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• How to Write a Summary | Guide & Examples

How to Write a Summary | Guide & Examples

Published on November 23, 2020 by Shona McCombes . Revised on May 31, 2023.

Summarizing , or writing a summary, means giving a concise overview of a text’s main points in your own words. A summary is always much shorter than the original text.

There are five key steps that can help you to write a summary:

• Read the text
• Break it down into sections
• Identify the key points in each section
• Write the summary
• Check the summary against the article

Writing a summary does not involve critiquing or evaluating the source . You should simply provide an accurate account of the most important information and ideas (without copying any text from the original).

Table of contents

When to write a summary, step 1: read the text, step 2: break the text down into sections, step 3: identify the key points in each section, step 4: write the summary, step 5: check the summary against the article, other interesting articles, frequently asked questions about summarizing.

There are many situations in which you might have to summarize an article or other source:

• As a stand-alone assignment to show you’ve understood the material
• To keep notes that will help you remember what you’ve read
• To give an overview of other researchers’ work in a literature review

When you’re writing an academic text like an essay , research paper , or dissertation , you’ll integrate sources in a variety of ways. You might use a brief quote to support your point, or paraphrase a few sentences or paragraphs.

But it’s often appropriate to summarize a whole article or chapter if it is especially relevant to your own research, or to provide an overview of a source before you analyze or critique it.

In any case, the goal of summarizing is to give your reader a clear understanding of the original source. Follow the five steps outlined below to write a good summary.

Prevent plagiarism. Run a free check.

You should read the article more than once to make sure you’ve thoroughly understood it. It’s often effective to read in three stages:

• Scan the article quickly to get a sense of its topic and overall shape.
• Read the article carefully, highlighting important points and taking notes as you read.
• Skim the article again to confirm you’ve understood the key points, and reread any particularly important or difficult passages.

There are some tricks you can use to identify the key points as you read:

• Start by reading the abstract . This already contains the author’s own summary of their work, and it tells you what to expect from the article.
• Pay attention to headings and subheadings . These should give you a good sense of what each part is about.
• Read the introduction and the conclusion together and compare them: What did the author set out to do, and what was the outcome?

To make the text more manageable and understand its sub-points, break it down into smaller sections.

If the text is a scientific paper that follows a standard empirical structure, it is probably already organized into clearly marked sections, usually including an introduction , methods , results , and discussion .

Other types of articles may not be explicitly divided into sections. But most articles and essays will be structured around a series of sub-points or themes.

Now it’s time go through each section and pick out its most important points. What does your reader need to know to understand the overall argument or conclusion of the article?

Keep in mind that a summary does not involve paraphrasing every single paragraph of the article. Your goal is to extract the essential points, leaving out anything that can be considered background information or supplementary detail.

In a scientific article, there are some easy questions you can ask to identify the key points in each part.

If the article takes a different form, you might have to think more carefully about what points are most important for the reader to understand its argument.

In that case, pay particular attention to the thesis statement —the central claim that the author wants us to accept, which usually appears in the introduction—and the topic sentences that signal the main idea of each paragraph.

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Now that you know the key points that the article aims to communicate, you need to put them in your own words.

To avoid plagiarism and show you’ve understood the article, it’s essential to properly paraphrase the author’s ideas. Do not copy and paste parts of the article, not even just a sentence or two.

The best way to do this is to put the article aside and write out your own understanding of the author’s key points.

Examples of article summaries

Let’s take a look at an example. Below, we summarize this article , which scientifically investigates the old saying “an apple a day keeps the doctor away.”

Davis et al. (2015) set out to empirically test the popular saying “an apple a day keeps the doctor away.” Apples are often used to represent a healthy lifestyle, and research has shown their nutritional properties could be beneficial for various aspects of health. The authors’ unique approach is to take the saying literally and ask: do people who eat apples use healthcare services less frequently? If there is indeed such a relationship, they suggest, promoting apple consumption could help reduce healthcare costs.

The study used publicly available cross-sectional data from the National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey. Participants were categorized as either apple eaters or non-apple eaters based on their self-reported apple consumption in an average 24-hour period. They were also categorized as either avoiding or not avoiding the use of healthcare services in the past year. The data was statistically analyzed to test whether there was an association between apple consumption and several dependent variables: physician visits, hospital stays, use of mental health services, and use of prescription medication.

Although apple eaters were slightly more likely to have avoided physician visits, this relationship was not statistically significant after adjusting for various relevant factors. No association was found between apple consumption and hospital stays or mental health service use. However, apple eaters were found to be slightly more likely to have avoided using prescription medication. Based on these results, the authors conclude that an apple a day does not keep the doctor away, but it may keep the pharmacist away. They suggest that this finding could have implications for reducing healthcare costs, considering the high annual costs of prescription medication and the inexpensiveness of apples.

However, the authors also note several limitations of the study: most importantly, that apple eaters are likely to differ from non-apple eaters in ways that may have confounded the results (for example, apple eaters may be more likely to be health-conscious). To establish any causal relationship between apple consumption and avoidance of medication, they recommend experimental research.

An article summary like the above would be appropriate for a stand-alone summary assignment. However, you’ll often want to give an even more concise summary of an article.

For example, in a literature review or meta analysis you may want to briefly summarize this study as part of a wider discussion of various sources. In this case, we can boil our summary down even further to include only the most relevant information.

Using national survey data, Davis et al. (2015) tested the assertion that “an apple a day keeps the doctor away” and did not find statistically significant evidence to support this hypothesis. While people who consumed apples were slightly less likely to use prescription medications, the study was unable to demonstrate a causal relationship between these variables.

Citing the source you’re summarizing

When including a summary as part of a larger text, it’s essential to properly cite the source you’re summarizing. The exact format depends on your citation style , but it usually includes an in-text citation and a full reference at the end of your paper.

You can easily create your citations and references in APA or MLA using our free citation generators.

APA Citation Generator MLA Citation Generator

Finally, read through the article once more to ensure that:

• You’ve accurately represented the author’s work
• You haven’t missed any essential information
• The phrasing is not too similar to any sentences in the original.

If you’re summarizing many articles as part of your own work, it may be a good idea to use a plagiarism checker to double-check that your text is completely original and properly cited. Just be sure to use one that’s safe and reliable.

If you want to know more about ChatGPT, AI tools , citation , and plagiarism , make sure to check out some of our other articles with explanations and examples.

• ChatGPT vs human editor
• ChatGPT citations
• Is ChatGPT trustworthy?
• Using ChatGPT for your studies
• What is ChatGPT?
• Chicago style
• Paraphrasing

 Plagiarism

• Types of plagiarism
• Self-plagiarism
• Avoiding plagiarism
• Academic integrity
• Consequences of plagiarism
• Common knowledge

A summary is a short overview of the main points of an article or other source, written entirely in your own words. Want to make your life super easy? Try our free text summarizer today!

A summary is always much shorter than the original text. The length of a summary can range from just a few sentences to several paragraphs; it depends on the length of the article you’re summarizing, and on the purpose of the summary.

You might have to write a summary of a source:

• As a stand-alone assignment to prove you understand the material
• For your own use, to keep notes on your reading
• To provide an overview of other researchers’ work in a literature review
• In a paper , to summarize or introduce a relevant study

To avoid plagiarism when summarizing an article or other source, follow these two rules:

• Write the summary entirely in your own words by paraphrasing the author’s ideas.
• Cite the source with an in-text citation and a full reference so your reader can easily find the original text.

An abstract concisely explains all the key points of an academic text such as a thesis , dissertation or journal article. It should summarize the whole text, not just introduce it.

An abstract is a type of summary , but summaries are also written elsewhere in academic writing . For example, you might summarize a source in a paper , in a literature review , or as a standalone assignment.

All can be done within seconds with our free text summarizer .

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McCombes, S. (2023, May 31). How to Write a Summary | Guide & Examples. Scribbr. Retrieved April 8, 2024, from https://www.scribbr.com/working-with-sources/how-to-summarize/

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Summary: Using it Wisely

What this handout is about.

Knowing how to summarize something you have read, seen, or heard is a valuable skill, one you have probably used in many writing assignments. It is important, though, to recognize when you must go beyond describing, explaining, and restating texts and offer a more complex analysis. This handout will help you distinguish between summary and analysis and avoid inappropriate summary in your academic writing.

Is summary a bad thing?

Not necessarily. But it’s important that your keep your assignment and your audience in mind as you write. If your assignment requires an argument with a thesis statement and supporting evidence—as many academic writing assignments do—then you should limit the amount of summary in your paper. You might use summary to provide background, set the stage, or illustrate supporting evidence, but keep it very brief: a few sentences should do the trick. Most of your paper should focus on your argument. (Our handout on argument will help you construct a good one.)

Writing a summary of what you know about your topic before you start drafting your actual paper can sometimes be helpful. If you are unfamiliar with the material you’re analyzing, you may need to summarize what you’ve read in order to understand your reading and get your thoughts in order. Once you figure out what you know about a subject, it’s easier to decide what you want to argue.

You may also want to try some other pre-writing activities that can help you develop your own analysis. Outlining, freewriting, and mapping make it easier to get your thoughts on the page. (Check out our handout on brainstorming for some suggested techniques.)

Why is it so tempting to stick with summary and skip analysis?

Many writers rely too heavily on summary because it is what they can most easily write. If you’re stalled by a difficult writing prompt, summarizing the plot of The Great Gatsby may be more appealing than staring at the computer for three hours and wondering what to say about F. Scott Fitzgerald’s use of color symbolism. After all, the plot is usually the easiest part of a work to understand. Something similar can happen even when what you are writing about has no plot: if you don’t really understand an author’s argument, it might seem easiest to just repeat what he or she said.

