496356

2013

DIS16110.1177/1461445613496356Discourse StudiesLi and Hoey

Article

Strategies of writing
summaries for hard news
texts: A text analysis approach

Discourse Studies
2014, Vol. 16(1) 89105
The Author(s) 2013
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DOI: 10.1177/1461445613496356
dis.sagepub.com

Li Yuan ke

South China Normal University, PR China

Michael Hoey

University of Liverpool, UK

Abstract
This article analyses which propositions of the original hard news texts are replicated in their
summaries written by competent readers, with a view to observing the strategies they use to write
summaries for this text type and analysing the linguistic devices involved when they implement the
strategies. Three strategies, namely deletion, selection and abstraction, are used by summary writers
to boil down the original texts to their main points. Implementing these strategies requires readers
to make of the relationships holding between the propositions (or larger parts) of text. Teaching
linguistic devices such as subordinators, conjuncts, lexical signals, lexical repetitions and parallelism
is crucial because they assist students to analyse the relationships between the propositions.

Keywords
Hard news, strategies, summary, texts, writing

Introduction
Writing summaries for original texts involves restating succinctly in ones own words the
main points of the original. The task is a synergy that combines reading and understanding the original text, identifying its important information, and composing a short text
to synthesize the important information. Given that summarization involves important
reading and writing skills and a wealth of linguistic knowledge, teaching students to
Corresponding author:
Li Yuan ke, School of Foreign Studies, South China Normal University, Guangzhou, 510631, PR China.
Email: yuanke.li@hotmail.com

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write adequate summaries has profound pedagogical values and has long been a core
activity in education (Hood, 2008).
Recent decades have witnessed a growing body of literature discussing the strategies
that readers use to summarize texts. Many of these studies drew insights from Van Dijk
and Kintschs discussion of the cognitive processes that readers go through in order to
derive the macrostructures of the original texts. Macrostructures represent texts overall
and global meanings, usually also described in terms of their topics, gists or upshots. Van
Dijk and Kintsch (1978, 1983) note that deletion, generalization and construction are the
macrorules that readers use to produce macrostructures. Van Dijk (1988: 116) explains
them as follows:
Deletion applies to local information that is not further used, as a presupposition, for the
interpretation of the rest of the text. Generalization occurs when similar properties are relevant
for different actors or situations or when a given property can be applied to different members
of a set. Construction requires the combination of several partial acts or events into an overall
macroact or macroevent.

The macrorules are seen by other authors (e.g. Brown and Day, 1983; Idris et al., 2011)
as the summarizing strategies that readers use to boil the original texts down to their
main points. For instance, Brown and Day (1983) propose four strategies of summarization, namely deletion, superordination, selecting a topic sentence if present and inventing
a topic sentence if the author is not explicit. Superordination is equivalent to Van Dijk
and Kintschs generalization, and inventing a topic sentence is roughly equivalent to Van
Dijk and Kintschs construction.
Previous studies on summarizing strategies have primarily taken three lines. Some
examine the differences between students of different levels in the strategies they use to
summarize texts (see Brown and Day, 1983; Brown et al., 1983; Johns and Mayes, 1990;
Keck, 2006, 2010; Shi, 2004). Brown and his colleagues studies show that low-level
students often use the copy/delete strategy, that is, they read text elements sequentially,
decide for each element whether to include or to delete, and if inclusion is the verdict, they
copy the unit more or less verbatim from the text, while high-level students are able to use
more sophisticated strategies such as generalization and construction (Brown and Day,
1983; Brown et al., 1983). There have also been studies examining the strategies readers
use to summarize particular text types, including narrative texts (see Brown et al., 1983;
Rumelhart, 1977), academic texts (see Bashman and Rounds, 1984; Hood, 2008; Johns
and Mayes, 1990), expository texts (see Brown and Day, 1983; Sherrard, 1986) and hard
news texts (Li, 2012). An important point suggested by the findings of these studies is that
there is a significant difference in the frequency of using particular strategy when readers
summarize different text types. Sherrard (1986) observed that rearranging idea units by
topic cluster, the strategy noted in Brown et al. (1983) with which college students summarize narrative texts, is seldom used when they write summaries for expository texts.
The third line that some previous studies take is designing a model for teaching summarizing strategies. Irwin (1986) proposes a framework that he refers to as EMQA. This model
starts with explaining to students the meanings and rationales of a particular strategy (i.e.
the explanation procedure), followed by monitoring students summarizing processes
through their think-alouds and/or analysing the summaries they write for a given text

