Last week, we started discussing summary writing, focusing on how to write sentences that will guarantee the candidate a good mark in the section – in the West African Senior School Certificate Examination (WASSCE), the National Examination Council (NECO) and other similar exams. We identified and discussed three points thus:
The sentence must be in your own words.
The sentence must be a complete one – not a phrase, not a subordinate clause.
The sentence should contain only the required point – as presented by the passage’s writer, and as demanded by the examiner. Indeed, as is already in the marking scheme!
We will conclude the topic today by looking at more major issues and other related ones. Therefore, the fourth point is that, in summary writing, your sentence should be brief and sharp. This means that it should be as short and smart as possible. To achieve this, do not explain the point. Also, do not engage in repetition just as you should avoid citing examples. Even if the writer gives examples in the passage, it is not your duty to reproduce them. Just identify the main idea in the clause and re-present it in your own words.
The fifth point is that you must avoid grammatical errors in all your sentences. You should be very careful in the way you construct them. They should be grammatically okay from the beginning to the end because for every error you commit, the marker normally deducts half mark. Nobody is expecting big words or flowery language from you. Just simple and correct English.
Beware of errors of tenses, articles, number etc. You should also create time to read through your answer before submitting your paper. This will give you the opportunity to eliminate omissions because the marker will punish both outright blunders and careless mishaps.
You should know the words you often find difficult to spell. So, if you need to use such in your exam, you will be extra careful. Generally, there are expressions that many people usually mishandle or mix up. You should beware of such. When you intend to write ‘were’, don’t carelessly write ‘where’. There is a difference between cause and course, his and he’s, there and their, I’m and am, has/have and had, sing and sung etc. The same applies to ‘been’ and ‘being’. Imagine writing the following as one of the required sentences in the summary section:
The matter has being settled.
Because ‘being’ is used instead of ‘been’, half mark is already gone. If the devil will have more laugh, the candidate will, in the same sentence, go ahead to commit some of the other blunders we earlier highlighted:
According to the writer of the passage, the matters has being settled and this has made the community become peaceful.
If you are the examiner, how many half marks will you deduct? First, ‘According to the writer’ is a liability in the sentence. Second, ‘the matters has’ is erroneous. Third, ‘and this has made the community become peaceful’ unnecessarily makes the statement long. The candidate does not need it, the examiner does not want to see it. Now, imagine the irony: the candidate who simply writes ‘The matter has been settled’, based on the nature of the question asked, gets his or her full mark while the one who laboured to write the long sentence ends up with little or no mark. That is how delicate summary writing can be. You should, therefore, handle it as technically and smartly as possible.
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