By Kate Marantz

I used this exercise to illustrate the difference between summary and  response--how before you respond to a text and bring yourself into the conversation, it's important to be able to step back and summarize or describe what the author is saying.

Hand out a postcard with a painting or other piece of artwork on it to each student, face down. This works best if the postcards are all of portraits, or landscapes, or any other common subject--the more similar the postcards, the harder (and better) the exercise.

Ask each student to write for five minutes, describing the artwork that is on the postcard, and to try not to let their neighbors see their postcard. They should NOT respond to it, or write about their associations with it, or even use "I" anywhere in their writing--this is only about writing about what is depicted on the postcard, using details like colors, shapes, and composition. They should try to write a paragraph that would give someone who hadn’t seen the picture a good idea of what it looks like--a "visual summary."

Now collect each student's piece of paper with their description on it and shuffle the pile. Ask them to place their postcard on their desk, face up, and then stand up and gather in the front of the room. Hand out a "summary" to each student (not their own) and then ask them to find the postcard that they think
is being described and stay at that desk. When everyone has found their "match," all the students should go back to their own desks and see if their peers made the correct match.

I then talk to the students about this exercise as a version of summary—how there was no judgment or analysis or response involved, only a "description" of what the artist is “saying” and what is depicted in the picture, so 
that their peers would know from their writing what the picture looked like. This, I suggest, is what a summary of a text should do: give the reader a good idea of what’s happening in the text (without them necessarily having read it). Summary should only address what the AUTHOR is saying--and that's something different than thinking about what emotions or ideas it might invoke for you, what it means to you, your response to it, what it makes you think of, etc.