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and pointing out the places where they have trouble in employing a certain strategy (i.e.
the modelling procedure). After that, in the third procedure, questioning, students working
in pairs ask their colleagues questions about how they wrote their summaries, such as
Why did/didnt you delete this part?; How did you decide these ideas of the original text
should be combined by this phrase of your summary? In the final procedure, application,
instructors design tasks to give students opportunities to practise summary writing.
Casazza (1993) discusses the activities that the instructors can use in the procedures of the
EMQA framework when they implement it.
There are also a large number of websites and English as a Foreign Language (EFL)
textbooks giving students a range of strategies that they can use to write summaries. The
summarizing strategies introduced in these resources coincide with those noted in Van
Dijk and Kintsch (1978, 1983) and Brown and Day (1983). But they provide the rationales of the strategies only. The first author has found that many of his students display a
poor handling of the strategies when they are taught nothing more than the strategies
definitions and rationales. It is necessary to teach them the linguistic devices that they
need to implement the strategies. However, earlier studies have not given an adequate
discussion of what linguistic devices need to be taught to improve students abilities of
handling the strategies. To fill the gap, the present article analyses which propositions
ideational meanings occurring in the original hard news texts are replicated in the summaries written by competent readers, with a view to observing the strategies they use to
write summaries for this text type and analysing the linguistic devices involved when
they implement the strategies.

Data
Eighty hard news texts and their summaries written by information retrieval experts have
been analysed. The texts and their summaries were obtained from Document
Understanding Conferences (henceforth the DUC), which are organized by the National
Institute of Standards and Technology, an agency of the US Commerce Department, with
a view to promoting progress in summarization and enabling researchers to participate in
large-scale experiments. The DUC annually invite research institutes around the globe
that are interested in text summarization to participate in the conferences. The participants are asked to produce summaries with the automatic summarizing schemes they
have developed for the texts given by the DUC. After that, the qualities of the summaries
they produce will be evaluated in terms of the summaries written by information retrieval
experts. For each of the texts three summaries written by different summarizers were
given. Each summary is approximately 10 words in length.

Research topic and method

The first author (2012) analysed the same data to identify the recurrent propositions of the
original texts that are replicated in the majority of their summaries, with a view to exploring the impact of cohesion in texts on readers interpretation of the texts meanings. It also
notes in passing some strategies competent summary writers use to write summaries for
hard news texts. The aim of the present article is to analyse the linguistic devices that are
involved when the summary writers implement the summarizing strategies.

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The propositions of the original texts and of their summaries are analysed in terms of
nuclei (Halliday, 1994). A proposition is usually referred to as consisting of a process
and one or more of its arguments (see Brown and Yule, 1983; Kintsch and Keenan, 1974;
Kintsch and Van Dijk, 1978). Halliday (1994) notes that a proposition is congruently
construed by a clause and that the combination of the process and its Medium, which he
defines as the participant through which the process is actualized (Halliday, 1994: 163),
constitutes the nucleus of the clause. Other elements in a clause can be seen as relating
to the nucleus in different ways: the agent instigates the process and the circumstance(s)
qualify the process in a variety of ways. Therefore, the proposition expressed by a clause
can be represented in miniature by the core of the clause, namely its nucleus. The
Mediums are equivalent to the participant roles given below in different process types.
They are equivalent:
In material process
In behavioural process
In mental process
In verbal process
In attributive process
In identifying process
In existential process

to Actor (middle), Goal (effective)

to Behaver
to Senser
to Sayer (middle), Target (effective)
to Carrier
to Identified
to Existent

(Reproduced from Halliday, 1994: 165)

In behavioural, mental, relational attributive, relational identifying and existential

processes, the Medium is equivalent to a single participant role. On the other hand, in
material and verbal processes the Medium is equivalent to two participant roles, depending on whether the clause is middle or effective in voice. Halliday (1994: 168) explains
the voice system as follows:
A clause with no feature of agency is neither active nor passive but MIDDLE. One with
agency is non-middle, or EFFECTIVE, in voice. An effective clause is then either active or
passive: active if Agent/Subject, passive if Medium/Subject. (Original capitalizations)

Given that the nucleus of a clause represents in short the proposition expressed by the
clause, identifying the nuclei occurring in a text in effect identifies the propositions of the
text. Nominalizations are treated as an alternative realization of the propositions expressed
by their agnate clauses (see grammatical metaphor discussed in Halliday, 1998; Halliday
and Matthiessen, 1999). After that, the next step analyses whether the nuclei of the original
text are replicated in one or more of its summaries. A nucleus of an original text is replicated in the summary if the answers to the two questions given below are both positive.
1. Does its process stand in a repetition relation with any process contained in the
summary?
2. In the context of the text, do the Mediums of the two processes noted in question
1 refer to the same (class of) thing(s)?
Figure 1 comprises criteria adapted from Hoey (1991) to examine whether a process in
an original text stands in a repetition relation with any process contained in its summary.

