While it is extensive and perhaps not immediately relevant to the English content area curriculum, The New York Times website provides a wealth of articles which can easily be utilized to help students exercise their writing skills. The site provides various pages, differentiated by topic or journal format, and provides links to these pages on the left side of the Home Page. These pages include World News, U.S. News, Politics, Sports, Technology, Science, Health, Arts, and Opinion, and each page offers relevant ground-breaking news in its respective field. The pages oftentimes also include pertinent images or videos.
If I were to do a summary writing exercise with my students, I would choose one manageable article from each of the pages listed above and post the list of titles as links on my classroom website. I would then give students the option to choose an article from the title list that they would like to read and summarize. They would be expected to access the article online, read it, and copy/paste the most important sentences from the article into a Word document (making sure that they put the sentence excerpts into quotations.) In the same Word document, they would construct a paragraph summarizing the main points of the article. If they choose to incorporate key words, phrases, or quotations, they would be expected to cite the name of the article's author. Finally, students would create a bibliographic entry for the article.
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