Notes Made of Full Sentences: Repairing a 22-Line Note-Making Answer
A 240-word passage titled 'Why Kitchen Gardens Matter' has three sections. Section 1: kitchen gardens supply fresh vegetables, cut household spending by about a fifth, and give families control over pesticide use. Section 2: they need 20–30 square metres, five to six hours of sunlight and watering twice a day; suitable crops include tomato, brinjal, spinach and curry leaf. Section 3: they improve soil, reduce waste because peels can be composted, and build in children a habit of outdoor work. Three examples and two quotations are scattered through the passage.
The question reads: 'Make notes using a suitable title and headings, and write a summary in about 60 words.'
Imran submits 22 lines of notes, five headings, and no abbreviations. Most lines are copied sentences: 'Kitchen gardens supply fresh vegetables and they also cut household spending by about a fifth of the total.' His summary runs to 96 words and reproduces the whole of Section 2, including the crop list.
1. Rebuild Imran's notes for the title and Section 1 only, in acceptable note form, and justify each change you make.
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Kitchen Gardens: Why They Matter 1. Benefits 1.1 fresh vegetables → better diet 1.2 cut household spending (~1/5) 1.3 family control over pesticide use
Changes and the reason for each:
- Title as a noun phrase, not a sentence. 'Why Kitchen Gardens Matter' works as the passage title; for notes, a compressed label ('Kitchen Gardens: Why They Matter') is acceptable and signals the topic at a glance.
- One heading for the section, numbered. Imran's five headings are too many for three sections; headings track the passage's structure, not every paragraph break.
- Sub-points as noun phrases with articles and verbs dropped. 'supply fresh vegetables' becomes 'fresh vegetables'; 'cut household spending' becomes 'cut household spending' (the verb survives because it carries the meaning). The rule is: drop what the reader can restore, keep what carries information.
- Consistent indentation and numbering (1, 1.1, 1.2). This is what makes notes scannable and what examiners look for; Imran's 22 unindented lines are a paragraph in disguise.
- Symbols and abbreviations used sparingly and unambiguously - '→', '~', '&' are standard; a coined abbreviation without a key is not. If he uses 'veg.', 'veg.' must be consistent.
- No full stops at the end of note lines. A note is not a sentence, and the full stop is a signal that the student is copying.
The test to teach: could another student rebuild the paragraph from these notes? If yes, the notes are complete; if the notes are longer than the paragraph, they are not notes.
2. Imran's summary is accurate and 96 words long against a limit of about 60. Explain why it still loses marks, and state what should survive the cut.
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An over-long summary is not a near-miss; it is evidence that the summarising has not been done. Three separate things have gone wrong:
- The word limit is a ceiling, not a target. 'About 60 words' means roughly 55–65. At 96 he is 60% over, and a scheme that allots marks for the summary will normally deduct for length before it reads the content.
- He has kept supporting detail and dropped proportion. The crop list - tomato, brinjal, spinach, curry leaf - is illustrative, not essential; it consumes roughly a third of his summary for a point that one phrase ('vegetables suited to local soil') would carry. Meanwhile Section 3, which is a separate main idea, is compressed away.
- He has copied, not condensed. A copied sentence is the same length as its source and therefore cannot be a summary of it; the marker recognises the original wording and marks accordingly.
What should survive (about 55 words): kitchen gardens grow fresh vegetables and cut spending by about a fifth; they need 20–30 square metres, five to six hours of sun and daily watering; they improve soil, recycle kitchen waste as compost and give children outdoor work habits.
That is one sentence per section: what they do, what they need, why they matter beyond the household. The examples and the two quotations go, because a summary keeps the skeleton and discards the flesh.
3. The teacher also has to decide how to treat headings, titles and abbreviations in the word count. Recommend a consistent rule and justify it.
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Recommendation: count the title and headings in the note-making answer, but count only the body of the summary - and announce the rule before the exercise, not after.
The reasoning for each half:
- Notes: a title and headings are part of the note-making skill being tested - a note-making answer without a title has missed a requirement - so they belong in the answer, and the limit should be generous enough to absorb them (typically 6–8 lines plus title for a 240-word passage).
- Summary: the instruction is 'write a summary in about 60 words', and the summary is the prose. The title is a separate formatting element, and counting it punishes a student for labelling her work correctly.
Two supporting rules make this workable: numbers written in figures count as one word ('20–30' = 1), and abbreviations count as the word they replace ('veg.' = 1, same as 'vegetables'). Without the second rule, a student can beat the limit by abbreviating everything, which defeats the purpose.
The deeper point for the class: whichever convention is used, it must be applied identically to every script, and it must be known in advance. A word limit that is interpreted differently by two examiners converts a test of summarising into a test of which bundle a script lands in.