Verbal Ability – Paragraph Summary Tips

This mini-article consists of 3 tricks that will help you solve Para Summary questions. Presented in the form of a digest, you can quickly browse through these rules and revise them at your own leisure time. Here is the first set of rules:

Trick-1: Summarize in your own words

The key in summary writing questions is that you need to find an answer option that best represents the main idea and theme of the paragraph. In order to identify the main idea in the answer options, you should first summarize the paragraph in your own words. Once you have summarized the paragraph, you can match your summary with the answer options and identify the answer option which is closest to your summary.

Trick-2: Stick to the subject of the paragraph and do not violate its scope

A guiding rule that you should keep in mind is that the option should contain the main subject of the paragraph and should not violate the scope of the paragraph. The scope of the paragraph refers to the range of ideas covered by the paragraph. You should stay within these ideas and not change the topic to something that goes beyond the scope. For example, if the paragraph is about a certain city in a certain state, the summary should also be this city. It should not be about the state as this will violate the scope of the given paragraph.

Trick-3: A single point of the paragraph cannot be its summary

You should always keep in mind that a single point in the paragraph cannot be the summary of the paragraph. The summary of the paragraph is an answer option that encapsulates the major points of the paragraph and ensures that the main theme of the paragraph is covered. Any answer option which simply highlights a point from the paragraph (even though this point might be a valid one) but misses the main point cannot be correct answer for the question.

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