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The process in a text (Process X)

1. Is X graphologically or phonologically
identical to any process contained in a summary?
No

Yes

2. Is X graphologically or phonologically
similar to any process contained in a summary?

3. Do these two processes belong to

the same part of speech category?

Yes

No

Yes

No
6. Is it possible to paraphrase one of the two
processes in such a way that the paraphrase
includes a process that or whose cognate verb
is a paraphrase of the other process?

5. Is a paraphrase of X also
a paraphrase of that process?
No

No

Yes

4. Is a paraphrase of X also a
paraphrase of any process
contained in a summary?
No

Yes

Yes
9. Does X share a common
context with that process; or is the
context of X related in some way
to the context of that process?

Not repetition
Not repetition
10. Does X share a common
context with that process; or is the
context of X related in some way
to the context of that process?
Yes
Repetition

No

Yes
Repetition

7. Is it possible to paraphrase X in such a

way that the paraphrase includes a process
that or whose cognate verb is a paraphrase
of (a process contained in the paraphrase
of) any process contained in a summary?

No

No

Yes

Not repetition

8. Does X share a common

context with that process; or is the
context of X related in some way
to the context of that process?

Not repetition

Yes
Repetition

Not repetition

No
Not repetition

Figure 1. The criteria for examining whether the process under consideration in a text stands
in a repetition relation with any process contained in its summary.

To save space, the process under consideration in a text is referred to as X in the

figure.
Criteria 8, 9 and 10 in the figure interrogate whether X shares a common context with
a process in the summary, or whether their contexts are related in some way. They will
be satisfied if the answer to any of the questions given below is positive.
1. Do they co-occur with lexical items denoting the same thing(s)?
2.Do they co-occur with lexical items that denote referents belonging to the same
class of thing(s)?
3. Is there whole or partial parallelism between their contexts?
After identifying the propositions of the original texts that are replicated in one or
more summaries of the texts in which they occur, the ways in which they are represented
in the original texts and summaries are compared in order to observe the strategies summary writers use to write summaries and analyse the linguistic devices that are involved
when they implement the strategies.

Findings and discussions

Summary writers use three strategies, namely deletion, selection and abstraction, to boil
down the original hard news texts to their main points. The paragraphs that follow
discuss them.

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Deletion
We begin with deletion. Summarizing texts characteristically involves omitting trivial
and unimportant information. The first author (2012) found that the propositions of hard
news texts that are replicated in the majority of the texts summaries have a strong tendency to be noted in the leads of the original texts. Conversely, the propositions of the
original texts that are not noted in the leads have a strong tendency not to be included in
their summaries. The findings concur with other authors view that the leads are central
to hard news texts because the paragraphs after the leads qualify them in a variety of
ways (see Bell, 1991; White, 1997).
It is necessary for readers to make of the relations holding between the parts of a text
when they delete the parts that are not/less important to the texts meaning. This view is
also held by other authors. Mann and Thompsons (1988a, 1988b) rhetorical structure
theory (henceforth RST) argues that understanding texts involves making of the relationships between the parts of a text and between the propositions comprising each part. RST
analyses the rhetorical relations occurring frequently in texts, noting that the majority of
such relations are asymmetrical, meaning that a part is more central than the other part to
the writers purpose (Mann and Thompson, 1988a). The part that is central to the writers
purpose is referred to as the nucleus, whereas the other part, referred to as the satellite, is
less central to the writers purpose, and they are linked to the nuclei in a variety of rhetorical relations. RST argues that an adequate summary is derived by deleting the propositions that always function as the satellites. One more piece of evidence indicating the
importance of analysing the relations between propositions when implementing deletion
strategy is given by Trabasso and his colleagues (see Trabasso and Sperry, 1985; Trabasso
and Van den Broek, 1985; Van den Broek, 1988, 1990). They analyse the causal relations
holding between the propositions of narrative texts. A series of propositions leading to
the protagonists outcome comprise a causal chain. They found that the propositions that
are included in the chain are considerably more often recalled by readers and considered
by them as more important to the texts meanings than the propositions that are, on the
other hand, not included in the chain. In addition, in the causal chain the propositions that
hold causal relations with many other propositions are more often recalled by readers and
rated more important to the texts meaning than those that are causally related to few
other propositions (Trabasso and Sperry, 1985; Trabasso and Van den Broek, 1985).
The relationships holding between the clauses or sentences and that between larger parts
of a text are often signalled. Hoey (1979, 1983, 1994, 2001) gives useful and thorough
discussions of signalling in texts. Following Winter, he classifies clause relations into two
types, sequence and matching. Sequence relations involve putting propositions in some
order of priority in time, space or logic (Hoey, 2001: 30). Typical sequence relations are
time sequence, causeconsequence, meanspurpose and premisededuction. Matching
relations, on the other hand, do not involve putting things in any order, but compare statements with a view to examining their similarities and/or differences (Hoey, 2001: 31).
Typical matching relations are contrast, similarity, exemplification, preview-detail and
exception. Hoey (1979, 1983, 2001) notes that both sequence and matching relations are
frequently signalled by a fair number of lexical items, subordinators and sentence conjuncts, but key signals for matching relations are parallelisms created by lexical repetitions

