L2 Written: The Summary That Contradicts the Essay
An L2 written paper lasts three hours. With 25 minutes remaining, a candidate has completed the comprehension questions (40 minutes), a 120-word summary of a 300-word article (30 minutes), and a 350-word essay (70 minutes). Rereading the summary, she sees she wrote: 'The report denies any link between screen time and sleep.' The article actually says: 'The correlation is weak and inconsistent, not absent.' Her essay uses the summary's claim as its central example, arguing that public health warnings are exaggerated. She also notices six subject–verb agreement errors in the essay, two in the summary. The summary task is capped at 120 words; she is at 118. The essay rubric weights task response and coherence above grammatical accuracy, but accuracy is still assessed. She has no dictionary. What should she do?
1. Triage the 25 minutes. Decide what to fix and in what order, with time allocations.
Read the worked answer
Fix the summary first because it is short, capped, and the source of the error: 5 minutes. Then repair the essay’s central claim and one supporting sentence: 10 minutes. Then address grammar selectively: 5 minutes. Reserve 5 minutes for a final read-through of the essay conclusion and the summary word count. The order matters because the summary error is localized and easy to correct, while the essay error is structural but can be repaired with two or three sentence changes. The grammar errors are real but lower priority than a false claim that undermines task response. Do not rewrite the whole essay or the whole summary. A precise correction in the summary and a revised thesis sentence in the essay will do more for the mark than six scattered agreement fixes, although those should still be corrected if they occur in key sentences.
2. Rewrite the faulty sentence in the summary (within the word cap) and the key sentence in the essay so the argument remains coherent.
Read the worked answer
Summary replacement: 'The report finds a weak, inconsistent correlation between screen time and sleep, not no link.' This is 15 words, four more than the original sentence, so cut four words elsewhere in the summary-for example, remove a redundant adjective or a repeated noun. Essay replacement: 'Even if the correlation is weak and inconsistent rather than absent, it is still too flimsy to justify the strongest public-health warnings.' This preserves the argument while correcting the evidence. It is better than abandoning the example, because the essay’s point can survive a weaker correlation: the claim becomes about the strength of the evidence, not its nonexistence. Check that the next sentence does not repeat 'denies' or 'no link'; if it does, change it to 'a weak correlation' so the paragraph remains internally consistent.
3. What should she do about the grammatical errors, and why?
Read the worked answer
Correct errors selectively, prioritising the thesis, topic sentences, and conclusion, where a subject–verb agreement error is most visible and most likely to affect clarity. Do not attempt a wholesale grammar edit: 5 minutes is enough for perhaps eight targeted corrections, not a rewrite. Read each key sentence aloud mentally and check the subject–verb pair. Leave minor errors in less important sentences if fixing them would risk introducing new errors or cutting content. The rubric weights task response and coherence above accuracy, so the false claim is the bigger threat. However, repeated agreement errors in the first and last paragraphs can create an impression of carelessness, so those paragraphs deserve the final check. If a correction would change meaning, do not make it at this stage.