To write a more analytical paper, you may need to review the text or film you are writing about, with a focus on the elements that are relevant to your thesis. If possible, carefully consider your writing assignment before reading, viewing, or listening to the material about which you’ll be writing so that your encounter with the material will be more purposeful. (We offer a handout on reading towards writing .)

How do I know if I’m summarizing?

As you read through your essay, ask yourself the following questions:

• Am I stating something that would be obvious to a reader or viewer?
• Does my essay move through the plot, history, or author’s argument in chronological order, or in the exact same order the author used?
• Am I simply describing what happens, where it happens, or whom it happens to?

A “yes” to any of these questions may be a sign that you are summarizing. If you answer yes to the questions below, though, it is a sign that your paper may have more analysis (which is usually a good thing):

• Am I making an original argument about the text?
• Have I arranged my evidence around my own points, rather than just following the author’s or plot’s order?
• Am I explaining why or how an aspect of the text is significant?

Certain phrases are warning signs of summary. Keep an eye out for these:

• “[This essay] is about…”
• “[This book] is the story of…”
• “[This author] writes about…”
• “[This movie] is set in…”

Here’s an example of an introductory paragraph containing unnecessary summary. Sentences that summarize are in italics:

The Great Gatsby is the story of a mysterious millionaire, Jay Gatsby, who lives alone on an island in New York. F. Scott Fitzgerald wrote the book, but the narrator is Nick Carraway. Nick is Gatsby’s neighbor, and he chronicles the story of Gatsby and his circle of friends, beginning with his introduction to the strange man and ending with Gatsby’s tragic death. In the story, Nick describes his environment through various colors, including green, white, and grey. Whereas white and grey symbolize false purity and decay respectively, the color green offers a symbol of hope.

Here’s how you might change the paragraph to make it a more effective introduction:

In The Great Gatsby, F. Scott Fitzgerald provides readers with detailed descriptions of the area surrounding East Egg, New York. In fact, Nick Carraway’s narration describes the setting with as much detail as the characters in the book. Nick’s description of the colors in his environment presents the book’s themes, symbolizing significant aspects of the post-World War I era. Whereas white and grey symbolize the false purity and decay of the 1920s, the color green offers a symbol of hope.

This version of the paragraph mentions the book’s title, author, setting, and narrator so that the reader is reminded of the text. And that sounds a lot like summary—but the paragraph quickly moves on to the writer’s own main topic: the setting and its relationship to the main themes of the book. The paragraph then closes with the writer’s specific thesis about the symbolism of white, grey, and green.

How do I write more analytically?

Analysis requires breaking something—like a story, poem, play, theory, or argument—into parts so you can understand how those parts work together to make the whole. Ideally, you should begin to analyze a work as you read or view it instead of waiting until after you’re done—it may help you to jot down some notes as you read. Your notes can be about major themes or ideas you notice, as well as anything that intrigues, puzzles, excites, or irritates you. Remember, analytic writing goes beyond the obvious to discuss questions of how and why—so ask yourself those questions as you read.

The St. Martin’s Handbook (the bulleted material below is quoted from p. 38 of the fifth edition) encourages readers to take the following steps in order to analyze a text:

• Identify evidence that supports or illustrates the main point or theme as well as anything that seems to contradict it.
• Consider the relationship between the words and the visuals in the work. Are they well integrated, or are they sometimes at odds with one another? What functions do the visuals serve? To capture attention? To provide more detailed information or illustration? To appeal to readers’ emotions?
• Decide whether the sources used are trustworthy.
• Identify the work’s underlying assumptions about the subject, as well as any biases it reveals.

Once you have written a draft, some questions you might want to ask yourself about your writing are “What’s my point?” or “What am I arguing in this paper?” If you can’t answer these questions, then you haven’t gone beyond summarizing. You may also want to think about how much of your writing comes from your own ideas or arguments. If you’re only reporting someone else’s ideas, you probably aren’t offering an analysis.

What strategies can help me avoid excessive summary?

• Read the assignment (the prompt) as soon as you get it. Make sure to reread it before you start writing. Go back to your assignment often while you write. (Check out our handout on reading assignments ).
• Formulate an argument (including a good thesis) and be sure that your final draft is structured around it, including aspects of the plot, story, history, background, etc. only as evidence for your argument. (You can refer to our handout on constructing thesis statements ).
• Read critically—imagine having a dialogue with the work you are discussing. What parts do you agree with? What parts do you disagree with? What questions do you have about the work? Does it remind you of other works you’ve seen?
• Make sure you have clear topic sentences that make arguments in support of your thesis statement. (Read our handout on paragraph development if you want to work on writing strong paragraphs).
• Use two different highlighters to mark your paper. With one color, highlight areas of summary or description. With the other, highlight areas of analysis. For many college papers, it’s a good idea to have lots of analysis and minimal summary/description.
• Ask yourself: What part of the essay would be obvious to a reader/viewer of the work being discussed? What parts (words, sentences, paragraphs) of the essay could be deleted without loss? In most cases, your paper should focus on points that are essential and that will be interesting to people who have already read or seen the work you are writing about.

But I’m writing a review! Don’t I have to summarize?

That depends. If you’re writing a critique of a piece of literature, a film, or a dramatic performance, you don’t necessarily need to give away much of the plot. The point is to let readers decide whether they want to enjoy it for themselves. If you do summarize, keep your summary brief and to the point.

Instead of telling your readers that the play, book, or film was “boring,” “interesting,” or “really good,” tell them specifically what parts of the work you’re talking about. It’s also important that you go beyond adjectives and explain how the work achieved its effect (how was it interesting?) and why you think the author/director wanted the audience to react a certain way. (We have a special handout on writing reviews that offers more tips.)

If you’re writing a review of an academic book or article, it may be important for you to summarize the main ideas and give an overview of the organization so your readers can decide whether it is relevant to their specific research interests.

If you are unsure how much (if any) summary a particular assignment requires, ask your instructor for guidance.

Works consulted

We consulted these works while writing this handout. This is not a comprehensive list of resources on the handout’s topic, and we encourage you to do your own research to find additional publications. Please do not use this list as a model for the format of your own reference list, as it may not match the citation style you are using. For guidance on formatting citations, please see the UNC Libraries citation tutorial . We revise these tips periodically and welcome feedback.

Barnet, Sylvan. 2015. A Short Guide to Writing about Art , 11th ed. Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice Hall.

Corrigan, Timothy. 2014. A Short Guide to Writing About Film , 9th ed. New York: Pearson.

Lunsford, Andrea A. 2015. The St. Martin’s Handbook , 8th ed. Boston: Bedford/St Martin’s.

Zinsser, William. 2001. On Writing Well: The Classic Guide to Writing Nonfiction , 6th ed. New York: Quill.

You may reproduce it for non-commercial use if you use the entire handout and attribute the source: The Writing Center, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill

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• How to Write a Summary

Proficient students understand that  summarizing , identifying what is most important and restating the text (or other media) in your own words, is an important tool for college success.

After all, if you really know a subject, you will be able to summarize it. If you cannot summarize a subject, even if you have memorized all the facts about it, you can be absolutely sure that you have not learned it. And, if you truly learn the subject, you will still be able to summarize it months or years from now.

Proficient students may monitor their understanding of a text by summarizing as they read. They understand that if they can write a one- or two-sentence summary of each paragraph after reading it, then that is a good sign that they have correctly understood it. If they can not summarize the main idea of the paragraph, they know that comprehension has broken down and they need to use fix-up strategies to repair understanding.

Summary Writing Format

• When writing a summary, remember that it should be in the form of a paragraph.
• A summary begins with an introductory sentence that states the text’s title, author and main point of the text as you see it.
• A summary is written in your own words.
• A summary contains only the ideas of the original text. Do not insert any of your own opinions, interpretations, deductions or comments into a summary.
• Identify in order the significant sub-claims the author uses to defend the main point.
• Copy word-for-word three separate passages from the essay that you think support and/or defend the main point of the essay as you see it.
• Cite each passage by first signaling the work and the author, put “quotation marks” around the passage you chose, and put the number of the paragraph where the passages can be found immediately after the passage.
• Using source material from the essay is important. Why? Because defending claims with source material is what you will be asked to do when writing papers for your college professors.
• Write a last sentence that “wraps” up your summary; often a simple rephrasing of the main point.

Example Summary Writing Format

In the essay Santa Ana , author Joan Didion’s main point is ( state main point ). According to Didion “… passage 1 …” (para.3). Didion also writes “… passage 2 …” (para.8). Finally, she states “… passage 3 …” (para. 12) Write a last sentence that “wraps” up your summary; often a simple rephrasing of the main point.

