Summary

Summarizing is part of every college student’s daily life. When you take careful notes from a lecture, you are summarizing what the professor says. When you read your college textbook, you underline or highlight main ideas, which is a form of summarization. You may also be assigned to write summaries of books, articles, or films, since this form of writing tests your understanding of what someone else has said or written.

What is a written summary? It is an objective condensation of the main ideas of another person. It is written to give readers a clear idea of an article or book they may not have read.

Steps in the Process of Summarizing Material

1.Make sure you understand the details of your assignment. Are you supposed to summarize only or to summarize and interpret or to summarize and compare? If phrases such as these are part of the assignment, you will know that just summarizing is not enough to meet the requirements. Moreover, check to see how long your summary should be; usually it should be no longer than one-quarter the length of the original.

2.Read the selection through once for general understanding.

3.Reread. This time look for the author’s main focus. Turn the title into a question which you try to answer as you reread. Highlight or underline main ideas. Make notes in the margin to summarize the main ideas of each paragraphin a few words.

4.Notice how much space is given to different topics. If the author uses two pages on one topic and only a half-page on another, the first idea is probably more important than the second.

5.Write a rough draft of your summary. Begin by identifying the author and title of the book or magazine. Remember to underline books and names of periodicals. Put into quotation marks the titles of articles.

George Will, in a Newsweek article entitled "Is a Third Party Necessary?" states that . . .

Megatrends, a book by John Naisbitt, discusses . . .

If information about the author’s background is important to the summary, then briefly add it.

In Paradigms Lost, John Simon, a major critic of the arts, points out that . . .

6.The body of your summary should include major points made in the article or book and, if there is space, the major support for each of these points. The conclusion reached in the article should conclude your summary.

7.Leave out minor details, illustrations, anecdotes, and other unimportant material.

8.You may want to use a few short, direct quotations in your summary to give your reader a taste of the original writing or to emphasize an important point. If you want to shorten a quotation you may use ellipsis (three dots) to indicate that something has been left out of the original.

Wills comments, "If Anderson runs again, he runs the risk of resembling William Jennings Bryan at the Scopes trial . . . ." (The sentence also ends, so a period is added to the three dots.)

9.Use the same tense throughout your summary. Present tense is most often used for summaries of literature, past tense for biographies or history. In summarizing other forms of writing, choose a tense that seems to fit and "stick to it" throughout the summary.

10.A good summary is abbreviated, but it should still be smooth and logical.

Compare the following article with the written summary that follows it.

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