Keeping the Author’s Meaning

Get Ready

A rewrite can use only true sentences and still say something the author did not. Here are three ways.

Today’s story

The Year Without a Summer

A true story from 1816. About 280 words.

Words to know

sunspotsDark patches that come and go on the sun.
eruptionWhen a volcano blows out hot rock, ash and gas.
frostIce that forms on plants and the ground on a freezing night.

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.

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.

What is lost if you drop the causes from this part?

Page 2 of 3

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.

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.

Page 3 of 3

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

Drop a cause, and two things look unconnected.
Drop the careful words, and a maybe sounds certain.
Drop a step, and the claim becomes too strong.

For the grown-up

This is the most valuable idea in the chapter and the least taught: an accurate-sounding summary can be false. The three failure modes are checkable — a missing cause, a missing hedge, a missing condition or step — and they are the same three that turn careful science reporting into a headline. The lesson calls the hedge "careful words".

When your child summarizes, ask whether the original was as certain as their version sounds.