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

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.