AA: I'm Avi Arditti, Rosanne Skirble is away. With us this week on Wordmaster: Emily Kissner, a ...(1) teacher in Pennsylvania and ...(2) of a new book called "Summarizing, Paraphrasing and Retelling."

EMILY KISSNER: "When you summarize, you need to ...(3) what's important ...(4) -- look for the main ideas. And ...(5) is to look at what the author ...(6) over and over again, because ...(7) what's important.

"And then you need to condense those main ideas. You need to ...(8) the repeated ideas. You need to ...(9) the trivia, those ...(10) that are ...(11) to keep you interested but ...(12) to the main idea."

AA: "And then from there, you've ...(13) down, you're looking for the important ideas, how do you begin to ...(14) on paper?"

EMILY KISSNER: "Different ...(15) use different...(16). Hmm... there's been a lot of research on retelling, which ...(17) retell the important ideas to someone else. Even ...(18) telling you it's good or bad, retelling what you've read ...(19) something about the way you store the information ...(20) and helps you to understand it better. So one ...(21) summarizing is just to turn to someone else and say 'Hey, I ...(22) this, listen to what the ...(23) talking about.'

"And from there, you can maybe ...(24) some of the main ideas. And then if you need to write a ...(25) to give to someone else, you can ...(26) look for the connections between those ideas and then use those to ...(27) your summary."

AA: "You write in your book here, you say: 'Left to ...(28) devices, most students write the topic of a text when ...(29) to write a main idea.' Now what's the difference between the topic and the main idea?"

EMILY KISSNER: "The topic is usually ...(30) to which everything in the text refers. So, ...(31), if you were reading about dinosaurs, the topic of the book could be 'dinosaurs.' A main idea is usually a ...(32) that explains why the topic is ...(33) or explains something about the topic. So ...(34) about dinosaurs might be 'dinosaurs ...(35) to many unusual...(36).' And so then everything in the text ...(37) to that main idea."

AA: "Do you find these ...(38) summarizing to be ...(39) at all, or especially helpful, to English learners?"

EMILY KISSNER: "Where I ...(40) right now, we actually have ...(41) a significant population of students ...(42) are learning English, and one ...(43) that I found especially helpful for them was looking for ...(44) in the article or the...(45). And so we would ...(46) their ..(47) first, and then they would look for key words that were important.

"And using some of these techniques ...(48) finding the main idea and looking for the ...(49) of the text helped them to -- by the end of the year, they were writing some really ...(50) summaries. And that really shows that they were ...(51) the texts."

AA: "What would ...(52a) look like?"

EMILY KISSNER: "A lot of students, and a lot of...(52b), use what's called the copy-and-...(53) method: 'Oh geez, I have...

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