Paragraph Order and Summary: The Tsunami Stones
Yui is on the paragraph-ordering item. The five sentences, labelled A–E, are:
A. These stone markers, some more than 600 years old, carry warnings carved in characters that rain has softened. B. Yet for decades after modern seawalls went up, many residents treated the stones as folklore rather than as engineering. C. In several coastal villages in western Japan, the highest ground is marked not by a temple or a tower but by a slab of stone. D. After the 2011 disaster, however, local governments began to map the stones again and to write them into evacuation plans. E. The message is almost always the same: do not build below this point.
Yui has written C – A – E – D – B. She cannot decide whether B or D belongs at the end, and she has one minute left. The next item asks her to summarise the completed paragraph in 25 words or fewer.
1. Give the correct order and show the two signals that decide between Yui's order and yours.
Read the worked answer
Correct order: C – A – E – B – D.
Signal 1, anaphora. C ends with 'a slab of stone' - indefinite, first mention. A opens 'These stone markers', which can only follow that introduction. E opens 'The message', which must refer back to 'warnings carved' in A. So C–A–E is fixed before any contrast is considered.
Signal 2, the two contrast connectives. B's 'Yet' and D's 'however' cannot both start the contrast, and D also contains 'After the 2011 disaster', a fixed time anchor that belongs last. B contrasts with E: the stones warn do not build below this point, yet residents ignored them. D then contrasts with B's neglect: after 2011, however, the stones were taken seriously again.
Yui's order puts D before B, which leaves 'Yet' contrasting with nothing and places the 2011 revaluation before the decades of neglect - the chronology runs backwards. Rule of thumb: with two contrastive connectives, the later one marks the stronger turn, and an explicit date phrase wins the final position.
2. Write the 25-word summary and explain what you deleted and why.
Read the worked answer
'Stone markers in western Japan, long dismissed as folklore after seawalls were built, have been remapped and added to evacuation plans since 2011.' (25 words)
How it was built:
- The topic is the stones, not the seawalls or the villages: keep 'stone markers' and 'western Japan'.
- Two events matter - dismissal and revival. 'After seawalls were built' dates the dismissal; 'since 2011' dates the revival. Everything else is setting.
- Deleted: the imagery ('characters that rain has softened'), the quoted message, the six-hundred-year age, and 'local governments', all of which the word limit cannot carry.
Warning: a summary is not all five sentences compressed. A's description and E's message are supporting detail; squeezing them in produces an over-long summary that still misses the point. Test your sentence by asking what changed over time - if the answer names both the neglect and the revival, the summary is doing its job.
3. The same five sentences are reused, but the paragraph must now describe a single village. Which sentences must change, and how?
Read the worked answer
Three, and only slightly.
- C: 'In several coastal villages' → 'In one coastal village' (or name it). This is the only sentence with a plural setting.
- A: 'These stone markers' → 'This stone marker' or 'These stones', depending on how many the village has. Number agreement is the point being tested.
- D: 'local governments began to map the stones' → 'the village began to map its stones' or 'the villagers began to map them', because a single village has no 'governments'.
B and E can stand unchanged: 'many residents' is compatible with one village, and 'The message' is generic.
The judgement being tested is that discourse revision is local. Students often rewrite the whole paragraph when the change of scope touches one noun phrase per sentence. Find the words that carry number and scope - quantifiers, plurals, institutional nouns - change those, and leave the rest alone.