Summarizing

Introduction

A summary is a short overview of the main points of a text. The purpose of a summary is to quickly give the reader or listener an idea of what this material is saying. You may find it helpful to create summaries of your own work, but more often, you will create summaries of material by other authors, such as articles, plays, films, lectures, stories, or presentations. When you finish reading a text, it’s a great idea to stop for a moment and write a summary of what you just read.

At some point in your classes, you will likely be given an assignment to summarize a specific text, an assignment in which summary is the sole intent. You will also use summaries in more holistic ways, though, incorporating them along with paraphrase, quotation, and your own opinions into more complex pieces of writing. You might summarize for several reasons, both in your time as a student and in your life outside of education.

Here are some common ones:

• A summary can show your understanding of the main points of an assigned reading or viewing, so your instructor might ask you to summarize in order to know that you’ve understood the material.
• You might summarize a section from a source, or even the whole source, when the ideas in that source are critical to an assignment you are working on and you feel they need to be included, but they would take up too much space in their original form.
• You might also summarize when the general ideas from a source are important to include in your work, but the details included in the same section as those main ideas aren’t needed for you to make your point. For example, technical documents or in-depth studies might go into much, much more detail than you are likely to need to support a point you are making for a general audience. These are situations in which a summary might be a good option.
• Summarizing is also an excellent way to double-check that you understand a text–if you can summarize the ideas in it, you likely have a good grasp on the information it is presenting. This can be helpful for school-related work, such as studying for an exam or researching a topic for a paper, but is also useful in daily life when you encounter texts on topics that are personally or professionally interesting to you.

Writing a Summary

Summary Writing Format

• When writing a summary, remember that it should be in the form of a paragraph.
• A summary begins with an introductory sentence that states the text’s title, author and main point of the text as you see it.
• A summary is written in your own words.
• A summary contains only the ideas of the original text. Do not insert any of your own opinions, interpretations, deductions or comments into a summary.
• Identify in order the significant sub-claims the author uses to defend the main point.
• Copy word-for-word three separate passages from the essay that you think support and/or defend the main point of the essay as you see it.
• Cite each passage by first signaling the work and the author, put “quotation marks” around the passage you chose, and put the number of the paragraph where the passages can be found immediately after the passage.
• Using source material from the essay is important. Why? Because defending claims with source material is what you will be asked to do when writing papers for your college professors.
• Write a last sentence that “wraps” up your summary; often a simple rephrasing of the main point.

Summary Writing Process

One major challenge with summary writing is deciding what to include and what to leave out. A bit of instruction on the process to follow, along with useful techniques, will have you writing expert summaries in no time.

• Read the text for understanding, without editing. Make sure you understand the content, including major and minor sections, as well as the overlying message being conveyed. Look closely at topic sentences and key words repeated throughout.
• Read through the material and cross out non-vital information. Underline what you believe to be the most important points, even if those points are words or phrases.
• Write your summary in your own words. Follow both the organization of the original as well as its tone, though you need to make sure your own point of view is purely objective (reporting content of the text, only). Opinions should not appear in a summary. Any words or phrases from the original need to be properly documented and punctuated.
• Your summary should be 15 to 20% the length of the original.
• Be sure to go back when you’ve finished your summary and compare it to the original for accuracy.

How to Construct a Summary

• Decide what part of the source is most relevant to your argument.
• Pick out the most important sentences in that part of the source. In most cases, you’ll focus on the main points.
• Paraphrase those sentences. If they include any important or memorable phrases, quote those in your paraphrases. List the paraphrased sentences in the order they occur in the original.
• Add any other information that readers might need to understand how your paraphrased sentences connect to one another.
• Revise the list so that it reads not like a list but like a paragraph.

Like traditional essays, summaries have an introduction, a body, and a conclusion. What these components look like will vary some based on the purpose of the summary you’re writing. The introduction, body, and conclusion of work focused specifically around summarizing something is going to be a little different than in work where summary is not the primary goal.

Introducing a Summary

One of the trickier parts of creating a summary is making it clear that this is a summary of someone else’s work; these ideas are not your original ideas. You will almost always begin a summary with an introduction to the author, article, and publication so the reader knows what we are about to read.

In summary-focused work, this introduction should accomplish a few things:

Introduce the name of the author whose work you are summarizing.

Introduce the title of the text being summarized.

Introduce where this text was presented (if it’s an art installation, where is it being shown? If it’s an article, where was that article published? Not all texts will have this component–for example, when summarizing a book written by one author, the title of the book and name of that author are sufficient information for your readers to easily locate the work you are summarizing).

State the main ideas of the text you are summarizing—just the big-picture components.

Give context when necessary. Is this text responding to a current event? That might be important to know. Does this author have specific qualifications that make them an expert on this topic? This might also be relevant information.

