Lesson 14

Creating multigenre blurbs

Newspapers include a summary section where the key articles of the day are summarised in short paragraphs.

The purpose of these summaries is to give the public information quickly, as well as to entice the reader to continue and read the entire article.

Characteristics/Rubrics Base

• Write five or six select summaries containing key happenings from particular events in your life or school in similar format to the news summaries you have read in the newspaper.

• Involvement of the 5 W’s, (who, what, where, when, and why and the how) of these key events in the summary.

• Exclusion of detailed, descriptive information.

• Initial sentence that includes several of the 5 W’s and an H.

• Information packed sentences that cover the event as completely as possible.

• Short headline lead in, followed by four to six sentences for each summary.

• Varied selection of topics – from events – happening in your life or at school.

• Elimination of persuasive statements.

• Factually accurate statements only.

Curriculum links

Summaries of articles or events can be used throughout the curriculum. Students have briefly summarised chapters in textbooks. Now they are writing on key elements of an event and summarising them to demonstrate comprehension much as they did with the textbook summaries.

The model for this writing would be the summaries in the newspaper. The more practise that a student gets in this format, the better prepared he will be for a lifetime of writing, as well as testing.

Newspaper Connection

Read several summaries found in the newspaper to get a feel for them and as examples for writing your own summaries.

Using the examples and the rubric, write summaries of a variety of articles from the newspaper. Make sure to include the 5W’s & H from the article with statements of fact and quotes.