Summary or Paraphrase?

Get Ready

A summary makes something much shorter. A paraphrase says all of it again in your own words.

Today’s story

The Year Without a Summer

A true story from 1816. About 280 words.

Words to know

eruptionWhen a volcano blows out hot rock, ash and gas.
sulfurA yellow material that makes a thick, smelly gas when it burns.
veilA thin cover you can partly see through.

Read and Answer

Read one page. Then answer the question in the yellow box.

Page 1 of 3

The eruptionIn April 1815, a volcano called Tambora blew itself apart. Tambora is on an island in what is now Indonesia. It was the biggest eruption anyone had ever recorded. People heard the blast sixteen hundred miles away.

The eruption threw huge clouds of ash and sulfur high into the sky. They went higher than the clouds where rain forms. Because rain could not wash it out, a thin veil of dust spread around the whole planet. It stayed there for months and bounced some of the sunlight back into space.

What is the difference between a summary and a paraphrase?

Page 2 of 3

A summer that did not comeThe next year, 1816, was cold everywhere. In June, snow fell in New England. In Vermont, frost killed the corn in July and again in August. In Europe, it rained all summer, and the harvest rotted in the fields.

Food prices rose faster than anyone could remember. In Switzerland, hungry families ate moss and boiled weeds. In New England, thousands of people left their farms. They walked west, looking for land that had not failed.

Page 3 of 3

Nobody knew whyNobody at the time connected any of this to a volcano on the other side of the world. Newspapers blamed sunspots, or lightning rods, or people behaving badly. The link to Tambora was not fully worked out until more than a hundred years later.

The cold year had one strange result that had nothing to do with food. Beside a lake in Switzerland, a group of writers was stuck indoors by the endless rain. To pass the time, they agreed that each of them would write a ghost story. One of them was Mary Shelley, who was eighteen. The story she began that wet summer became the famous book Frankenstein.

Read It All

Answer all the questions to open the whole story.

My Notebook

Finish the story first. Then write two things you noticed.

What You Learned

A summary is much shorter and leaves things out on purpose.
A paraphrase is about as long and leaves nothing out.
Both use your own words, but their rules are opposite.

For the grown-up

Summary and paraphrase are set as though they were the same exercise, and children then apply the wrong standard: a paraphrase gets marked down for length when its length is the point, or a summary sprawls because nobody said it had to shrink.

A useful pair of questions: am I making this shorter, or making it plainer? The answer decides which job it is.