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(Hoey, 1983, 1991, 2001). Lexical repetitions, which embody the similarities of two statements, provide a context for highlighting their differences (Hoey, 1983, 2001; Winter,
1977, 1986). Hoey (2001) also discusses the organizations of some popular patterns,
including the Problem-Solution pattern, the Goal-Achievement pattern, the OpportunityTaking pattern, the Desire Arousal-Fulfilment pattern and the Gap in Knowledge-Filling
pattern, noting the lexical signals that are characteristic of the patterns.
It is important to teach the signalling devices (e.g. subordinators, conjuncts, lexical
signals, lexical repetitions and parallelism) so that students are sensitive to them when
they occur and utilize them to assist their analysis of the relationships between the
propositions or larger parts of a text.
Deletion is reported to be the first strategy that students acquire before other summarizing strategies. Brown and Day (1983) report on their observations of the strategies that
students of different levels use to summarize expository texts. They found that junior
high school students primarily use the copy/delete strategy, and that older high school
and college students, on the other hand, are able to use the generalization strategy but are
less capable than college teachers of handling construction strategy. Therefore, they conclude that students acquire deletion first, followed by generalization and selection, and
construction is acquired last (Brown and Day, 1983: 12).

Selection
Selection occurs when summary writers consider a particular part of the original text as
important to the texts meanings and write the meanings of that part in the summaries.
The first author (2012, forthcoming) also analyses the propositions in the leads that are
replicated in a majority of their texts summaries in terms of the type of clause they tend
to occur in. The results show that the propositions in the leads that occur in primary or
independent clauses are considerably more often replicated in their texts summaries
than those occurring in secondary or embedded clauses, indicating that summarizers
have a strong tendency to select propositions occurring in primary or independent clauses
of the leads when they write summaries for hard news texts.
Selecting important proposition(s) of a passage also requires readers to make of the
relationships holding between the propositions comprising the passage (see RST noted
earlier). Teaching the signalling devices, which is valuable for students to analyse the
relationships holding between the propositions (or larger parts), is also useful for them to
identify the proposition (or the part) that is central to the writers purpose.
Once summary writers have selected the part that is important to the texts meaning,
they write the meanings of that part in the summaries in the following four ways.
Nominalization. Summary writers often nominalize the propositions replicated from the
original texts. Nominalization is regarded as an important type of grammatical metaphor
by systemic linguists (see Halliday and Matthiessen, 1999). Grammatical metaphor
occurs when a semantic category is not construed by its congruent grammatical form.
Processes are construed congruently by verbs, qualities are construed congruently by
adjectives and things are construed congruently by nouns. Nominalization occurs when
processes or qualities are construed by nouns.

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For instance, summary writers employed nominalization when they wrote summaries
for a text reporting that the then Korean Army Chief of Staff and martial law commander
was not found to be involved in assassinating then President Pak Chong-hui in 1979. The
summaries of the text are given in Example 1, alphabetized for ease of reference.
Example (1)
a) No evidence showed Chong was an accomplice in the slaying of Pak.
b) No evidence showed that Chong involved in Paks assassination.
c) Chong was not found to involve in the assassination of Pak [sic].

