14.1 Summaries

A summary is a comprehensive and objective restatement of the main ideas of a text (an article, book, movie, event, etc.). By mastering the craft of summarizing, students put themselves in the position to do well on many college assignments, not just English essays.  In most fields (from the humanities to the soft and hard sciences) summary is a required task. College students are asked to summarize material for many different types of assignments. In some instances, summarizing one source is often the sole purpose of the entire assignment. Students might also be asked to summarize just one aspect of a larger project, such as a literature review, an abstract in a research paper, or a works consulted entry in an annotated bibliography.

Some summary assignments will expect students to condense material more than others. For example, when the summary is the sole purpose of the assignment, the student might be asked to include key supporting evidence, whereas an abstract might require students to boil down the source text to its bare-bones essentials.

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.
• Shorter than the original material.

It can be easy and feel natural, when summarizing an article, to include our own opinions. We may agree or disagree strongly with what this author is saying, or we may want to compare their information with the information presented in another source, or we may want to share our own opinion on the topic. Often, our opinions slip into summaries even when we work diligently to keep them separate. Unless the instructor states otherwise in the prompt, a summary should stay neutral. A summary should only highlight the main points of the article.

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

• First, it no longer correctly represents the original text. It misleads your reader about the ideas presented in that text. A summary should give your readers an accurate idea of what they can expect if they pick up the original article to read.
• Second, it undermines your credibility as an author. Authors need to represent information accurately. If readers cannot trust an author to accurately represent source information, they may not be as likely to trust that author to thoroughly and accurately present a reasonable point.

How Should I Organize a Summary?

Like traditional essays, summaries in essay form have an introduction, a body, and a conclusion. What these components look like will vary based on the purpose of the summary you’re writing. The introduction, body, and conclusion of work focused specifically on summarizing something is going to be a little different than in work where summary is not the primary goal.

Introducing a Summary

One 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 begin a summary with an introduction to the author, article, and publication so the reader knows what we are about to read. This information will appear again in your bibliography but is also useful here so the reader can follow the conversation happening in your paper. You will want to provide it in both places.

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

• Introduce the name of the author whose work you are summarizing.
• Introduce the title of the text being summarized.
• Introduce where this text was presented (if it’s an art installation, where is it being shown? If it’s an article, where was that article published? Not all texts will have this component–for example, when summarizing a book written by one author, the title of the book and name of that author are sufficient information for your readers to easily locate the work you are summarizing).
• State the main ideas of the text you are summarizing—just 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 information.

However, you will probably find yourself more frequently using summary as just one 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 being summarized, and state just the relevant context.

Presenting the “Meat” (or Body) of a Summary

Again, this will look a little different depending on the purpose of the summary work you are doing. Regardless of how you are using summary, you will introduce the main ideas throughout your text with transitional phrasings, such as “One of [Author’s] biggest points is…,” or “[Author’s] primary concern about this solution is….”

If you are responding to a “write a summary of X” assignment, the body of that summary will expand on the main ideas you stated in the introduction of the summary, although this will all still be very condensed compared to the original. What are the key points the author makes about each of those big-picture main ideas? Depending on the kind of text you are summarizing, you may want to note how the main ideas are supported (although, again, be careful to avoid making your own opinion about those supporting sources known).

When you are summarizing with an end goal that is broader than just summary, the body of your summary will still present the idea from the original text that is relevant to the point you are making (condensed and in your own words).

Concluding a Summary

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

• Are there any connections or loose ends to tie up that will help your reader fully understand the points being made in this text? 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.

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

• Discuss the summary you’ve just presented. How does it support, illustrate, or give new information about the point you are making in your writing? Connect it to your main point for that paragraph so readers understand clearly why it deserves the space it takes up in your work.