Summarizing stories | Reading | Khan Academy

Hello readers! Today I'll make a video about summaries. A summary retells the main ideas of a passage, but in a much shorter version. Cool, great, done! You can learn anything.

David out.

Sorry, I made a goof. See, I summarized what was going to happen in this video, right? I took the information I was going to tell you and I shortened it. This is what the skill of summarizing is. I just applied it to this video instead of to a story.

When you summarize, you have to ask yourself: what are the most important facts? What are the most important details? You're a reporter, a stringer, a journalist. Your job is to get in, get the facts, and get out. It's the news in brief, just the facts, ma'am.

Take the three little pigs, for instance. I'll summarize it now. Three little pigs live in houses that they built. One used straw, one used wood, and the third pig, who worked hardest of all, built a brick house. Along comes a big bad wolf, pictured here with a big bad top hat and a big bad house wrecking hammer.

I don't know, and he successfully knocks down the first two houses in order to eat the pigs inside. But they escape to the brick house, which the wolf is unable to knock down. That's the important part of the story, and I bet I could even cut that down a little bit.

But here's what's there: all the important characters, all their major decisions, and the outcome of the story. We have the beginning, the middle, and the end.

Now let me show you what too little information looks like. There were three pigs, they built houses, a big bad wolf tried to get them. Not enough! That's not enough information. It doesn't tell us whether or not the wolf succeeded, or the important differences between the three pig houses. Not enough as far as facts go. You know, it's got to be specific.

And look, it's possible to go in the opposite direction too: too many irrelevant facts. So, there were three pigs. One's name was Horus, another's name was Pansy, and the third's name was Flustafer. They had all been friends since middle school, and when the market was in a good place, all three of them decided to go in for plots of land right next to each other.

That right? Like, that's too much! In a summary, I don't need the whole story. If it were the whole story, it wouldn't be a summary; it'd just be the whole story all over again. Keep it simple! We need the events of the story in the order they happened. We need the characters, and we need the problems they face. And for a summary, that's kind of it.

You can learn anything.

David out, for real this time. Bye!