Summary Essay

What is a Summary?

A common writing assignment in a variety of college courses is the summary of a short text or work. The purpose of a summary is to accurately describe the main point and the important details of the work as if to someone who has not read it.

In order to do so, you must be familiar with the work you are summarizing. A good summary begins by reading the piece many times in order to gain a full understanding of it. Once the work is fully understood, you can relate the thesis and the important points that support it.

Summaries are significantly shorter than the work itself. If your summary is close to the overall length of the work, chances are you are simply paraphrasing the majority of the work rather than summarizing. If the summary is too short, then you probably missed some important points. Make sure to check your word count requirement in your assignment sheet.

Essential Tips

• Read the assigned text as many times as necessary to gain a full understanding of it.

• Pretend you are a reporter giving us just the facts. No first person ("I" statements) or opinion, please.

• Name the author (full name) and the article or essay title in the first or second sentence. Refer to the author by last name throughout the rest of summary.

• Use present tense to discuss the source text and facts from the text.

• Use direct quotes from the text or paraphrase examples to support your claims. Paraphrasing should be done more than quoting, which should be kept to a minimum. Quoting should only be used with unique language that is hard to paraphrase.

• Always capitalize the title of the text.

• If using MLA formatting, you will also place the title of the text in quotation marks. Do not use italics. Example: "Just a Smile and a Handshake."