How Do You Summarize What You Read

A summary is a short overview of the principal points of a text. The purpose of a summary is to rapidly give the reader or listener an idea of what this fabric is saying. Yous may find it helpful to create summaries of your own work, merely more oft, you will create summaries of material by other authors, such every bit manufactures, plays, films, lectures, stories, or presentations.

Why Summarize?

At some point in your classes, yous will likely be given an assignment to summarize a specific text, an assignment in which summary is the sole intent. You lot will also employ summaries in more holistic ways, though, incorporating them forth with paraphrase, quotation, and your own opinions into more circuitous pieces of writing. You might summarize for several reasons, both in your fourth dimension as a pupil and in your life outside of education.

Here are some common ones:

• A summary can show your agreement of the main points of an assigned reading or viewing, and then your instructor might inquire you to summarize in order to know that you've understood the material.
• You might summarize a department 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, only they would take up too much space in their original grade.
• 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 chief ideas aren't needed for you to make your point. For example, technical documents or in-depth studies might become into much, much more detail than you are likely to need to support a indicate you are making for a general audition. These are situations in which a summary might be a skilful 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 accept a good grasp on the information it is presenting. This tin be helpful for school-related work, such equally studying for an exam or researching a topic for a paper, but is likewise useful in daily life when you see texts on topics that are personally or professionally interesting to yous.

What Makes Something a Summary?

When you ask yourself, after reading an article (and perhaps even reading it two or three times), "What was that article nigh?" and you end up jotting down–from memory, without returning to the original article to use its language or phrases–three things that stood out as the author'south main points, you lot are summarizing. Summaries accept several key characteristics.

You're summarizing well when you

• Use your ain words.
• Significantly condense the original text.
• Provide authentic representations of the main points of the text they summarize.
• Avert personal opinion.

Summaries are much shorter than the original material—a general rule is that they should be no more than than 10% to 15% the length of the original, and they are oftentimes even shorter than this.

Information technology tin be easy and feel natural, when summarizing an article, to include our own opinions. We may hold or disagree strongly with what this writer is saying, or we may want to compare their information with the data presented in another source, or we may want to share our own opinion on the topic. Frequently, our opinions slip into summaries even when we work diligently to keep them separate. These opinions are not the task of a summary, though. A summary should only highlight the main points of the article.

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Focusing on just the ideas that best support a signal nosotros want to make or ignoring ideas that don't support that point can be tempting. This approach has ii significant problems, though:

Starting time, it no longer correctly represents the original text, and then it misleads your reader nearly the ideas presented in that text. A summary should give your reader an accurate idea of what they can expect if we pick up the original article to read.

Second, information technology undermines your own brownie as an author to non represent this information accurately. If readers cannot trust an author to accurately correspond source information, they may not be equally probable to trust that author to thoroughly and accurately present a reasonable point.

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How Should I Organize a Summary?

Like traditional essays, summaries have an introduction, a body, and a conclusion. What these components look like volition vary some based on the purpose of the summary y'all'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 non the main goal.

Introducing a Summary

I 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 brainstorm a summary with an introduction to the author, article, and publication so the reader knows what we are nigh to read. This information will announced over again in your bibliography, but is also useful here and so the reader can follow the conversation happening in your paper. Y'all will desire to provide it in both places.

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

• Introduce the name of the author whose piece of work yous are summarizing.
• Introduce the title of the text being summarized.
• Innovate where this text was presented (if information technology'south an fine art installation, where is it existence shown? If information technology'southward an commodity, where was that commodity published? Non all texts will have this component–for case, when summarizing a book written by 1 author, the title of the book and name of that writer are sufficient data for your readers to easily locate the piece of work you are summarizing).
• State the main ideas of the text you are summarizing—but 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 data.

So, for example, if y'all were to get an assignment request you to summarize Matthew Hutson's Atlantic article, "Beyond the V Senses" (found at world wide web.theatlantic.com) an introduction for that summary might wait something like this:

In his July 2017 commodity in The Atlantic, "Beyond the 5 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 practise not take total access to one of the five senses. In much of the article, though, he seems more interested in how technology might aggrandize 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 of the examples he gives consider how adding new senses to the ones we already feel might modify how we perceive the world around the states.

Yet, you will probably notice yourself more frequently using summary every bit only ane 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 existence summarized.
• State just the relevant context, if in that location is any (maybe the author has a specific credential that makes their work on this topic comport more weight than information technology would otherwise, or possibly the written report they generated is at present being used every bit a benchmark for additional research).
• Introduce the author's full proper noun (offset and last names) the first fourth dimension y'all summarize part of their text. If you summarize pieces of the aforementioned text more than than one time in a work yous are writing, each time you use their text afterward that initial introduction of the source, you will only use the author's last name as you innovate that side by side summary component.

Presenting the "Meat" (or Body) of a Summary

Once again, this will wait a footling different depending on the purpose of the summary work you are doing. Regardless of how you lot are using summary, you will innovate the main ideas throughout your text with transitional phrasing, such as "One of [Author's] biggest points is…," or "[Writer's] primary concern well-nigh this solution is…."

If y'all are responding to a "write a summary of 10" consignment, the torso of that summary will expand on the primary ideas you stated in the introduction of the summary, although this will all still be very condensed compared to the original. What are the central points the writer makes about each of those big-moving picture main ideas? Depending on the kind of text you are summarizing, you may want to note how the primary ideas are supported (although, once more, be conscientious to avoid making your own opinion well-nigh those supporting sources known).

When you lot are summarizing with an end goal that is broader than simply summary, the body of your summary volition still nowadays the idea from the original text that is relevant to the signal you are making (condensed and in your ain words).

Since information technology is much more mutual to summarize simply a single idea or point from a text in this type of summarizing (rather than all of its main points), information technology is of import to make sure you understand the larger points of the original text. For example, you lot might find that an article provides an example that opposes its main betoken in lodge to demonstrate the range of conversations happening on the topic it covers. This opposing signal, though, isn't the primary point of the article, and so but summarizing this one opposing instance would not be an accurate representation of the ideas and points in that text.

Final a Summary

For writing in which summary is the sole purpose, here are some ideas for your determination.

At present that we've gotten a little more data near the principal ideas of this slice, are in that location any connections or loose ends to necktie upwards that will assistance your reader fully understand the points existence fabricated in this text? This is the place to put those.

This is too a good place to country (or recapitulate) the things that are almost of import for your readers to remember later reading your summary.

When your writing has a primary goal other than summary, your decision should

• Include an in-text citation, if appropriate. (To larn how to exercise this correctly, see the give-and-take of in-text citation in "Crediting and Citing Your Sources," part of the "Using Sources Correctly" section of this text.)
• Talk over the summary y'all've merely presented. How does it support, illustrate, or give new information virtually the point you are making in your writing? Connect it to your own main bespeak for that paragraph so readers empathise conspicuously why it deserves the infinite it takes upward in your work. (Note that this is still not giving your opinion on the fabric you've summarized, just making connections betwixt it and your own main points.)

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Source: https://openoregon.pressbooks.pub/wrd/chapter/writing-summaries/

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