Summary

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How to think about a summary:

Summaries are similar to blog posts. It is important to distinguish between personal blogs and professional blogs or learning blogs. Personal-blog posts often start off, "Today I ..." Professional or learning-blog posts start with a topic sentence. Personal-blog posts are interesting to a person's friends and family. Personal-blogs posts are about you and your experiences, so they only interest you, your friends, and your family. Professional or learning-blog posts are interesting to anyone interested in learning about the topic of the post. Professional or learning-blog posts are about topics that people study and contain useful facts and information on that topic. The differences between personal-blog and learning-blog posts are contrasted in the examples below.

Personal-blog post: Today I learned about the metric system. I read about meters, liters, and kilograms. This knowledge will be useful when I have to measure lengths, volumes, and masses in science labs. (Note, the example above uses many of the terms, but gives no useful information about meters, liters, kilograms, lengths, volumes, or masses.)

Learning-blog post: (Has a topic sentence, plus uses linking and transition phrases.) The metric system is used by scientist around the world. This is because a measurement system based on powers of 10 is easier to use. In the metric system, length is measured in meters. Small lengths are measured in millimeters. The liter is used to measure volume in the metric system. Volume is the amount of space occupied by an object. Kilograms are metric units that are used to measure........ (Note, each term or concept is explained. There are two parts in the text, the concept and its explanation.)