The proposition of the original text that then Korean President Pak Chong-hui was
assassinated is construed in the summaries by nominal groups the slaying of Pak, Paks
assassination and the assassination of Pak.
Nominalization has two characteristics that make it favourable to the summary writers. To begin with, an important function of nominalization is encapsulation, whereby a
large amount of information is compacted in a nominal group. Nominal groups are usually more concise than their agnate clauses because some elements in clauses may be left
out after nominalizing. Second, nominalization is capable of functioning as an element
in another clause, making it convenient for summary writers to write a summary that
contains two or more propositions.
Paraphrase. Paraphrase occurs when summary writers do not copy an item from the original text, but use an item that is not graphologically identical or similar to the original but
they express similar meanings. An example of paraphrase occured when summary writers wrote summaries for a text reporting the consequences of a coal mine gas explosion
happening in Shanxi province. The proposition 10 (people) died occurs twice in the
original text. One appears in the lead and the other appears in one of the sentences after
the lead. The two sentences in which the proposition occurs are given below.
Example (2)
YUXIAN, Shanxi At least 10 people died and one is missing after a coal mine gas explosion
Tuesday in north Chinas Shanxi Province, a spokesperson for work safety authorities said
Wednesday.
Three of the trapped had been rescued, while 10 died and one is missing, Liu said at a press conference.

The summaries of the text are given below. As before, they are alphabetised for ease of
reference.
a) At least 10 were killed and one was missing in an explosion.
b) 10 died and one was missing after a coal mine explosion.
c) Gas blast in north China mine killed 10 and one was missing.

We can see that the proposition 10 (people) died occurring in the original text, is
replicated in the three summaries. Its process, namely died, is paraphrased by killed in
summaries a) and c).

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Learning to paraphrase is important in academic writing because students need to

avoid copying from the source texts to avoid plagiarism. Keck (2006) analyses paraphrase in terms of near copy, minimal revision, moderate revision and substantial
revision to measure degrees of resemblance between the items in the original texts
and their replacement in the summaries produced by native college students (L1) and
foreign students at college who learn English as a foreign language (L2). She found
that L2 students use significantly more near copies than L1 students and that conversely L1 students use significantly more moderate and substantial revisions than L2
students, indicating that it is necessary for EFL writing courses to improve students
abilities to paraphrase.
The two ways to be discussed below, namely replicating in summaries the linkages
that occur in leads and creating in summaries linkages that do not occur in texts, concern
the ways in which summary writers deal with the relationship holding between two or
more propositions replicated from the original texts.
Replicating in summaries the linkages that occur in leads. The first author (2012) observes
that when two or more propositions occurring in the lead of a hard news text are replicated in its summaries, the relationship in the lead holding between the propositions is
also often replicated in the summaries. Therefore, summary writers have a strong tendency to replicate the linkages that occur in the leads. An example occured when summarizers wrote summaries for a text reporting that China would start building a training
centre in Sichuan province to teach giant pandas born in captivity to live in the wild. Its
lead and summaries are given below.
Example (3)
China will start building a center at the end of May to train giant pandas born in captivity to live
in the wild, experts said on Wednesday. (the lead)

The summaries of the text in which the lead occurs are

a) China is about to train giant pandas to survive the wild.
b) China will build a center to train pandas to survive.
c) A training center will be built in China to train pandas.

The proposition China will start building a center at the end of May occurring in the lead
can be represented in short by its nucleus building a center. The nucleus is repeated in
summary (b) by build a center, and in summary (c) by a training center will be built. The
proposition in the lead train giant pandas is also replicated in the three summaries. In
addition, in the lead train giant pandas is linked to building a center by a causal connector to (shorthand for in order to), and the relationship between the two is also replicated
in the last two summaries.
Readers replication of linkages shows that they consider the relationships holding
between the propositions of a text as important to the texts meanings. This view is held
by authors such as Eggins (2004), Halliday (1994), Halliday and Matthiessen (2004),
Hoey (1983, 2001), Mann and Thompson (1988a, 1988b), Martin (1992), Martin and

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Rose (2003), Matthiessen and Thompson (1988) and Thompson (1996, 2004). My
observation provides empirical evidence in support of their view.
Creating in summaries the linkages that do not occur in texts. Competent summary writers
sometimes create a relation to link two or more propositions replicated from the original
text. Two ways in which summary writers create linkages are proposition splitting and
proposition connecting.
Proposition splitting occurs when the speaker/writer represents proposition A as specifying or qualifying an element of proposition B, but the hearer/reader represents the two
propositions in such a way that they are linked in some way (see Van Dijk and Kintsch,
1983: 133). An instance of this kind is given below in Example 4, which gives the lead
and summaries of a text reporting that a man in Fujian who killed elementary school
students was prosecuted in public.
Example (4)
A PUBLIC prosecution has been brought against a man in Nanping, East Chinas Fujian
Province, who allegedly stabbed eight elementary school students to death and wounded
another five, the Peoples Procuratorate of Nanping announced Saturday. (the lead)

The summaries of the text in which the lead occurs are

a) School stabbing suspect was prosecuted in Fujian Province.
b) A man was prosecuted for stabbing elementary school students.
c) A man in Fujian was prosecuted for attacking children.

