Summarize Written Text: the mistakes that cost marks

Plenty of weak Summarize Written Text answers contain perfectly good English. What sinks them is a short list of habits: more than one sentence, copied phrases, too much detail, a stray opinion. Each is cheap to fix once you can see it, so this post takes one weak answer apart and rebuilds it.

One passage, one weak answer

Here is an illustrative passage, made up for this post. Real passages are longer.

And a weak summary of it:

It reads like English, which is exactly why the errors survive. Here is what is wrong with it:

• Three sentences. The task asks for one. Form is checked separately, and an answer that is not a single sentence can score very little even when the content is good. Pearson's score guide explains how form is handled, so treat "one sentence" as a hard rule.
• Comma splices. The long middle sentence glues three clauses together with commas and nothing else. A comma is a pause, not glue. It reads smoothly aloud, which is why this one slips through.
• Copied runs. "Narrower roads slow the traffic" and "safer streets and cleaner air matter more" are lifted almost whole. Keep key nouns such as bike lanes, but rebuild the verbs and the word order. As a rough test, if you have copied five or more words in a row, rewrite that stretch.
• Minor detail. Parking outside doors is a side issue, and it takes space from the argument.
• Opinion. "I think the lanes are a good idea" is yours, not the writer's. The task is to report the passage, not to answer it.

The repair

That is 26 words and one sentence. The contrast is carried by although and the reason by because. The passage's real conclusion, that the planners think the benefits outweigh the costs, sits in the main clause, where a reader looks first. The parking detail has gone, and nearly every verb is new.

Three slips that hide in a good-looking sentence

The wrong connector. A connector makes a claim about how two ideas relate, so the wrong one changes the meaning. Compare:

So says the planners' claim causes the complaint, which it does not. The two ideas pull against each other, so the connector should be although or while.

Missing the main point. A summary can be accurate in every detail and still fail to say what the passage concludes. Test it: if someone read only your sentence, would they know the writer's overall position? If your sentence is a list of facts, rebuild it around the conclusion.

Running over the limit. The word limit is usually quoted as 5 to 75, but check it on screen. If you are creeping towards the top, you have almost certainly included detail. Cut the least important idea instead of squeezing everything in. A tight sentence of 25 to 45 words is also easier to keep grammatical.

Count your own slips

Mistakes repeat, so counting is more useful than rereading.

1. Take your last three summaries.
2. Check each one against the eight slips: one sentence, comma splices, copying, detail, main point, connector, length, opinion.
3. Put a mark on a sticky note for each slip you find.
4. For the next ten summaries, fix only the slip with the most marks. Ignore the rest until that one stops appearing.

If you want the method from the beginning, read the one-sentence method. For comma splices and other sentence-boundary slips, grammar for PTE writing has before-and-after examples. Then write a timed summary in one of the practice tests here and count again.