So, for example, if you were to get an assignment asking you to summarize Matthew Hutson’s Atlantic article, “Beyond the Five Senses” (found at www.theatlantic.com) an introduction for that summary might look something like this:

In his July 2017 article in The Atlantic, “Beyond the Five Senses,” Matthew Hutson explores ways in which potential technologies might expand our sensory perception of the world. He notes that some technologies, such as cochlear implants, are already accomplishing a version of this for people who do not have full access to one of the five senses. In much of the article, though, he seems more interested in how technology might expand the ways in which we sense things. Some of these technologies are based in senses that can be seen in nature, such as echolocation, and others seem more deeply rooted in science fiction. However, all the examples he gives consider how adding new senses to the ones we already experience might change how we perceive the world around us.

However, you will probably find yourself more frequently using summary as just one component of work with a wide range of goals (not just a goal to “summarize X”).

Summary introductions in these situations still generally need to:

Name the author.

Name the text being summarized.

State just the relevant context, if there is any (maybe the author has a specific credential that makes their work on this topic carry more weight than it would otherwise, or maybe the study they generated is now being used as a benchmark for additional research).

Introduce the author’s full name (first and last names) the first time you summarize part of their text. If you summarize pieces of the same text more than once in a work you are writing, each time you use their text after that initial introduction of the source, you will only use the author’s last name as you introduce that next summary component.

How to Mix Quotation With Summary

A long summary can make readers feel that you and they are too distant from an important source. So when you write a summary as long as half a page, look for memorable phrases that you can quote within your summary.

“Colomb and Williams emphasize that drafting is “an act of discovery” that can fuel a writer’s creative thinking. They acknowledge that some writers have to draft carefully and stick closely to their outlines, but they advise writers to draft as freely and as openly as they can. They encourage even slow and careful drafters to be open to new ideas and surprises and not to be limited by what they do before drafting. They still stress the value of steady work that follows a plan: for example, writing a little bit every day rather than all at once “in a fit of desperate inspiration.” But they show writers how to make the best of a plan while hoping that you will “discover what your storyboard has missed.”[2]

When you add a few quotations to your summary, you seem a more lively writer. You give readers an idea of your source without quoting so much that your paper reads like a cut-and-paste job. If you have pages that are mostly summary and paraphrase, add a few notable quotations that will liven up your writing.

Example

ORIGINAL TEXT

“For nearly 1,400 years Islam, though diverse in sectarian practice and ethnic tradition, has provided a unifying faith for peoples stretching from the Atlantic to the Indian Ocean and beyond. Starting in the 1500s, Western ascendancy, which culminated in colonization, eroded once glorious Muslim empires and reduced the influence of Islam. After the breakup of the Ottoman Empire following World War I and the decline of European colonial empires following World War II, Muslim nations adopted Western ideologies–communism, socialism, secular nationalism, and capitalism. Yet most Muslims remained poor and powerless. Their governments, secular regimes often backed by the West, were corrupt and repressive” (Belt 78).

Belt, Don. “The World of Islam.” National Geographic. January 2002: 76-85. Print.

POORLY-WRITTEN SUMMARY

Despite Western-style governments, Muslim countries are mired in deep poverty and radical governments. This despite the fact that the religion has existed for several centuries. European colonization ruined the Islamic religion for a long time. You would find it hard to imagine how many Muslims there really are out there.

This summary:

• does not follow the order of information found in the original
• the phrase “several centuries” minimizes the historic significance of the religion
• sentence-level problems like “mired,” “you would,” and “out there” change the formal tone of the original to a biased, informal representation
• it is approximately half the length of the original, which is too long
• no credit is given to the original source

WELL-WRITTEN SUMMARY

For almost 1,500 years, Islam has united people globally. Western interference, through colonization and political ideologies, has not improved Muslims’ lives (Belt 78).

This summary:

• follows the order of the original
• maintains the original tone
• is approximately 20% of the original’s length
• is properly documented and punctuated

Summary

Summarizing involves condensing the main idea of a source into a much shorter overview. A summary outlines a source’s most important points and general position. When summarizing a source, it is a good idea to use a citation to give credit to the original author. You should reference the author or source in the appropriate citation method at the end of the summary.

Sources:

“Text: Summary Writing.” By Lumen Learning. Retrieved from https://courses.lumenlearning.com/waymaker-level3-english-gen/chapter/text-summary-writing/ Licensed under CC-BY-NC

“Paraphrase and Summary.” By Lumen Learning. Retrieved from: https://courses.lumenlearning.com/olemiss-writing100/chapter/paraphrase-and-summary/ Licensed under: CC-BY-NC

“How to Write a Summary.” By Lumen Learning. Retrieved from: https://courses.lumenlearning.com/englishcomp1v2xmaster/chapter/how-to-write-a-summary/Licensed under: CC-BY

“Writing Summaries.” By Open Oregon. Retrieved from: https://openoregon.pressbooks.pub/wrd/chapter/writing-summaries/ Licensed under: CC-BY-NC