Read the article or chapter through once.
Decide what the essay's purpose is. Write out the purpose in your own words.
If the essay’s purpose is to persuade, follow the instructions for persuasive essays.
If the essay’s purpose is something other than to persuade, follow the instructions for non-persuasive essays.
Click here for an example of a paragraph outline based on this article.
Benefits
This process may seem laborious at first but it will dramatically improve your comprehension. Over time, if you practice this method, it will teach you some excellent reading habits that will become second nature, so you don’t have to write everything out this way.
There are four specific things that this method does to improve your comprehension and retention:
- It helps you pay closer attention. If you have to sum up the main idea of each paragraph, you have to read it closely to be sure you’ve gotten the idea. Writing it down then fixes it in your mind much more strongly than if you just read it.
- It helps you read actively. When you “translate” the main idea into your own words, you make choices—you separate the main idea from the supporting details, and you choose your own words to express that idea. This gets you more involved in reading, which helps you understand and remember.
- It helps you focus on main ideas. Instead of getting bogged down in the details, you focus your attention on the key points, which are shorter, fewer and easier to remember.
- It helps you see relationships among ideas. This type of relationship is called a hierarchy, or ranked series. This means there’s one overall idea that includes everything in the article or chapter. Beneath that there are main sections that all relate to the main idea. These sections appear in sequential groups of paragraphs, and they in turn include the ideas in the individual paragraphs, and each individual paragraph relates to the main idea of its group.
- The concept of hierarchy is perhaps the single most important concept for you to take away from this method of reading. Almost all writing can be analyzed hierarchically, and understanding the hierarchy of ideas is key to truly understanding what you read. Without a grasp of the hierarchy, or relationship, your reading will seem pretty random, making it much more difficult or impossible to understand and remember.
Once you’ve made your paragraph outline and grouped the ideas within it, you will have an outline of your reading. If you need to write a summary, all you will have to do is write out in complete sentences the ideas you’ve already identified. This should give you a complete, accurate, objective and concise summary.
