Summarizing: How to effectively summarize the work of others. Welcome back! Student Learning Commons services are here for you this Fall -- both in-person and online. On this page Strategies for summarizing A summary case study Conclusion. Try these steps for writing summaries: Select a short passage about one to four sentences that supports an idea in your paper. Knowing how to summarize something you have read, seen, or heard is a valuable skill, one you have probably used in many writing assignments.
It is important, though, to recognize when you must go beyond describing, explaining, and restating texts and offer a more complex analysis. This handout will help you distinguish between summary and analysis and avoid inappropriate summary in your academic writing. Not necessarily. If your assignment requires an argument with a thesis statement and supporting evidence—as many academic writing assignments do—then you should limit the amount of summary in your paper.
You might use summary to provide background, set the stage, or illustrate supporting evidence, but keep it very brief: a few sentences should do the trick. Most of your paper should focus on your argument. Our handout on argument will help you construct a good one. Writing a summary of what you know about your topic before you start drafting your actual paper can sometimes be helpful. You may also want to try some other pre-writing activities that can help you develop your own analysis.
Outlining, freewriting, and mapping make it easier to get your thoughts on the page. Check out our handout on brainstorming for some suggested techniques. Never put any of your own ideas, opinions, or interpretations into the summary. This means you have to be very careful of your word choice.
Write using "summarizing language. Since it is much more common to summarize just a single idea or point from a text in this type of summarizing rather than all of its main points , it is important to make sure you understand the larger points of the original text. For example, you might find that an article provides an example that opposes its main point in order to demonstrate the range of conversations happening on the topic it covers.
This is the place to put those. This is also a good place to state or restate the things that are most important for your readers to remember after reading your summary. Skip to content Drafting. Why Summarize? 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.
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. What Makes Something a Summary? Significantly condense the original text. Provide accurate representations of the main points of the text they summarize.
Avoid personal opinion. This approach has two significant problems, though: First , it no longer correctly represents the original text, so it misleads your reader about the ideas presented in that text.
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