• Provided by : Lumen Learning. Located at : http://lumenlearning.com/ . License : CC BY: Attribution
• Authored by : Paul Powell. Provided by : Central Community College. Project : Kaleidoscope Open Course Initiative. License : CC BY: Attribution
• Authored by : Elisabeth Ellington and Ronda Dorsey Neugebauer. Provided by : Chadron State College. Project : Kaleidoscope Open Course Initiative. License : CC BY: Attribution
• Table of Contents

Instructor Resources (Access Requires Login)

• Overview of Instructor Resources

An Overview of the Writing Process

• Introduction to the Writing Process
• Introduction to Writing
• Your Role as a Learner
• What is an Essay?
• Reading to Write
• Defining the Writing Process
• Videos: Prewriting Techniques
• Thesis Statements
• Organizing an Essay
• Creating Paragraphs
• Conclusions
• Editing and Proofreading
• Matters of Grammar, Mechanics, and Style
• Peer Review Checklist
• Comparative Chart of Writing Strategies

Using Sources

• Quoting, Paraphrasing, and Avoiding Plagiarism
• Formatting the Works Cited Page (MLA)
• Citing Paraphrases and Summaries (APA)
• APA Citation Style, 6th edition: General Style Guidelines

Definition Essay

• Definitional Argument Essay
• How to Write a Definition Essay
• Critical Thinking
• Video: Thesis Explained
• Effective Thesis Statements
• Student Sample: Definition Essay

Narrative Essay

• Introduction to Narrative Essay
• Student Sample: Narrative Essay
• "Shooting an Elephant" by George Orwell
• "Sixty-nine Cents" by Gary Shteyngart
• Video: The Danger of a Single Story
• How to Write an Annotation
• Writing for Success: Narration

Illustration/Example Essay

• Introduction to Illustration/Example Essay
• "She's Your Basic L.O.L. in N.A.D" by Perri Klass
• "April & Paris" by David Sedaris
• Writing for Success: Illustration/Example
• Student Sample: Illustration/Example Essay

Compare/Contrast Essay

• Introduction to Compare/Contrast Essay
• "Disability" by Nancy Mairs
• "Friending, Ancient or Otherwise" by Alex Wright
• "A South African Storm" by Allison Howard
• Writing for Success: Compare/Contrast
• Student Sample: Compare/Contrast Essay

Cause-and-Effect Essay

• Introduction to Cause-and-Effect Essay
• "Cultural Baggage" by Barbara Ehrenreich
• "Women in Science" by K.C. Cole
• Writing for Success: Cause and Effect
• Student Sample: Cause-and-Effect Essay

Argument Essay

• Introduction to Argument Essay
• Rogerian Argument
• "The Case Against Torture," by Alisa Soloman
• "The Case for Torture" by Michael Levin
• How to Write a Summary by Paraphrasing Source Material
• Writing for Success: Argument
• Student Sample: Argument Essay
• Grammar/Mechanics Mini-lessons
• Mini-lesson: Subjects and Verbs, Irregular Verbs, Subject Verb Agreement
• Mini-lesson: Sentence Types
• Mini-lesson: Fragments I
• Mini-lesson: Run-ons and Comma Splices I
• Mini-lesson: Comma Usage
• Mini-lesson: Parallelism
• Mini-lesson: The Apostrophe
• Mini-lesson: Capital Letters
• Grammar Practice - Interactive Quizzes
• De Copia - Demonstration of the Variety of Language
• Style Exercise: Voice

how to write a summary

A step-by-step guide to writing a great summary.

A summary of a literary work isn't just a plain-old synopsis. It's a valuable study tool, a foundational element of all kinds of essays, a common testing mechanism, and one of the basics of literary analysis. 

Whether you're in high school or college, developing a deep understanding of how and when to summarize a book or text is a valuable skill. Doing so might require a little more knowledge and effort than you'd think. 

That's why we're covering all aspects of summaries, from study tools to plot summaries, below.

What Is a Summary?

A summary is a brief overview of a text (or movie, speech, podcast, etcetera) that succinctly and comprehensively covers the main ideas or plot points. 

Sounds simple, right? Well, there are a lot of unique characteristics that differentiate summaries from other commentary, such as analyses, book reviews, or outlines. 

Summaries are: 

• In your own words. It's important that you don't just copy and paste the writer's words (in fact, that's plagiarizing). Writing the key points of a work in your own words indicates your comprehension and absorption of the material. 
• Objective. While a summary should be in your own words, it shouldn't contain your opinions. Instead, you should gather the main points and intentions of the writer and present them impartially. (If you include your opinions, it instead becomes an analysis or review.)
• More than paraphrasing. Many students fall into the trap of simply paraphrasing—plainly restating the ideas or events of the work. (Is our definition starting to sound contradictory? We told you it wasn't straightforward!) Rather than recounting the events or ideas in a work chronologically or in the order they're presented, instead consider the broad scope of how they all contribute to the narrative or argument. 
• Short. There are no strict rules regarding length, only that it is concise. It's largely dependent on the length of the text it summarizes: longer texts, longer summaries. It also depends on the assignment or objective. However, most are about one to two paragraphs in length. 
• Comprehensive. Yes, it's another seemingly contradictory descriptor, but an important one. Summaries are comprehensive, meaning they cover all of the main plot points or ideas in a work (so they inherently contain "spoilers"). You should present those ideas in a way that condenses them into an inclusive, but not exhaustive, recounting in order to keep it short.  
• Straightforward (even if the text isn't). A good summary should be easy to comprehend, presenting the reader with a simple but all-encompassing understanding of the work at hand. With complex texts, summaries can be particularly useful because they distill big, complicated ideas into a bite-sized package. 

When to Write a Summary

Like so many elements of literary analysis, summaries are misunderstood. We've already explained why they aren't as simple as most people think, but neither are their uses. 

Summary writing is a useful skill in a variety of circumstances, both in and outside the English and Language Arts classrooms. 

Readers, writers, teachers, and students can use summaries: 

• As a study tactic. The ability to summarize a book or text indicates that you've absorbed and understand the material. Plus, writing down notes (as in a summary) is a great way to retain material. Try summarizing at the end of a book chapter, after each section of an article, or periodically in textbooks. Doing so will help you digest the material you've just read, confirming you understood and retained the information therein. Stopping frequently to summarize is most effective because you're less likely to forget important plot points or ideas. 
• As an assignment. Teachers and professors often ask students to summarize a text as a test to confirm they read and understood the material. Before heading into class—especially if you have a test or quiz scheduled—try practicing summarizing the text. Write it down (rather than practicing it out loud or in your head) so that you can review your ideas and ensure you're presenting them succinctly and sensibly. 
• As part of an essay. If you're referencing a book or article in your own paper, you might need to summarize the source as the foundation for your argument. In this case, your summary should be particularly short so the reader doesn't lose sight of your own argument and intention. Introduce the name of the work and its author, then use one sentence (two at most) to describe their objective and how it relates to your own. 
• As part of a review. Summaries are very useful in an academic setting, but they have their place outside of it too. Whether you're on a book review site or just sharing a recommendation with a friend, being able to succinctly write a book summary (with or without spoilers) will help others to make their own judgements of a book. 

Your Step-by-Step Guide for How to Write a Summary

Step 1: read the work .

Summaries are often perceived as a workaround for reading the work itself. That's not a great strategy under most circumstances because you tend to lose a lot of the details and nuance of a work, but it's particularly impractical to do so when writing about the work. 

Remember, a summary is supposed to present your perception of the work as a whole. So in order to develop that perception, you have to first read the original text. 

Step 2: Take Notes 

As you read the work, simultaneously take notes. If you own the book, it might be helpful to add your notes to the margins or highlight passages that are particularly relevant or capture a key idea. If you don't own the book, try taking notes on your computer or in a notebook. You can still notate important passages by writing down the page and paragraph number or writing an abbreviated version of the quotation. Alternatively, try marking key passages with sticky notes or tabs. 

It might also be helpful to write out a short outline of the work as you go. While you won't want to use this verbatim (remember, you shouldn't just paraphrase the work), it can help you establish and remember the text's framework. 

Step 3: Identify the Author's Thesis Statement, Objective, or Main Point 

In some works, such as a journal article, a writer will provide a thesis statement. A thesis statement is a one-sentence synopsis of the author's argument and intention. A thesis statement can be really helpful in forming the backbone of your own summary, just as it forms the backbone of the essay. 

However, even when a thesis statement isn't present—like in a novel—the writer always has an objective or main idea. You should always identify this idea and use it to form the foundation of your summary. 

The main point might be apparent at the outset of the work. Other times, the author won't present it until the conclusion. Sometimes you might identify multiple objectives throughout the work. That's why it's important, as you read, to note any ideas that might be the  main  idea. Even those that aren't the  most  important will likely remain relevant. 

Step 4: Note Other Important Elements

If something stands out to you about the work and seems to play an important role in the text's overall narrative or structure, make a note about it. This could be a recurring theme, an incident in the storyline, or a deviation from the overall argument. 

As you identify and note important elements and moments in the work, the structure of your summary should begin to fall into place. 

Step 5: Prepare to Write Your Summary 

Once you've finished reading the work, review your notes and highlight the key points that came to light. Remember, your summary should be objective, so disregard any opinions you might have noted about the work. You should introduce the thesis or objective, briefly encapsulate the important ideas and moments from the work, and end with a conclusion that ties those ideas to the objective. Keep this structure in mind as you begin. 

Step 6: Begin by Introducing the Work 

As you begin, introduce the work, its author, and, if relevant, the context.

Depending on your situation—for example, if your teacher or professor has asked you to summarize a work as part of an assignment or quiz—this might seem redundant. However, it is standard practice to begin by introducing the work, even if the reader already knows what you're writing about. 

Example:  In  The Great Gatsby , F. Scott Fitzgerald... 

Step 7: Present the Thesis, Main Idea, or Central Argument

Once you've introduced the work, your priority is to clearly define the author's thesis, important point, or central argument. As mentioned above, sometimes the author presents this idea clearly and succinctly at the outset of their work; at other times, it's buried deep in the text. 

Regardless of how the main idea is presented in the work, it should be front and center in your summary. Some teachers might refer to this as a "topic sentence" or "introductory sentence." This is the central point around which you will construct the rest of your writing. As you progress, you'll highlight other ideas or occurrences that relate or contribute to this main idea, so it's important that your representation of it is easily understood. 

Example:  In  The Great Gatsby , F. Scott Fitzgerald uses the story of Jay Gatsby as a symbol of the social stratification, greed, and indulgence of 1920s America. 

Step 8: Briefly Discuss the Important Elements of the Work

After identifying the thesis or central argument, you should provide a brief overview of the work's other elements, ideas, and plot points. For the most part, the information you present throughout this section should bolster the thesis presented previously. Each sentence should serve as a supporting point for the topic sentence. Don't simply list ideas or plot points, but show how they're connected and inform the work as a whole. Of course, there may also be important elements of the work that are not directly tied to the main idea; it's ok to include these if you feel they are vital to understanding the work.

When writing the body, you should consciously and intentionally leave out unnecessary details. They tend to bog down your writing and lose the reader. 

Example:  The narrator, Nick Carraway, moves to New York's "West Egg," where he reunites with his cousin, Daisy, and her husband, Tom Buchanan. Fitzgerald clearly delineates social lines between West Egg (new money) and East Egg (old money), where Tom and Daisy reside. 

Nick attends a lavish party thrown by his neighbor, Jay Gatsby, and learns Jay formerly had a relationship with Daisy. The two reignite their forbidden affair. Tom reveals to Daisy that Gatsby earned his money illegally, through smuggling alcohol, and is actually a man of humble Midwestern origins. Daisy and Gatsby try to run away together, but Daisy accidentally runs over Tom's mistress. Tom, eager to exact revenge, convinces his mistress' husband that Gatsby was to blame in her death, and he murders Gatsby before committing suicide. Few of Gatsby's many friends attend his funeral.

Step 9: Write a Conclusion that Ties It All Together

Much like you introduce the author's major point at the outset of your summary, you should revisit it as you close out your writing. If you presented the author's main idea in the introduction, and then bolstered that main idea by recollecting plot points or important elements from the work, your conclusion should then reiterate how those elements relate to the main idea. 

Example:  Though Gatsby subscribed to the extravagance of his peers, his efforts to fit into the upper echelon of West and East Egg were negated by his humble origins; always out of place, he was rejected for his social class as much as his perceived crimes.  

Step 10: Edit

Before submitting your work, read it in full, and edit out any superfluous and redundant information. It's likely that unnecessary details snuck in as you were writing, and you might find that certain plot points just feel unnecessary within the scope of your finished product. 

In addition to editing for content, be sure to edit it closely for grammatical or spelling errors. Even if your summary is well thought out, its expertise is compromised if it's full of errors! 

How to Write a Plot Summary

The step-by-step guide to writing an effective summary, outlined above, applies to most summaries. However, each type has its own unique elements outside of those standard requirements. 

A plot or book summary, for example, should encapsulate the plot of a short story or novel. When writing one, there are unique strategies to follow.  

Dos of Writing a Plot Summary

• Note plot points as the book or story unfolds. Especially in longer novels, it can be difficult to keep track of the twists and turns in the storyline. That's why we recommend taking notes as you read. 
• Use online study guides for inspiration. Websites like SuperSummary provide in-depth summaries free of charge. While this is a good starting point when writing your own, it should only be for inspiration. Don't copy examples online (that's plagiarism!). 
• Be sure to cover the three main arcs of every story: the exposition, climax, and conclusion. The exposition is the moment when the conflict or driving narrative is introduced. The climax is when that conflict comes to a head, and the narrative reaches its most dramatic moments. The conclusion is when the conflict is resolved or the story comes to an end. You should also include any inciting incidents (the first domino in a plot point).
• Connect the dots. Throughout, you should demonstrate an understanding of how events and characters are related, rather than introducing each element as an independent variable. Remember, you should tie each plot point back to the main idea. 

Don'ts of Writing a Plot Summary

• Don't just regurgitate the storyline. Rather than drone through the story plot point by plot point, you should highlight key moments in the narrative and direct them back to the author's objective. 
• Avoid repetitive phrases like "then" or "next." A key indication you're just repeating the storyline point by point is utilizing a phrase like "then" or "next." While you should recount the major incidents of the narrative, it shouldn't feel so formulaic. 
• Don't let it drag on. Books are long, but summarizing a book should still be short. While it depends on the assignment and the work in question, your summary should be 200 to 600 words, max.

Example :   In  The Great Gatsby , F. Scott Fitzgerald uses the story of Jay Gatsby as a symbol of the social stratification, greed, and indulgence of 1920s America.   The narrator, Nick Carraway, moves to New York's "West Egg," where he reunites with his cousin, Daisy, and her husband, Tom Buchanan. Fitzgerald clearly delineates social lines between West Egg (new money) and East Egg (old money), where Tom and Daisy reside. 

Nick attends a lavish party thrown by his neighbor, Jay Gatsby, and learns he formerly had a relationship with Daisy. When the two reignite their forbidden affair, disaster ensues. Tom reveals to Daisy that Gatsby earned his money illegally, through smuggling alcohol, and is actually a man of humble Midwestern origins. Daisy and Gatsby try to run away together, but Daisy accidentally runs over Tom's mistress. Tom, eager to exact revenge, convinces his mistress' husband that Gatsby was to blame in her death, and he murders Gatsby before committing suicide. Few of Gatsby's many friends attend his funeral.

Though Gatsby subscribed to the extravagance of his peers, his efforts to fit into the upper echelon of West and East Egg were negated by his humble origins; always out of place, he was rejected for his social class as much as his perceived crimes.

For an in-depth analysis of The Great Gatsby , check out the our study guide (we have an audio guide, too!).

How to Summarize an Article or Essay

The nature of an article or essay is quite different from a novel or short story, and in many ways, your summary should be too. The outline above remains the same, but the details are different. 

Here's what you should and shouldn't do when writing your article summary. 

Dos of Writing an Article Summary

• Skim the original article first. To develop a basic understanding of the article and the writer's objectives, skim the content before reading it closely. Doing so will help you to identify some of the key points and then pay attention to the arguments around them when you read the article in full. 
• Then read the article closely, marking key passages and ideas. Noting important ideas as you read will help you develop a deeper understanding of the writer's intentions.  
• Note headings and subheadings, which likely identify important points. In articles and essays, the author often utilizes subheadings to introduce their most important ideas. These subheadings can help guide your own writing. 
• Keep it short. The rule of brevity applies to article summaries too. In fact, because articles are usually short compared to novels or books, your text should be correlatively brief. And if you're utilizing the work as part of your own essay or argument, just a couple sentences will do.

Don'ts of Writing an Article Summary

• Don't ignore the conclusion. When reading a long article or essay, it can be tempting to overlook the conclusion and focus on the body paragraphs of the article. However, the conclusion is often where the author most clearly outlines their findings and why they matter. It can serve as a great foundation for your own writing. 
• Don't copy anything from the article directly—always paraphrase. If you copy any passages word-for-word from the article, be sure to identify them as quotations and attribute them to the author. Even this should be done sparingly. Instead, you should encapsulate their ideas within your own, abbreviated words.  
• Don't forget to include proper citations. If you do include a direct quotation from the article, be sure to properly cite them. You can learn how to properly cite quotations in our Academic Citation Resource Guide . 

Example Summary of  "Gatsby as a Drowned Sailor" :  In her essay, "Gatsby as a Drowned Sailor," Margaret Lukens posits that a major, and often overlooked, motif in  The Great Gatsby  is that of the "drowned sailor." The novel, she points out, is immersed in nautical symbols and themes, particularly in the scenes surrounding Jay Gatsby. For example, Gatsby grew up on the shores of Lake Superior, now owns a house on the Long Island Sound, and supposedly spends much of his time on his boat. 

Lukens nods to the nautical imagery throughout Gatsby's lavish party, as well as Nick's interactions with Gatsby. Many of these, she argues, foreshadow Gatsby's death in his pool. Even his funeral is a testament to the motif, with the few attendees soaked to the skin with rain. Lukens presents a thorough case for the overarching nautical motif in  The Great Gatsby  and her argument that though Gatsby hooked a big one, ultimately it was "the one that got away." 

FAQs: How to Write a Book Summary  

How do you summarize without plagiarizing .

By its very nature, a summary isn't plagiarizing because it should be written in your own words. However, there are cases where it might be difficult to identify an appropriate synonym, and the phrase remains somewhat close to the original. In this scenario, just be sure to differentiate the rest of the phrase as much as possible. And if you need to include a direct quote from the work, be sure to appropriately cite it. 

How to write a summary and a reaction? 

In some cases, your teacher may ask you to write a summary and a reaction. Whereas a summary is objective, a reaction is a matter of opinion. So in this case, you should present the actions or ideas of the work, then respond to those actions and ideas with your personal thoughts. 

Why write a summary? 

A summary is a helpful tool many educators use to test their students' comprehension of a text. However, it is also a useful study tactic because recounting what you read can help you organize and retain information. 

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How to Write a Summary (Examples Included)

Ashley Shaw

Have you ever recommended a book to someone and given them a quick overview? Then you’ve created a summary before!

Summarizing is a common part of everyday communication. It feels easy when you’re recounting what happened on your favorite show, but what do you do when the information gets a little more complex?

Written summaries come with their own set of challenges. You might ask yourself:

• What details are unnecessary?
• How do you put this in your own words without changing the meaning?
• How close can you get to the original without plagiarizing it?
• How long should it be?

The answers to these questions depend on the type of summary you are doing and why you are doing it.

A summary in an academic setting is different to a professional summary—and both of those are very different to summarizing a funny story you want to tell your friends.

One thing they all have in common is that you need to relay information in the clearest way possible to help your reader understand. We’ll look at some different forms of summary, and give you some tips on each.

Let’s get started!

What Is a Summary?

How do you write a summary, how do you write an academic summary, what are the four types of academic summaries, how do i write a professional summary, writing or telling a summary in personal situations, summarizing summaries.

A summary is a shorter version of a larger work. Summaries are used at some level in almost every writing task, from formal documents to personal messages.

When you write a summary, you have an audience that doesn’t know every single thing you know.

When you want them to understand your argument, topic, or stance, you may need to explain some things to catch them up.

Instead of having them read the article or hear every single detail of the story or event, you instead give them a brief overview of what they need to know.

Academic, professional, and personal summaries each require you to consider different things, but there are some key rules they all have in common.

Let’s go over a few general guides to writing a summary first.

1. A summary should always be shorter than the original work, usually considerably.

Even if your summary is the length of a full paper, you are likely summarizing a book or other significantly longer work.

2. A summary should tell the reader the highlights of what they need to know without giving them unnecessary details.

3. It should also include enough details to give a clear and honest picture.

For example, if you summarize an article that says “ The Office is the greatest television show of all time,” but don’t mention that they are specifically referring to sitcoms, then you changed the meaning of the article. That’s a problem! Similarly, if you write a summary of your job history and say you volunteered at a hospital for the last three years, but you don’t add that you only went twice in that time, it becomes a little dishonest.

4. Summaries shouldn’t contain personal opinion.

While in the longer work you are creating you might use opinion, within the summary itself, you should avoid all personal opinion. A summary is different than a review. In this moment, you aren’t saying what you think of the work you are summarizing, you are just giving your audience enough information to know what the work says or did.

Now that we have a good idea of what summaries are in general, let’s talk about some specific types of summary you will likely have to do at some point in your writing life.

An academic summary is one you will create for a class or in other academic writing. The exact elements you will need to include depend on the assignment itself.

However, when you’re asked for an academic summary, this usually this means one of five things, all of which are pretty similar:

• You need to do a presentation in which you talk about an article, book, or report.
• You write a summary paper in which the entire paper is a summary of a specific work.
• You summarize a class discussion, lesson, or reading in the form of personal notes or a discussion board post.
• You do something like an annotated bibliography where you write short summaries of multiple works in preparation of a longer assignment.
• You write quick summaries within the body of another assignment . For example, in an argumentative essay, you will likely need to have short summaries of the sources you use to explain their argument before getting into how the source helps you prove your point.

Regardless of what type of summary you are doing, though, there are a few steps you should always follow:

• Skim the work you are summarizing before you read it. Notice what stands out to you.
• Next, read it in depth . Do the same things stand out?
• Put the full text away and write in a few sentences what the main idea or point was.
• Go back and compare to make sure you didn’t forget anything.
• Expand on this to write and then edit your summary.

Each type of academic summary requires slightly different things. Let’s get down to details.

How Do I Write a Summary Paper?

Sometimes teachers assign something called a summary paper . In this, the entire thing is a summary of one article, book, story, or report.

To understand how to write this paper, let’s talk a little bit about the purpose of such an assignment.

A summary paper is usually given to help a teacher see how well a student understands a reading assignment, but also to help the student digest the reading. Sometimes, it can be difficult to understand things we read right away.

However, a good way to process the information is to put it in our own words. That is the point of a summary paper.

A summary paper is:

• A way to explain in our own words what happened in a paper, book, etc.
• A time to think about what was important in the paper, etc.
• A time to think about the meaning and purpose behind the paper, etc.

Here are some things that a summary paper is not:

• A review. Your thoughts and opinions on the thing you are summarizing don’t need to be here unless otherwise specified.
• A comparison. A comparison paper has a lot of summary in it, but it is different than a summary paper. In this, you are just saying what happened, but you aren’t saying places it could have been done differently.
• A paraphrase (though you might have a little paraphrasing in there). In the section on using summary in longer papers, I talk more about the difference between summaries, paraphrases, and quotes.

Because a summary paper is usually longer than other forms of summary, you will be able to chose more detail. However, it still needs to focus on the important events. Summary papers are usually shorter papers.

Let’s say you are writing a 3–4 page summary. You are likely summarizing a full book or an article or short story, which will be much longer than 3–4 pages.

Imagine that you are the author of the work, and your editor comes to you and says they love what you wrote, but they need it to be 3–4 pages instead.

How would you tell that story (argument, idea, etc.) in that length without losing the heart or intent behind it? That is what belongs in a summary paper.

How Do I Write Useful Academic Notes?

Sometimes, you need to write a summary for yourself in the form of notes or for your classmates in the form of a discussion post.

You might not think you need a specific approach for this. After all, only you are going to see it.

However, summarizing for yourself can sometimes be the most difficult type of summary. If you try to write down everything your teacher says, your hand will cramp and you’ll likely miss a lot.

Yet, transcribing doesn’t work because studies show that writing things down (not typing them) actually helps you remember them better.

So how do you find the balance between summarizing the lessons without leaving out important points?

There are some tips for this:

• If your professor writes it on the board, it is probably important.
• What points do your textbooks include when summarizing information? Use these as a guide.
• Write the highlight of every X amount of time, with X being the time you can go without missing anything or getting tired. This could be one point per minute, or three per five minutes, etc.

How Do I Create an Annotated Biography?

An annotated bibliography requires a very specific style of writing. Often, you will write these before a longer research paper . They will ask you to find a certain amount of articles and write a short annotation for each of them.

While an annotation is more than just a summary, it usually starts with a summary of the work. This will be about 2–3 sentences long. Because you don’t have a lot of room, you really have to think about what the most important thing the work says is.

This will basically ask you to explain the point of the article in these couple of sentences, so you should focus on the main point when expressing it.

Here is an example of a summary section within an annotation about this post:

“In this post, the author explains how to write a summary in different types of settings. She walks through academic, professional, and personal summaries. Ultimately, she claims that summaries should be short explanations that get the audience caught up on the topic without leaving out details that would change the meaning.”

Can I Write a Summary Within an Essay?

Perhaps the most common type of summary you will ever do is a short summary within a longer paper.

For example, if you have to write an argumentative essay, you will likely need to use sources to help support your argument.

However, there is a good chance that your readers won’t have read those same sources.

So, you need to give them enough detail to understand your topic without spending too much time explaining and not enough making your argument.

While this depends on exactly how you are using summary in your paper, often, a good amount of summary is the same amount you would put in an annotation.

Just a few sentences will allow the reader to get an idea of the work before moving on to specific parts of it that might help your argument.

What’s the Difference Between Summarizing, Paraphrasing, and Using Quotes?

One important thing to recognize when using summaries in academic settings is that summaries are different than paraphrases or quotes.

A summary is broader and more general. A paraphrase, on the other hand, puts specific parts into your own words. A quote uses the exact words of the original. All of them, however, need to be cited.

Let’s look at an example:

Take these words by Thomas J. Watson:

”Would you like me to give you a formula for success? It’s quite simple, really. Double your rate of failure. You are thinking of failure as the enemy of success. But it isn’t as all. You can be discouraged by failure—or you can learn from it. So go ahead and make mistakes. Make all you can. Because, remember, that’s where you will find success.”

Let’s say I was told to write a summary, a paraphrase, and a quote about this statement. This is what it might look like:

Summary: Thomas J. Watson said that the key to success is actually to fail more often. (This is broad and doesn’t go into details about what he says, but it still gives him credit.)

Paraphrase: Thomas J. Watson, on asking if people would like his formula for success, said that the secret was to fail twice as much. He claimed that when you decide to learn from your mistakes instead of being disappointed by them, and when you start making a lot of them, you will actually find more success. (This includes most of the details, but it is in my own words, while still crediting the source.)

Quote: Thomas J. Watson said, ”Would you like me to give you a formula for success? It’s quite simple, really. Double your rate of failure. You are thinking of failure as the enemy of success. But it isn’t at all. You can be discouraged by failure—or you can learn from it. So go ahead and make mistakes. Make all you can. Because, remember, that’s where you will find success.” (This is the exact words of the original with quotation marks and credit given.)

Avoiding Plagiarism

One of the hardest parts about summarizing someone else’s writing is avoiding plagiarism .

That’s why I have a few rules/tips for you when summarizing anything:

1. Always cite.

If you are talking about someone else’s work in any means, cite your source. If you are summarizing the entire work, all you probably need to do (depending on style guidelines) is say the author’s name. However, if you are summarizing a specific chapter or section, you should state that specifically. Finally, you should make sure to include it in your Work Cited or Reference page.

2. Change the wording.

Sometimes when people are summarizing or paraphrasing a work, they get too close to the original, and actually use the exact words. Unless you use quotation marks, this is plagiarism. However, a good way to avoid this is to hide the article while you are summarizing it. If you don’t have it in front of you, you are less likely to accidentally use the exact words. (However, after you are done, double check that you didn’t miss anything important or give wrong details.)

3. Use a plagiarism checker.

Of course, when you are writing any summary, especially academic summaries, it can be easy to cross the line into plagiarism. If this is a place where you struggle, then ProWritingAid can help.

Just use our Plagiarism Report . It’ll highlight any unoriginal text in your document so you can make sure you are citing everything correctly and summarizing in your own words.

Find out more about ProWritingAid plagiarism bundles.

Along with academic summaries, you might sometimes need to write professional summaries. Often, this means writing a summary about yourself that shows why you are qualified for a position or organization.

In this section, let’s talk about two types of professional summaries: a LinkedIn summary and a summary section within a resume.

How Do I Write My LinkedIn Bio?

LinkedIn is all about professional networking. It offers you a chance to share a brief glimpse of your professional qualifications in a paragraph or two.

This can then be sent to professional connections, or even found by them without you having to reach out. This can help you get a job or build your network.

Your summary is one of the first things a future employer might see about you, and how you write yours can make you stand out from the competition.

Here are some tips on writing a LinkedIn summary :

• Before you write it, think about what you want it to do . If you are looking for a job, what kind of job? What have you done in your past that would stand out to someone hiring for that position? That is what you will want to focus on in your summary.
• Be professional . Unlike many social media platforms, LinkedIn has a reputation for being more formal. Your summary should reflect that to some extent.
• Use keywords . Your summary is searchable, so using keywords that a recruiter might be searching for can help them find you.
• Focus on the start . LinkedIn shows the first 300 characters automatically, and then offers the viewer a chance to read more. Make that start so good that everyone wants to keep reading.
• Focus on accomplishments . Think of your life like a series of albums, and this is your speciality “Greatest Hits” album. What “songs” are you putting on it?

How Do I Summarize My Experience on a Resume?

Writing a professional summary for a resume is different than any other type of summary that you may have to do.

Recruiters go through a lot of resumes every day. They don’t have time to spend ages reading yours, which means you have to wow them quickly.

To do that, you might include a section at the top of your resume that acts almost as an elevator pitch: That one thing you might say to a recruiter to get them to want to talk to you if you only had a 30-second elevator ride.

If you don’t have a lot of experience, though, you might want to skip this section entirely and focus on playing up the experience you do have.

Outside of academic and personal summaries, you use summary a lot in your day-to-day life.

Whether it is telling a good piece of trivia you just learned or a funny story that happened to you, or even setting the stage in creative writing, you summarize all the time.

How you use summary can be an important consideration in whether people want to read your work (or listen to you talk).

Here are some things to think about when telling a story:

• Pick interesting details . Too many and your point will be lost. Not enough, and you didn’t paint the scene or give them a complete idea about what happened.
• Play into the emotions . When telling a story, you want more information than the bare minimum. You want your reader to get the emotion of the story. That requires a little bit more work to accomplish.
• Focus. A summary of one story can lead to another can lead to another. Think about storytellers that you know that go off on a tangent. They never seem to finish one story without telling 100 others!

To wrap up (and to demonstrate everything I just talked about), let’s summarize this post into its most essential parts:

A summary is a great way to quickly give your audience the information they need to understand the topic you are discussing without having to know every detail.

How you write a summary is different depending on what type of summary you are doing:

• An academic summary usually gets to the heart of an article, book, or journal, and it should highlight the main points in your own words. How long it should be depends on the type of assignment it is.
• A professional summary highlights you and your professional, academic, and volunteer history. It shows people in your professional network who you are and why they should hire you, work with you, use your talents, etc.

Being able to tell a good story is another form of summary. You want to tell engaging anecdotes and facts without boring your listeners. This is a skill that is developed over time.

Take your writing to the next level:

20 Editing Tips from Professional Writers

Whether you are writing a novel, essay, article, or email, good writing is an essential part of communicating your ideas., this guide contains the 20 most important writing tips and techniques from a wide range of professional writers..

Be confident about grammar

Check every email, essay, or story for grammar mistakes. Fix them before you press send.

Ashley Shaw is a former editor and marketer/current PhD student and teacher. When she isn't studying con artists for her dissertation, she's thinking of new ways to help college students better understand and love the writing process. You can follow her on Twitter, or, if you prefer animal accounts, follow her rabbits, Audrey Hopbun and Fredra StaHare, on Instagram.

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How to Summarize an Article

Last Updated: February 23, 2023 Fact Checked

This article was co-authored by Richard Perkins and by wikiHow staff writer, Danielle Blinka, MA, MPA . Richard Perkins is a Writing Coach, Academic English Coordinator, and the Founder of PLC Learning Center. With over 24 years of education experience, he gives teachers tools to teach writing to students and works with elementary to university level students to become proficient, confident writers. Richard is a fellow at the National Writing Project. As a teacher leader and consultant at California State University Long Beach's Global Education Project, Mr. Perkins creates and presents teacher workshops that integrate the U.N.'s 17 Sustainable Development Goals in the K-12 curriculum. He holds a BA in Communications and TV from The University of Southern California and an MEd from California State University Dominguez Hills. There are 8 references cited in this article, which can be found at the bottom of the page. This article has been fact-checked, ensuring the accuracy of any cited facts and confirming the authority of its sources. This article has been viewed 742,468 times.

You might summarize an article as part of an assignment or to better understand the author’s ideas. An article summary provides an overview of the author’s thesis, purpose, and main ideas. Before you start your summary, read the article several times and make notes in the margins. Then, write a first draft that summarizes the article effectively. Finally, get feedback on your article and make revisions to finalize it.

Reading the Article

• If you have any questions, ask your instructor to get clarification.

• Highlight or underline the thesis, research question, or purpose.
• Mark the supporting points.
• Highlight the section headings.
• Note the method of study, if there is one.
• Highlight the findings, conclusions, or results.

• If possible, read it aloud to help you process the information.
• Reading the article several times will help you get a better understanding of the ideas. It’s difficult to fully understand an article on a first reading.

• It’s okay to write short phrases and fragments rather than full sentences.

Tip: Making notes in your own words will help you avoid plagiarism once you sit down to write your summary.

• You might write, “Lopez asserts that homework helps students retain more knowledge based on exam scores and self-reporting.”

Drafting a Summary

• You might say, “Inez Lopez is a former high school educator who now teaches curriculum planning as a researching professor. Her article entitled “Homework Smarts: Why Kids Need Homework” discusses why students benefit from regular homework assignments. Lopez also differentiates between effective homework and busywork, which helps educators change their lessons for the better.”

• For instance, you’d write, “Lopez argues homework is necessary to support in-class instruction because students retain more information, the class covers more curriculum, and students get more one-on-one attention in class.”

• A short summary is 1 page or shorter. For a short summary, you’ll write either 1 long paragraph or an introduction, a body paragraph, and a conclusion.
• Write, “According to Lopez, students who complete homework assignments for their core classes perform better academically.”

Tip: Summaries are usually about 1/3 of the length of the original article. You’ll only write a short summary if your original article was no longer than 3 pages long.

• If your summary is longer than 1 page, it’s considered a longer summary.
• You might write, “In her study, Lopez compared 2 different classrooms at the same high school, one that had homework and one that didn’t. Lopez asserts that students who completed homework assignments performed better academically.”

• You might write, “To support her claims, Lopez explains that students who did their homework scored 40% higher on exams, participated in class at a higher rate than students who weren’t assigned homework, and completed academic units 30% faster than classes that didn’t do homework.”

• For instance, you’d write, “In her research, Lopez studied two classes at the same high school. Both classes had a similar demographic and socioeconomic makeup and were provided the same academic supports. The control classroom did not receive homework, while the experimental classroom did. Lopez tracked the students’ homework completion rate, assignment scores, class participation, and progress through the curricula. Additionally, she conducted short student surveys after each exam.”

• You could write, “Lopez collected data such as student scores, number of incidences of class participation, and rate of lesson progression. Additionally, she asked students to rate their confidence, understanding of the material, and readiness to move on to the next unit on a survey after each exam. Based on her data, Lopez concluded that students progress as much as 30% faster if they complete daily homework assignments. To improve academic performance, Lopez recommends that teachers in core subjects assign homework every night.”

• Write something like, “According to Lopez, students are able to retain information and progress rapidly if they’re required to do homework. Her work provides teachers with a tool to promote academic success and advice on how to use homework effectively to help students.”

Making Your Summary Effective

• Your summary doesn’t need to be exact in length. As long as it’s about 1/3 of the article’s length, it should be sufficient.

Variation: If your assignment sheet lists a different length, always do as your instructor asks. For instance, your instructor might give you a word count goal of 1,500 words. If this is the case, follow their instructions.

• You’d write, "Lopez believes," "Lopez finds that," and "Lopez argues." It’s also okay to use pronouns. You might write, “She goes on to say,” “She further asserts,” or “She refutes this idea.”

Warning: Copying phrases or sentences from the original article is plagiarism. If you’re summarizing the article as part of an assignment, you will likely lose credit if you don’t restate the ideas in your own words.

Finalizing Your Summary

• For instance, ask your classmate, a writing tutor, or your teacher to give you feedback.

• You may want to do several rounds of revisions depending on the purpose of your assignment. If you’re writing this summary for a grade, make sure your final product is your best work.

• Ask someone else to proofread your paper for you if you can. Then, make changes if they spot any errors.

• Don’t include any of your own ideas, analysis, or opinions in a summary. Focus solely on the original author’s ideas.

Expert Q&A

• Make sure you follow all of your instructor’s directions so you get full credit. Thanks Helpful 0 Not Helpful 0

• Make sure you put all of the author’s ideas in your own words so you don’t accidentally plagiarize. Thanks Helpful 0 Not Helpful 1

Sample Summaries

You Might Also Like

• ↑ https://libguides.randolph.edu/summaries
• ↑ Richard Perkins. Writing Coach & Academic English Coordinator. Expert Interview. 1 September 2021.
• ↑ https://www.kibin.com/essay-writing-blog/how-to-summarize-an-article-the-smart-way/
• ↑ https://www.trentu.ca/academicskills/how-guides/how-write-university/how-approach-any-assignment/writing-article-summaries
• ↑ https://www.scribbr.com/dissertation/introduction-structure/
• ↑ https://otis.libguides.com/mla_citations/in-text
• ↑ https://writingcenter.unc.edu/tips-and-tools/revising-drafts/
• ↑ https://owl.purdue.edu/owl/general_writing/the_writing_process/proofreading/steps_for_revising.html

About This Article

To summarize an article, start by introducing the article title and the author’s full name so the reader knows what you’re referring to. Then, give a brief overview and explanation of the topic of the article, which will either be the author’s argument or the main premise of their research. Next, outline the points they use to back up their research, but avoid direct quotations to keep your summary brief. Finally, state the author’s conclusions before going back to make sure everything you stated in your summary matches up with the original article. For tips on how to use author tags to avoid plagiarizing in a summary, read on! Did this summary help you? Yes No

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How to Write a Summary | Guide & Examples

Published on 25 September 2022 by Shona McCombes . Revised on 12 May 2023.

Summarising , or writing a summary, means giving a concise overview of a text’s main points in your own words. A summary is always much shorter than the original text.

There are five key steps that can help you to write a summary:

• Read the text
• Break it down into sections
• Identify the key points in each section
• Write the summary
• Check the summary against the article

Writing a summary does not involve critiquing or analysing the source. You should simply provide an accurate account of the most important information and ideas (without copying any text from the original).

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Table of contents

When to write a summary, step 1: read the text, step 2: break the text down into sections, step 3: identify the key points in each section, step 4: write the summary, step 5: check the summary against the article, frequently asked questions.

There are many situations in which you might have to summarise an article or other source:

• As a stand-alone assignment to show you’ve understood the material
• To keep notes that will help you remember what you’ve read
• To give an overview of other researchers’ work in a literature review

When you’re writing an academic text like an essay , research paper , or dissertation , you’ll integrate sources in a variety of ways. You might use a brief quote to support your point, or paraphrase a few sentences or paragraphs.

But it’s often appropriate to summarize a whole article or chapter if it is especially relevant to your own research, or to provide an overview of a source before you analyse or critique it.

In any case, the goal of summarising is to give your reader a clear understanding of the original source. Follow the five steps outlined below to write a good summary.

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You should read the article more than once to make sure you’ve thoroughly understood it. It’s often effective to read in three stages:

• Scan the article quickly to get a sense of its topic and overall shape.
• Read the article carefully, highlighting important points and taking notes as you read.
• Skim the article again to confirm you’ve understood the key points, and reread any particularly important or difficult passages.

There are some tricks you can use to identify the key points as you read:

• Start by reading the abstract . This already contains the author’s own summary of their work, and it tells you what to expect from the article.
• Pay attention to headings and subheadings . These should give you a good sense of what each part is about.
• Read the introduction and the conclusion together and compare them: What did the author set out to do, and what was the outcome?

To make the text more manageable and understand its sub-points, break it down into smaller sections.

If the text is a scientific paper that follows a standard empirical structure, it is probably already organised into clearly marked sections, usually including an introduction, methods, results, and discussion.

Other types of articles may not be explicitly divided into sections. But most articles and essays will be structured around a series of sub-points or themes.

Now it’s time go through each section and pick out its most important points. What does your reader need to know to understand the overall argument or conclusion of the article?

Keep in mind that a summary does not involve paraphrasing every single paragraph of the article. Your goal is to extract the essential points, leaving out anything that can be considered background information or supplementary detail.

In a scientific article, there are some easy questions you can ask to identify the key points in each part.

If the article takes a different form, you might have to think more carefully about what points are most important for the reader to understand its argument.

In that case, pay particular attention to the thesis statement —the central claim that the author wants us to accept, which usually appears in the introduction—and the topic sentences that signal the main idea of each paragraph.

Now that you know the key points that the article aims to communicate, you need to put them in your own words.

To avoid plagiarism and show you’ve understood the article, it’s essential to properly paraphrase the author’s ideas. Do not copy and paste parts of the article, not even just a sentence or two.

The best way to do this is to put the article aside and write out your own understanding of the author’s key points.

Examples of article summaries

Let’s take a look at an example. Below, we summarise this article , which scientifically investigates the old saying ‘an apple a day keeps the doctor away’.

An article summary like the above would be appropriate for a stand-alone summary assignment. However, you’ll often want to give an even more concise summary of an article.

For example, in a literature review or research paper, you may want to briefly summarize this study as part of a wider discussion of various sources. In this case, we can boil our summary down even further to include only the most relevant information.

Citing the source you’re summarizing

When including a summary as part of a larger text, it’s essential to properly cite the source you’re summarizing. The exact format depends on your citation style , but it usually includes an in-text citation and a full reference at the end of your paper.

You can easily create your citations and references in APA or MLA using our free citation generators.

APA Citation Generator MLA Citation Generator

Finally, read through the article once more to ensure that:

• You’ve accurately represented the author’s work
• You haven’t missed any essential information
• The phrasing is not too similar to any sentences in the original.

If you’re summarising many articles as part of your own work, it may be a good idea to use a plagiarism checker to double-check that your text is completely original and properly cited. Just be sure to use one that’s safe and reliable.

A summary is a short overview of the main points of an article or other source, written entirely in your own words.

Save yourself some time with the free summariser.

A summary is always much shorter than the original text. The length of a summary can range from just a few sentences to several paragraphs; it depends on the length of the article you’re summarising, and on the purpose of the summary.

With the summariser tool you can easily adjust the length of your summary.

You might have to write a summary of a source:

• As a stand-alone assignment to prove you understand the material
• For your own use, to keep notes on your reading
• To provide an overview of other researchers’ work in a literature review
• In a paper , to summarise or introduce a relevant study

To avoid plagiarism when summarising an article or other source, follow these two rules:

• Write the summary entirely in your own words by   paraphrasing the author’s ideas.
• Reference the source with an in-text citation and a full reference so your reader can easily find the original text.

An abstract concisely explains all the key points of an academic text such as a thesis , dissertation or journal article. It should summarise the whole text, not just introduce it.

An abstract is a type of summary , but summaries are also written elsewhere in academic writing . For example, you might summarise a source in a paper , in a literature review , or as a standalone assignment.

Cite this Scribbr article

If you want to cite this source, you can copy and paste the citation or click the ‘Cite this Scribbr article’ button to automatically add the citation to our free Reference Generator.

McCombes, S. (2023, May 12). How to Write a Summary | Guide & Examples. Scribbr. Retrieved 2 April 2024, from https://www.scribbr.co.uk/working-sources/how-to-write-a-summary/

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What you include in a summary depends on how the summary will be used.

Form and Function

As a writer, you decide what goes into your summary based on what the summary needs to do for your readers. If you write a summary to remind yourself about the content of an article you read as part of a large research project, you'll decide about how much detail to include in your summary based on the scope and focus of your research. If you write a summary to include as part of a review of literature, you'll shape the summary based on how much you believe your target readers know about your topic before they begin reading your review of literature. A summary can be as short as a single sentence (a précis or nutshell statement) or as long as 30% of the length of the original article you're summarizing (a detailed summary). Choosing among the options for a summary means thinking about what your readers need.

As an End in Itself

Most of the summaries that we write to remind ourselves of articles we've read serve only that purpose. For a short project or paper that uses only five to ten sources, a nutshell statement or précis for each source may suffice. For a longer project (more sources or extending over a long time), more detailed summaries help writers remember sources accurately.

Teachers may also assign summaries as ends in themselves when the articles are complex and teachers need to be sure that everyone understands the points in the assigned readings. Or teachers may assign summaries to help students practice writing accurately and concisely about the subject matter. Sometimes these summaries serve to introduce students to jargon or concepts particular to that discipline.

Finally, summaries are sometimes written as separate pieces of reference works. Typically called abstracts, these summaries help readers decide if they need/want to read an entire article.

Defining the Précis or Nutshell Statement

Our English word precise comes from the same root as the French word précis, and the nutshell statement or précis is a precise and concise restatement of the original article's main point. Typically only one or two sentences, the précis or nutshell doesn't aim to capture the details, supporting arguments, or types of proof a longer summary does. Instead, the précis boils down an article to its essential main point.

The précis can be a complicated sentence (or two), especially if the main point (otherwise known as the thesis or claim) of the original piece is complex. And a précis can be extremely difficult to write even though it is short because the writer must take great care to capture the complexity of the original main idea. If you write a précis or nutshell statement to summarize an article, be sure to spend enough time revising to make it both clear and accurate.

Example Article

Computers and Education in America

In the last decade, computers have invaded every aspect of education, from kindergarten through college. The figures show that schools have spent over two billion dollars installing two million new computers. Recently, with the explosive increase of sites on the Internet, computers have taken another dramatic rise. In just five years, the number of Internet hosts has skyrocketed from 2 million to nearly 20 million. It is not uncommon for 6th graders to surf the Net, design their own home pages, and e-mail their friends or strangers they have "met" on the Web. Computer literacy is a reality for many junior high students and most high school students.

In the midst of this technological explosion, we might well stop and ask some key questions. Is computer technology good or bad for education? Are students learning more or less? What, exactly, are they learning? And who stands to benefit from education's current infatuation with computers and the Internet?

In the debate over the virtues of computers in education, the technological optimists think that computers and the Internet are ushering us into the next literacy revolution, a change as profound as Gutenberg's invention of the printing press. In contrast, a much smaller but growing number of critics believe that cyberspace is not the ideal classroom. I agree with the critics. If you consider your own experience, you'll agree that the benefits of computer literacy are at best wildly overrated. At their worst, computers and the Internet pander to the short attention spans and the passive viewing habits of a young television generation.

