A study investigated the effects of specific guidelines in the taking and rating of tests of summarizing ability. The subjects were 63 native-Hebrew-speaking students enrolled in English-as-a-Second-Language (ESL) courses at the Seminar Hakibbutzim Teacher Training College in Tel Aviv (Israel). The subjects were given two sets of instructions (guided and minimal) for summarizing texts in both English and Hebrew. The guided instructions gave specific directions on how to read the texts and on how to write the summaries, while the minimal instructions gave traditional minimum direction. Two scoring keys were developed from the summaries of nine Hebrew-speaking and nine English-speaking experts, respectively. The summary guidelines developed in this case did not make a sizable contribution to summary development, but an item-by-item analysis revealed that the guided instructions were both helpful and detrimental. In some cases, the guided instructions helped respondents to identify key elements to summarize, but in other cases, they may have dissuaded the respondents from including details that in fact proved essential in the eyes of the experts upon whom the rating key was based. (Author/DJD)