The proposition a public prosecution has been brought against a man in Nanping, East
Chinas Fujian Province in the lead is summarized in the three summaries by suspect was
prosecuted in Fujian Province, a man was prosecuted and a man in Fujian was prosecuted respectively. (S)tabbed eight elementary school students also occurring in the lead
is replicated in the last two summaries by stabbing elementary school students and
attacking children, respectively.
In the lead stabbed eight elementary school students occurs in a relative clause that
qualifies a participant of the preceding clause. Halliday and Matthiessen (2004: 426) say
that there is no direct relationship between the clause that qualifies an element and the
outer clause containing that element, and that the relationship between these two
clauses is an indirect one, with the qualified element as intermediary. Therefore there is
no direct relation in the lead between the prosecution of the man and his attack of elementary school students. On the other hand, summaries b) and c) contain a causal connector for linking the prosecution of the man and his attack of elementary school students.
Therefore, in these two summaries the mans attack of elementary school students is said
to be the reason why he was prosecuted.
The other way in which summary writers create a linkage is proposition connecting.
It occurs when two propositions in a text are not linked in any way, but they are represented by summary writers in such a way that they become linked in some way. An
instance embodying proposition connecting is given in Example 5, which gives the lead

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and the summaries of a text reporting that four luxury nightclubs in Beijing that provided
paid services were suspended.
Example (5)
Police in Beijings Chaoyang district on Tuesday discovered 557 hostesses providing paid
services, which is against the law, in four luxury night clubs, and suspended the clubs for six
months, the Beijing Times reported Thursday. (the lead)

The summaries of the text in which the lead occurs are

a) Four night clubs were suspended for providing paid hostesses services.
b) Four night clubs were suspended due to provision of paid services.
c) Four night clubs were suspended for paid services.

The lead can be analysed in two ways. The first way considers that the clause complex
providing paid services, which is against the law, in four luxury night clubs postmodifies the preceding nominal group 557 hostesses. The other way of analysing the
lead considers that the clause complex is projected by the preceding mental clause Police
in Beijings Chaoyang district on Tuesday discovered. No matter which way the lead is
analysed, there is no direct relationship holding between the suspension of the night
clubs and their provision of paid services. On the other hand, summaries a) and
b) contain causal connectors for and due to respectively linking the two propositions.
The creations in summaries of linkages that do not occur in texts involve inference.
There are frequently lexical signals in text that lead readers to make inference in a particular way. Hoey points out that the patterns of text organization discussed in Hoey (1979,
1983, 2001) are characteristically signalled, that is, there are lexical signals characteristically occurring in the patterns. When they occur in text, they indicate to readers the juxtaposition of the parts of the text should be interpreted in a particular way. Therefore,
teaching signalling in text should play an important part when teaching students to infer.
It has been argued that good paraphrasing goes beyond presenting a faithful account
of the source text, but also involves readers inferential thinking (see Keck, 2010; Shi,
2012; Yamada, 2003). Studies on textual borrowing and summary writing have shown
that inferential thinking is a characteristic of skilled writers (Brown and Day, 1983;
Keck, 2010; Shi, 2012). Brown and Day (1983) found that when engaging in summarization tasks experienced writers sometimes combine propositions occurring in different
paragraphs, but inexperienced writers never do this. Shi (2012) compares the paraphrases
written by students and professors for source texts. She found that professors paraphrases more often contain extra content that is not explicitly given in the source texts.
Therefore, creating linkages appears as a higher-level practice that is perhaps better to be
taught after students have acquired other skills.
The observation that competent summary writers replicate or create linkages to connect propositions indicates that readers have a strong tendency to make sense of the relations holding between the propositions so as to understand the texts coherence. Some
researchers analyse texts in terms of the relations that hold between their parts (see e.g.
Hoey, 1983, 2001; Mann and Thompson, 1988a, 1988b; Trabasso and Sperry, 1985;
Trabasso and Van den Broek, 1985) and discuss the contributions of such relations to the

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texts coherence. For example, Mann and Thompsons (1988a, 1988b) RST shows that a
coherent text can be characterized by the rhetorical relations holding between its parts,
and that texts in which the relations between their parts are conceivable are more coherent than those in which the relations between their parts are difficult to conceive. My
observation shows that readers indeed attempt to make of the relations holding between
the propositions in order to understand the texts coherence.
One more point about selection strategy before we discuss abstraction is that the four
ways of expressing the meanings of a selected part of the original text make use of lexical
repetitions. Therefore teaching lexical repetitions should play an important part when
teaching selection strategy.

