Day 3. Summaries and Spoilers

One of the important ideas I've had about how I want to build the library of stories is doing the summaries in two parts: a first part that can work as a quick introduction to the story but no spoilers, and a second part that completes the story (and thus might indeed contain spoilers). By breaking the summary up into two parts like that, it will be possible to repurpose the story summaries for different purposes.

Summary 1: This summary would be useful for people who are browsing a table of contents, deciding what to read. It might introduce you to the main characters, with maybe a bit of information about the plot, but without giving anything away that would detract from the pleasure of reading the story itself.

Summary 2: This would continue Summary 1 (not replace it), containing information about the plot, and even the ending of the story. This could be useful for researching, for teachers looking for materials to share with their students, etc.

So the idea would be to default always to the Summary 1 (no spoilers!), but allowing people to see the additional part of the summary if they want.

I've never done anything like this, but I am increasingly sure that the main value I can provide annotating the stories is doing good summaries so that people are not just trying to browse by the title or by skimming. Of course, that is an excuse for me to read lots of books too! I'm guessing I will get really good to doing summaries with some practice. I'll start this summer... and summer is less than ten days away! Here's what the countdown clock says over at my class blog. :-)