Summarizing

What is Summarizing?

The technique of summarising involves presenting facts in a simplified form and demonstrating your understanding of the primary idea of the author. It serves as an example of how you may discuss the writer’s viewpoint without really using his or her words. It also gives you the opportunity to include a small portion of a larger work by another author.

The objective of summarising is to offer context for your argument or thesis by concisely outlining the main ideas of a theory or work.

Summarising is helpful in a variety of writing formats and stages of the writing process. Writing literature reviews, annotating a bibliography, supporting an argument, giving context for a paper’s topic, and summarising are all examples of summarising.

Summarising has the benefit of providing the “full picture,” which enables the reader to put what you are saying into context. In addition to the benefits for the reader, summarising helps you as a writer understand where you are heading with your work, what needs to be expanded upon, and whether you have understood the data you have gathered.

Features of Good Summary

• Provide comprehensive coverage of all the key ideas in the original book.
• Clearly state the main ideas of the original.
• It should be written as much as feasible in your own words and shouldn’t use too many quotation marks from the source.
• It shouldn’t contain any examples.
• Generally speaking, it should refrain from employing the same precise phrase structure as the original.
• It shouldn’t accentuate any of the original points too much or too little.
• It shouldn’t contain any additional details that aren’t there in the material you are summarising.
• Condensed, not expanded, from the original wording.
• A citation (reference) is required.
• It shouldn’t contain information that is only somewhat relevant.

Process of Summarizing

1. To understand the author’s intentions, read the piece first. This is an important step because an incomplete reading could result in a flawed summary. Note that a false summary constitutes plagiarism.
2. As you read the content you want to summarise, make notes; and highlight key arguments, points, and relationships between facts.
3. Write the thesis and key points in point form in your own words.
4. Choose the details that must be included for a complete summary of the author’s work. Make a list or group of the key concepts you want to cover in your summary. It is crucial that the summary accurately conveys the author’s position.
5. Explain any relationships between the material in your list’s bullets in a paragraph.
6. Look over the paragraph to see if there are any minor details or repetitive material. Remove superfluous descriptors, information, and examples from the summary.
7. To make sure your synopsis of the original work adequately captures its important points, read it again.
8. Make sure to specify the summary’s author and title as well as how it specifically connects to your study.
9. Contrary to good essay writing, the objective is to be succinct and generic rather than back up every assertion with evidence.

What can be Summarized?

• Results of the studies you are reporting on.
• Techniques or strategies used by others in the field.
• Different authors’ and academics’ perspectives on a topic.
• Ideas you’ve expressed in an essay at any point or in the end.
• The setting of the text you are examining.
• Topics unrelated to your paper yet important for setting the scene for your writing.
• The past events that led to the topic, event, or philosophy you are addressing.

Tips for Summarizing

1. In your initial sentence, provide the title and the author’s name.
2. The thesis or main idea of the author should be conveyed in the opening sentence or two of your summary in your own words.
3. Try to understand how the various stages of the explanation or argument are built up in groups of connected paragraphs while summarising a longer article.
4. If it is not done in the published version, divide the article into sections. Then, sum up the main points of each part in one or two sentences.
5. Eliminate concepts that are not truly essential to the text. Do not feel obligated to follow the author’s identical thought process.
6. Overall, leave off minor specifics and examples.
7. Keep opinions and personal responses out of your summaries; save them for discussions about the readings or tutorials.
8. Take care not to use the author’s words without permission. Even a handful of the author’s words must be cited by using quotation marks. Try drafting the initial matter of your summary without consulting the original content in order to avoid plagiarism.

Wrap Up

Similar to paraphrasing, a summary enables you to rephrase the ideas of another author. When writing a summary, you should concentrate on the key points of the original piece and omit the less crucial information.

You can condense the information using three strategies: note-taking, selection and deletion, and miniaturisation. You will develop your own custom blend of these strategies for each situation as you get more skilled at summarising. However, the presentation of the summary must be understandable writing that captures the main ideas of the original work.

A summary has two main objectives, i.e. to reproduce the main points of a text, highlighting the universal ideas that underlie the entire work; and to articulate these main points in clear, particular language.