heavily populated by Rohingyas

Step Three: Shrink it! Take the summaries you have written above and cut out those words and phrases that are “fluff”—that is, words that are not necessary to the main idea of what you have written. Reduce your summary to 45–50 words.
Article One:

This article is about human rights violations that have been well reported by various groups.Burma suffered many problems due to the division policy of British colonialism. Burma faced civil war after building thier democracy. After the human rights have been oppressed many innocent people have been killed.

Article Two:

This article is about and violations by security forces against certian Rohingyas and other Muslims. The government passed a state emergency in Rakhine State . After Myanmar’s Border Security Force army, and police have conducted massive sweeps in areas that are heavily populated by Rohingyas

Step Four: Shrink it again! Can you do it? Now, take the summaries from Step 2 and combine them into one summary of two paragraphs. Try to make it more succinct—include only the information that truly summarizes (or captures the meaning of) the text. Combine and reduce the two summaries into one summary of 25–30 words.

Step Five: Develop two headlines for your new article.
Emotionally appealing headline: The human rigts crisis in Rakhine State

Intellectually appealing headline:
The unpredictable human rights in Burma

Step Six: Evaluate and choose your headline. Select one of your headlines and apply the evaluation questions. Revise your headline based on your responses.

The human rigts crisis in Rakhine State

How easy is it for the reader to break down the meaning of the headline?
The readers can use context clues to break the meaning of the headline because they already know crisis mean.

Are all of the words in the headline necessary?
Yes

Is the meaning of the headline ambiguous?
No
Step Seven: Create an outline for your article using an inverted pyramid format. Use supporting details from the two original articles. Perhaps one of the major figures that have helped to raise the awareness has been Nobel Prize Winner and democracy activist Aung San Suu Kyi. Towards the end of the 1980s when many democratic protests were taking place, over ten thousand students, Buddhist monks and other civilians were killed in a series of massacres and protest clampdowns.
“Declaring a state of emergency is not a license to commit human rights violations,” said Benjamin Zawacki, Amnesty International’s Myanmar Researcher.

Step Eight: Write your news article on Myanmar, combining details from the two original articles.

Human rights violations have been well reported thanks to various groups in Burma. Myanmar suffered many problems due to the division policy of British colonialism. Ever since then human rights have been oppressed many innocent people have been killed. After the government issued the sate emergency the violations against Rohingyas and other Muslims and violence in the sate has also continued.Myanmar’s Border Security Force army, and police have conducted massive sweeps in areas that are heavily populated by Rohingyas. Many have been detailed with nearly all held incommunicado, and some subjected to ill-treatment. After more than a year of prisoner amnesties and releases, the overall number of political prisoners in Myanmar is again increased.