Summary under a word limit: fidelity versus fluency
The summary question on the Intermediate English paper gives candidates a 430-word article about Valletta's car-free Sunday pilot and asks for a summary of no more than 70 words. The instructions read: 'Use your own words. Include only the main points.' One candidate, Nadia, submits 84 words. Her draft opens: 'The article is about how Valletta went car-free on Sundays, which I think is a great idea because pollution is a big problem.' She then copies a 22-word sentence from paragraph three verbatim: 'Retailers reported a 40 per cent drop in footfall during the pilot, although restaurants and cafés saw takings rise by about a quarter.' She ends: 'So basically the council should make it permanent.' The three main points the mark scheme rewards are that the pilot ran for three months, that traffic and noise complaints fell, and that businesses disagreed about the effect. Nadia's draft covers only the first two.
1. Identify three features of Nadia's draft that conflict with the instructions, and explain what each one costs her in marks.
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Three breaches, each costing marks differently.
1. Personal opinion. 'which I think is a great idea' and 'the council should make it permanent' are Nadia's views, not the article's. Summary marks reward source content, so a marker cannot credit a point the passage never makes - and the words use up a limit that is already tight.
2. Verbatim copying. The 22-word sentence is lifted whole. 'Use your own words' is an instruction, not a preference, and a copied string usually shows the candidate understood the words rather than the point. It should be compressed to something like 'retailers reported 40% less footfall while cafés and restaurants did better'.
3. Length and selection. At 84 words the draft is 14 over the limit, and it has spent the surplus on opinion instead of on the third main point, that businesses disagreed. Over-length is normally penalised directly, but the deeper problem is that it reveals no selection took place: a summary is judged on what was left out as much as on what was kept.
The fix is not to trim the final sentence but to cut opinion first, compress the copied sentence second, and add the missing point third.
2. Rewrite the draft as a summary of no more than 70 words that satisfies the instructions. State your word count and explain two choices you made.
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Rewrite (61 words):
'Valletta held a three-month car-free Sunday pilot scheme in which the city centre was closed to cars. Complaints about traffic and noise fell during the trial, which supporters saw as evidence of success. Local businesses, however, disagreed about the scheme's effects: retailers reported that footfall dropped by 40 per cent, while restaurants and cafés saw takings rise by about a quarter.'
Choice 1 - kept the figure but cut the framing. The 40 per cent matters because it is the evidence behind the third main point, not decoration. What went was the reporting verb padding and the contrastive 'although', replaced by a colon that does the same job in one character.
Choice 2 - merged the three-month detail into the opening clause rather than giving it a sentence of its own. A separate sentence would have implied it was a distinct point of equal weight; as an adjective it costs two words and still registers with the marker.
Notice that nothing has been added and no opinion survives. Every clause can be traced to the passage.
3. Nadia argues that '40 per cent' is a detail and should be dropped so she can fit the third main point. Decide whether you agree, with reference to the instructions and to how summaries are marked.
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Partly agree, but the premise is wrong.
She is right that a summary cannot carry every statistic, and right that the third main point is worth more than a number. If the only choice were 'the figure' or 'businesses disagreed', the point wins every time.
But this is a false choice. In the passage the figure is how the disagreement is expressed: retailers lost footfall while cafés gained. Keeping it as a six-word clause ('footfall dropped by 40 per cent') buys the supporting detail cheaply, and it signals to the marker that the candidate has read to the end of the paragraph, not just its topic sentence.
Where Nadia's instinct is sound is on the second figure: 'about a quarter' can go, because 'restaurants and cafés saw takings rise' already carries the contrast. The test is not importance in the source but cost in words - a detail earns its place only if the point collapses without it.
So: keep one figure, cut the other, and never sacrifice a main point for either.