Writing a Summary

 

When it comes to a summary, I would normally think of the act of writing an overview of the film I just watched. I would explain the film in a very vague way, just giving the overall plot and main characters. When looking into this assignment there were a few things that I have done before, this would be the intro and chronological order of events. Things I have not really done before in a summary would be, adding notable details for each event that took place. Along with that the signal phrases were also new to me. 

It was easy for me to be able to explain the film in summary terms. Explaining how the fossil was found, when the film was made and who found it. I flew through the initial column of adding the bullet points to show specific scenes that took place. The struggle came when I had to add more details to these basis points. I started with something like; “The main paleontologist is Named Peter Larson, along with the paleontologist who found the Dinosaur Sue, Susan Hendrickson.” After working with it and adding more details it came out to this; “Peter Larson is a paleontologist who helped found Black Hills Institute of Geological Research. He also was the leader of the team that found Sue, one of the largest known T-rex specimens ever found. The documentary also shows another paleontologist, her name is Susan Hendrickson. Susan is responsible for the T-rex being named Sue, this is because she is the one that found Sue.” This is just one example of experimenting with the new format we used. 

Another thing I struggled with was making sure I got all the important parts. The struggle I experienced was I had the main points written down, but not the little points that are important to setting the story up. This was a crucial mistake because it was hard for me to make a good and continuous summary that made sense. I needed these smaller parts of the film to help tie it all together. Along with that the extra descriptions and information explaining the points made the summary better overall. This format has made my summaries improve drastically, not only in story telling but also in the detail within the points.