Abstraction
The last strategy we discuss is abstraction, which is similar to what Van Dijk and Kintsch
(1983) refer to as construction. It occurs when several partial acts or events are combined
into an overall macroact or macroevent (Van Dijk and Kintsch, 1983). Readers use this
strategy to summarize a passage when the writer/speaker is giving a serial of instances to
illustrate a common theme, but the theme is not explicitly given in the text. The series of
instances are of equal status, none being able to subsume the meanings of the others. The
key signal indicating the instances equal status is their parallelism structure, which is
created by the repetitions between the items of the instances. Therefore, teaching lexical
repetitions should also be an important part of teaching abstraction strategy.
An example embodying abstraction strategy occured when summarizers wrote summaries for a text reporting that Fujian province published a new circular to punish misbehaving college teachers. The text in full and its summaries are given below. As before,
sentences of the original text are numbered and summaries are alphabetized for ease of
reference.
Example (6)
BEIJING (1) A new circular by Fujians provincial education department on Tuesday has
targeted academic plagiarism by college teachers, amid increasing worries over the
practice.
(2) College teachers in Fujian may also be dismissed if they spread misinformation against the
countrys laws and regulations to mislead students, the circular said.
(3) An increasing number of teachers in universities in China are turning to the Internet or other
academics research to advance their own careers.
(4) Shen Yang, a professor at Wuhan University who released a research paper in 2009, said the
country lacks an effective thesis supervision system and the convenience brought by the
Internet drives the booming ghostwriting market.
(5) His study shows there were more than 1.1 million full-time teachers in universities and
colleges across the country in 2007.
(6) They had to publish more than half a million theses within two years in nearly 1,800
important periodicals to keep their positions.
(7) Other banned practices include teachers abusing their power for personal benefit and
teachers acting fraudulently on student enrolment, assessment and exams.

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(8) The circular also emphasized that teachers will lose out on promotion opportunities and pay
rises if they are irresponsible in students safety or induce students to participate in any illegal
or superstitious activities.
(9) It said teachers were not allowed to use physical punishment on students or insult them.
(10) Violators will have any academic award and honor canceled, and will not be able to apply
for new research projects for specified periods.

The summaries of the text are:

a) Circular was published to punish errant teachers in Fujian.
b) Fujian published new circular to punish misbehaving teachers.
c) New circular published by Fujian aims to punish misbehaving teachers.

College teachers in Fujian may also be dismissed in sentence 2, teachers will lose out on
promotion opportunities and pay rises in sentence 8, and the entire sentence 10 together
are summarized by punish teachers contained in the three summaries. Sentences 2 and 8
display matching parallelism (see Table 1), and parts of the two sentences also display
matching parallelism with sentence 10.
(A)cademic plagiarism by college teachers in sentence 1, they (i.e. college teachers)
spread misinformation against the countrys laws and regulations to mislead students in
sentence 2, teachers abusing their power for personal benefit and teachers acting fraudulently on student enrolment, assessment and exams in sentence 7, they (i.e. college teachers) are irresponsible in students safety or induce students to participate in any illegal
or superstitious activities in sentence 8, and (teachers) use physical punishment on students or insult them in sentence 9 also display matching parallelism and together they are
very succinctly summarized by errant in summary a) and by misbehaving in summaries
b) and c).
Of the strategies discussed in this article, abstraction is the most difficult for students
to acquire. Brown and Day (1983: 7) note that fifth and seventh graders seldom use this
strategy, tenth graders use it on one-third of appropriate occasions and college students
use it only on half of the units where it would be appropriate. Abstraction is most difficult
because it departs most radically from the surface of the original text, requiring students
to generalize or abstract information rather than just delete, paraphrase and reconstrue
propositions. Abstraction is used with facility by experts and is most difficult for novice
learners (Brown and Day, 1983: 12).

Conclusions
This article has analysed which propositions of the original hard news texts are replicated
in the summaries written by competent readers with a view to observing the strategies
they use to write summaries for this text type, and analysing the linguistic devices that
are involved when they implement the strategies. Three strategies are used by summary
writers to boil down the original texts to their main points. They are deletion, selection
and abstraction. Implementing these strategies requires readers to make of the relationships holding between the propositions (or larger parts) of text. The relationships between
the propositions are frequently signalled by some lexical items, subordinators, conjuncts

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Table 1. The matching parallelism of sentences 2 and 8 of Example 6.

