22 Color-Coding a Summary Article
How to Color-Code a Summary Article
In the early stages of a summarizing process, your instructors will want you to color-code the article to be summarized. This is a process that you may do electronically using the editing features of MS Word, and Adobe, or by using an tablet + e-Pencil. You may also do it on a printed copy using regular highlighters or multicolored pens or highlighters.
The main purpose of color coding is to identify the main ideas that support each of the subtopics in the summary prompt. Keep in mind that color coding is complementary to the addition of margin notes. In other words, the summary article should also contain margin notes.
You will work on this color-coding process gradually over the next few days. Eventually, the summary article should have substantial color-coding.
Important:
This color-coding process is subject to frequent revisions and updates. Most likely, you’ll need to change the highlights as you move along in the preparation of your summary. For example, excerpts that were initially highlighted in “yellow” or “light blue” may change to “green” after you have read the article a few times and, most importantly, after discussing these ideas with your classmates. The same will happen with your margin notes: you may add or delete margin notes. This is why it is important to learn how to highlight and change/delete/erase/ highlights using the features of MS Word and Adobe Acrobat.
To color code the article, follow these steps:
- Begin the reading process by underlining the article. Underlining will make you interact with the text the first time that you read it. The underlined information may or may not end up in your summary.
- Then, read the summary article again. During the second reading of the article, you should begin to highlight sentences or paragraphs, that express important information about each of the subtopics of this summary. Alternatively, you may also color-box sections of the text (see the YouTube video link below). For this selective summary, you will apply three different colors of your choice:
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- The first color will be for subtopic # 1
- The second color will be for subtopic # 2
- The third color will be for subtopic # 3:
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- Add an Inscription or key: On the first page of the article, please insert a key, indicating what exactly each color stands for.
Watch this YouTube Video “How to put a colored box around a text”
Samples:
These are examples of what color coding looks like when ESL 118 students submit sources with the research papers that they have to write for that class:
