**7.4 Classification and coding of units of meaning**

Except in a few cases, all of the essential meaning-bearing content of the annotations was contained in the verb extension. This was not unexpected since students were basically following the standard format for writing an annotation, as already observed in the coding of the principal verb. This data was analyzed to identify the nature of the content students were using to construct the summaries that, as mentioned before, comprised the annotations. In this phase of the analysis, the deductive approach continued to apply not only with reference to the essay topic but also against the backdrop of established criteria for writing a summary. However, the inductive was also applied at this stage since one also needed to examine attributes inherent in the text to identify what they revealed about the strategies the students were using to construct their summaries. Based on a preliminary review, four categories of text were identified.