Sentence 2:

the circular

said

teachers may be dismissed if

they

Sentence 8:

the circular

emphasized

if
teachers will lose out
on promotion
opportunities and
pay rise

they

Constant

the circular

verbal
processes
specifics
of verbal
processes

teachers punishments

same
referent

Variable

if

different ways of
punishing

spread misinformation
against the countrys
laws and regulations to
mislead students
are irresponsible in
students safety or
induce students to
participate in any
illegal or superstitious
activities
misbehaviours
different ways of
misbehaving

and/or parallelism created by lexical repetitions. It is important to teach students the

signalling devices because they play an important role in assisting students to analyse the
clause relations accurately.
Once summary writers have selected the part that is important to the texts meanings,
they write the meanings of that part in the summaries in four ways: they may paraphrase
or nominalise the propositions replicated from the original texts; they replicate in summaries the linkages that occur in the leads; they sometimes create in summaries the linkages that do not occur in the original texts. The four ways of expressing the meanings of
a selected part of the original text utilize lexical repetitions. Therefore, teaching lexical
repetitions should play an important part when teaching selection strategy.
After considering their degrees of difficulty for students to learn and other factors, we
suggest the summarizing strategies should be presented in the EFL syllabus of college in
the following way. Deletion comes first, followed by selection, and finally comes abstraction. Deletion appears first because it is less demanding than the other two strategies.
Brown and Day (1983) have shown that students as young as junior high school age used
this strategy. When teaching deletion strategy, it is important to show students how some
lexical items, subordinators, conjuncts, and/or parallelism created by lexical repetitions
indicate the relationships holding between the propositions (or larger parts) of text.
Selection comes next because it is more difficult than deletion and less demanding than
abstraction strategy. What is more, students have been taught to make use of the signalling devices to analyse the relationships holding between the propositions, which is
important for them to select the proposition that is important to the texts meanings.
When teaching students the ways in which they write the meanings of a selected part,
paraphrase should be taught first because it is the least demanding and there is also an
urgent need for junior students to improve their abilities to paraphrase. When analysing
the ways in which college English learners paraphrase, Keck (2006) found that junior
students primarily use near copy and minimal revision, while senior students, on the
other hand, mainly use moderate and substantial revisions. Since near copy and minimal
revision embody a considerable resemblance in terms of wording between the original

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text and students writing, Kecks results suggest that junior college students writings
are likely to incur accusations of plagiarism, making it urgent for them to improve their
abilities to paraphrase. Having learnt paraphrasing, students are ready to learn replicating
linkages, which involves paraphrasing two or more propositions of the original text.
Next comes nominalization and creating linkages. The former involves syntactic transformation and managing the flow of meanings in text, and the latter involves inference.
Both are high level practices and appropriate to be taught in the writing course for senior
students. Abstraction is more sophisticated than deletion and selection strategies, and
appropriate to be taught after students have acquired the other two strategies.
Future research may explore summarizing strategies along two lines. One may wish
to examine the order of students acquisitions of summarizing strategies. There have
been few studies exploring this topic except for Brown and Day (1983), which, as mentioned earlier, noted that students acquire deletion first, next generalization and selection,
and finally abstraction. Observing students development of summarizing strategies has
important values for designing the order in which they should be presented in the syllabus. The other avenue that future research may take is examining the variation of summarizing strategies across summaries of various text types. There are studies pointing out
that there is a significant difference in the frequency of using a particular strategy when
readers summarize different text types. For instance, Sherrard (1986) observed that
rearranging idea units by topic cluster, the strategy noted in Brown et al. (1983) with which
college students summarize narrative texts is seldom used when they write summaries for
expository texts.
Acknowledgements
The authors thank the editor and the anonymous reviewer for their valuable comments on the
previous version of this article.

Funding
The study reported in the paper is part of the Planning Project of Guangdong Philosophy and
Social Science (Project number: GD12XWW07).

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Author biographies
Li Yuan ke is an English language lecturer at South China Normal University, PR China. Before
that, he obtained his doctoral degree at the University of Liverpool under the supervision of
Professors Michael Hoey and Geoff Thompson. His most recent publication is Cohesion in Text
and Text Aboutness (2012, Sun Yat-sen University Press, Guangzhou).
Michael Hoey is Pro-vice Chancellor and Baines Professor of English at the University of
Liverpool, UK.

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