Muhammad W.

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. Why Summarize? 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. What Makes Something a Summary? When you ask yourself, after reading an article (and maybe even reading it two or three times), “What was that article about?” 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’s main points, you are summarizing. Summaries have several key characteristics. You’re summarizing well when you Use your own words. Significantly condense the original text. Provide accurate representations of the main points of the text they summarize. Avoid personal opinion. Summaries are much shorter than the original material—a general rule is that they should be no more than 10% to 15% the length of the original, and they are often even shorter than this.