A summary is a brief restating of the main points of a larger text (or video, presentation, speech, etc.). To summarize a reading, you will need to take the much longer text and distill it down to just a few sentences that represent the main ideas of the whole reading. This can be a difficult task as it requires you to really understand the reading and then determine which of the ideas presented are the most important.
To effectively summarize a text, you should:
Read the entire text.
Annotate and take notes while you read.
List or mark the main points as you read
Introduce the name of the reading and the author(s)
Write a summary of the main points
These steps are further explained below.
Always read the entire text before you attempt to write a summary. This doesn’t necessarily mean reading linearly (from start to end). When you read textbooks and academic texts, it’s often better to skim the headers and bolded text first to get an idea about what it’s about before you read. But in the end, make sure you are reading through all the major points and not just skimming the beginning of a text.
Annotating means to write notes or make markings on your reading. Find a system that works for you, whether it’s a combination of highlighting, writing notes in the margins, keeping notes on a notepad, and/or numbering important information from the text. You should not be passively reading when you read for learning—participate actively in your readings for your classes.
For readings that are on the computer, there are several ways you can do this. You can take notes on a separate pad of paper, just like you would in a class lecture. You can download a browser extension, like PowerNotes or Hypothes.is which will allow you to take notes and highlight anything in a web browser (and save those notes for later). For PDF readings, you can download them to your computer and use Adobe Acrobat comments and markup to take notes and save them on your computer.
As you read, list on notepaper or annotate on the reading directly any point that you think might be one of the main points. You may want to use a different highlighter color or have some other system for keeping track of these. Then use this list or these annotations as a starting place for coming up with the main ideas for the summary.
In the first sentence of your summary, introduce the name of the reading and the author(s). Then, transition to your summary using a signal word.
For example, for the essay “How to Mark a Book” written by Mortimer J. Adler, the introduction sentence might be something like:
In “How to Mark a Book,” Adler suggests that readers should mark up their books.
In the above example, “suggests” is the signal word. Some common “signal words” that can be used to transition from the title and author(s) to the summary are: states, explains, argues, suggests, points out, and says.
If there are more than two authors, shorten it to the last name of the first author listed followed by “et al.” For example: In “Read the Room! Navigating Social Contexts and Written Texts,” Seeley et al. state that...
Using your notes and annotations, write a summary of the text in your own words. The summary should explain the most important points that the author(s) make in the reading. Imagine you were trying to explain to a classmate what was in the reading so that they understood the concepts; that’s what should be included in a summary.
Tips
Go back through your notes and annotations (highlights/marks on the reading/etc) before writing the summary to decide what the most important ideas are.
Look for clues like bold words, headings, and how the reading is organized and sectioned off (if there are headings) to figure out what some of the main ideas are.
Also look to the introduction and conclusion, as they often restate the thesis/main point of the whole reading. These can give you a clue for which sub-points might be most important also.
Do not get caught up in the details; you’re aiming for a high-level summary here.
Ensure that the summary is in your own words. Do not copy and paste snippets of the author’s original text into your summary; do not simply reorder their words or use a thesaurus to change out a few words.
An effective summary will cover the most important points in your own words.
An effective summary will not include personal opinions, quotes, too many details, or focus on the subject instead of the content (see below for an example of this).
Below is an example of an effective summary and then several ineffective summaries. These summaries are based on an essay titled: “How to Mark a Book” by Mortimer J. Adler.
In his essay “How to Mark a Book,” Adler explains that for readers to engage with a reading and get something out of it, they should mark up their books and readings. According to Adler, there are several reasons that marking a book while reading is important. It keeps the reader awake and engaged so that they aren’t just passively reading the book. It helps the reader think about what they are reading. And, finally, it helps the reader remember the book and the ideas they had while they were reading the book. There are many methods for marking books like underlining, highlighting, and jotting notes in the margin, and a reader should find a system that works for them.
This reading talks about why people should mark up their books. The author explains why some people don’t mark up their books and then explains why it’s important that people do mark up their books. Additionally, the author then explains methods for marking up books, like highlighting or underlining.
Explanation
The above example is ineffective because the focus is on the subject (“this reading is about why to mark up a book”) instead of actually explaining any of the content. After reading this summary, I cannot tell what point the author is trying to make about why someone should mark up their books. And while there are a couple of examples at the end for annotation methods, this summary does not explain the main points of this reading.
Readers should mark up their books when they are reading. Some of the ways someone can mark up a book is by underlining or highlight, vertical lines at the margins, using stars, marks or asterisks in the margins of the text, using numbers in the margins to note the sequence of events, referring to other pages in the margins that ideas connect to, circling or highlighting important words or phrases, and writing in the margins or at the bottom or the top of the page.
Explanation
While this example does start to tell the reader of the summary what this text is about, it’s missing some of the major points in the essay because it’s focusing on a detailed list of all the ways someone can mark up a text. A good summary should focus on the main ideas, instead of worrying about all the little details.
It’s important that people mark up books that they are reading. Some people don’t mark up their books because they are afraid to write in them, and others because they’ve borrowed the books. People shouldn’t mark up library books or books that are borrowed because they aren’t their books. It would be rude to mark up a book that doesn’t belong to you, so the author isn’t talking about those books. But for your own books, the author argues that it’s an act of love to mark up a book.
Explanation
This summary only covers the first page of the essay and ignores quite a few of the main points. An effective summary should cover the big, main ideas. Sometimes it’s hard to figure out if one point is more of a main idea than another, but if you find yourself skipping large sections of the reading or only summarizing the beginning or end of a reading, then you are very likely not effectively summarizing.
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“Summarizing” by Sarah Karlis is licensed under CC BY-NC-SA 4.0