ABSTRACT
The ability to summarize is often taken for granted. Yet summarization is actually a 21st century skill as listed by the Partnership of 21st Century Literacies. The summary card is a quick way to use summarizing in the classroom. This card is one that is an informal, summative assessment of a student's reading. Cornell Notes are a topic on which people write entire books. The author first learnt about them through the AVID program; the Notes are dual-entry journals with one side indicating student-developed questions or headings about a reading selection and the other indicating answers to those questions or information related to those sub-topics. The executive summary incorporates many different formats and text structures. When writing an executive summary, students should be encouraged to do the following: keeping the language strong and positive; writing no more than two pages; using different text structures such as subtitles, bold fonts, bullets; and writing in short, readable paragraphs.