The technological optimists sing a siren song of an enchanted new land where the educational benefits of computers and the Internet are boundless. First, they boast that children can now access information on every conceivable subject. If little Eva or little Johnny wants to learn about far-away cultures, they can access sites from their own homes that will teach them about the great languages and cultures of the world. Second, these starry-eyed optimists warble about how the Internet has created a truly democratic space, where all children--rich, poor, black, white, and brown--have equal access to information and education. Third, they claim that computers will allow students to have e-mail conversations with experts on any subject around the world. No longer will students be limited by their own classroom, their teacher, or their environment. Distance learning is the wave of the future, and classrooms will become obsolete or at least optional. In the words of John Sculley, former CEO of Apple Computer, the new technologies have created an "avalanche of personal creativity and achievement" and they have given students the "ability to explore, convey, and create knowledge as never before." Children who used to hate going to school will now love to learn to read and write, to do math and science. They will voluntarily spend hours learning on the Web instead of being bored to death by endless books and stodgy teachers.

Sound too good to be true? Let's examine these claims, one by one. First, promoters of computer learning are endlessly excited about the quantity of information available on the Internet. The reality, however, is quite a different story. If you've worked on the Internet, you know that finding and retrieving information from a Web site can sometimes be tedious and time consuming. And once you find a site, you have no idea whether the information will be valuable. Popular search engines such as Yahoo! are inefficient at finding relevant information, unless you just want to buy a book on Amazon.com or find a street map for Fargo, North Dakota. Information is definitely available on the Web, but the problem is finding relevant, reliable, and non-commercial information.

Next, the optimists claim that the Internet is truly a democratic space with equal access for everyone. Again, the reality falls short. First, access to an Internet provider at home costs over a hundred dollars a month, once you add up service and long distance fees. And then there's the technology barrier--not every person has the skills to navigate the Web in any but the most superficial way. Equal access is still only a theoretical dream, not a current reality.

Finally, computers do allow students to expand their learning beyond the classroom, but the distance learning is not a utopia. Some businesses, such as Hewlett Packard, do have mentoring programs with children in the schools, but those mentoring programs are not available to all students. Distance learning has always been a dream of administrators, eager to figure out a cheaper way to deliver education. They think that little Eva and Johnny are going to learn about Japanese culture or science or algebra in the evening when they could be talking with their friends on the phone or watching television. As education critic Neil Postman points out, these administrators are not imagining a new technology but a new kind of child: "In [the administrator's] vision, there is a confident and typical sense of unreality. Little Eva can't sleep, so she decides to learn a little algebra? Where does little Eva come from? Mars?" Only students from some distant planet would prefer to stick their nose in a computer rather than watch TV or go to school and be with their friends.

In addition to these drawbacks are other problems with computers in education. There is the nasty issue of pornography and the rampant commercialism on the Internet. Schools do not want to have their students spend time buying products or being exposed to pornography or pedophiles. Second, the very attractiveness of most Web sites, with their color graphics and ingenious links to other topics, promotes dabbling and skimming. The word "surfing" is appropriate, because most sites encourage only the most surface exploration of a topic. The Internet thus accentuates what are already bad habits for most students: Their short attention spans, their unwillingness to explore subjects in depth, their poor reading and evaluation skills. Computers also tend to isolate students, to turn them into computer geeks who think cyberspace is actually real. Some students have found they have a serious and addictive case of "Webaholism," where they spend hours and hours on the computer at the expense of their family and friends. Unfortunately, computers tend to separate, not socialize students. Finally, we need to think about who has the most to gain or lose from computers in the schools. Are administrators getting more students "taught" for less money? Are big companies training a force of computer worker bees to run their businesses? Will corporate CEO's use technology to isolate and control their employees?

In short, the much ballyhooed promise of computers for education has yet to be realized. Education critic Theodore Roszak has a warning for us as we face the brave new world of computer education:

Like all cults, this one has the intention of enlisting mindless allegiance and acquiescence. People who have no clear idea of what they mean by information or why they should want so much of it are nonetheless prepared to believe that we live in an Information Age, which makes every computer around us what the relics of the True Cross were in the Age of Faith: emblems of salvation.

I think if you examine your own experience with computers, you'll agree that the cult of computers is still an empty promise for most students. Computers, the Internet, and the Web will not magically educate students. It still must be done with reading, study, good teaching, and social interaction. Excellence in education can only be achieved the old fashioned way--students must earn it.

--Dudley Erskine Devlin

Example Précis

Devlin believes the benefits of computers in education claimed by the technological optimists are wildly overrated in that equal access on the Internet is not a reality; that finding relevant and reliable information is tedious and time-consuming; that distance learning assumes an unrealistic learner; and that pornography, commercialism, "surfing," and social isolation are not consistent with the goals of education.

As Part of a Response or Position Paper

Many teachers ask students to react in some way to an assigned reading. Typically, such writing assignments include a summary to show that writers understood the original reading. Writers may begin their response or position paper with the summary, or they might work summary into their response. In either case, the summary needs to be clear and distinctive from the response or reaction.

As Part of an Annotated Bibliography

After a citation or bibliography entry, a brief summary constitutes the annotation in an objective annotated bibliography. Typically less detailed and shorter than the detailed summary that might begin a response paper, a summary as annotation rarely includes any quoted material and instead concentrates on main ideas. The length of the annotation or summary depends on how readers will use the bibliography. If readers are looking for a nutshell statement to help them decide whether to read the article, then the briefest summary will usually suffice. If readers are hoping to learn about the range of articles written about a topic (so that they don't have to read the articles themselves), then annotations usually are longer and include more details from the article.

In a critical annotated bibliography, the annotation includes both the summary as well as one or two lines of analysis/judgment of the published work's worth for a given topic/line of argument.

Example Critical Annotated Bibliography Entry

Rosen, Jeffrey. "The end of obscenity." The New Republic July 1996: 6-7.

In this article, Rosen talks about the Internet and the overturn of the Communications Decency Act. He believes the Philadelphia judges who overturned this Act deserve credit for enumerating the possibility of one person corrupting cyberspace with obscenities, but they did not take into account that the public are the ones who decipher what is considered to be obscenity. This article appears in a professional publication that targets readers concerned with law and the government. This article is useful to our research because it has to do with language on the Internet and the censorship of it.

Example Objective Annotated Bibliography Entry

Jolly, Frank. "Helping Children Learn About TV." Journal of Communication 30.3 (1980): 84-93.

In this article, Jolly expresses dismay about the time consumed by television, especially when children watch "inselectively." He does admit that programming brings language into the home and does affect the growing child in positive ways as far as language is concerned. Jolly includes statistics and graphs, including a bar graph indicating the time spent watching TV by children at different socio-economic levels. The article appears in a professional journal and is written for an audience of teachers.

As Part of a Larger Paper

Summaries of various sorts fit into larger papers. We often see summaries as part of a review of literature that sets the context for the writer's research or position in a controversy. Sometimes writers use summaries of polarized arguments to show the range of points of view in a dispute. Even more often, summaries are frequently used as "proof" for an argument or your position, to explain a given idea or fact, or to show where the information you are using came from. This is why many writers compose summaries frequently as they are researching for a larger essay. Writing a complete summary of each essay/book you cover in your research is a good time-saver because you can simply "paste" the summary at an appropriate point in your draft or refer to it for a central quote or idea.

When you're using summaries for one of these purposes, be sure to think about what your readers already know about the topic. If your readers know relatively little on your topic, your summaries will almost certainly be longer and give readers more background information. If you believe that your readers know a good deal about your topic, you can probably set the context or prove your point with a précis or brief summary.

Example of Summary to Set Context in a Review of Literature

(Note how the writer uses the source "summary" to set up a theoretical explanation of reading and then extends that definition to her argument about hypertext.)

The prior knowledge readers have about reading can be called reading schemata. David Rumelhart (1980) defines schemata as "the building blocks of cognition" that are "employed in the process of interpreting sensory data (both linguistic and nonlinguistic), in retrieving information from memory, in organizing actions, in determining goals and subgoals, in allocating resources, and generally in guiding the flow of processing in the system" (p. 33-34). If reading conventions are schematic, then a hypertext reader, even one with little experience reading from a computer screen, brings prior knowledge about reading paper texts to the task of reading hypertexts. This prior knowledge can be adapted to the development of hypertext-reading schemata. Rumelhart calls the evolution of schema "tuning" (p. 53). If we watch, analyze, and learn how readers read hypertexts, then we may be able to facilitate an evolution of paper text reading schemata to hypertext reading schemata.

Rumelhart says that one kind of "tuning" schemata amounts to "replacing a constant portion of a schema with a variable one--that is, adding a new variable to a schema" (p. 53). One constant portion of a paper text navigation schema, for example, is that texts are fixed in a linear structure. When a reader sees sentences and paragraphs on a computer screen that look like text in a paper document, the reader may instantiate a linear text navigation schema. But when the reader realizes that there are no page numbers, and no pages as the reader knows them, then the constant, that documents are made up of pages in a linear sequence, is replaced with a variable that sentences and paragraphs can appear like they do on pages, but not necessarily on paper. If the reader "tunes" this portion of the linear text navigation schema, then the reader becomes open to developing hypertext navigation schemata.

Rumelhart, D.E. (1980). Schemata: The building blocks of cognition. In R. J. Spiro, B. C. Bruce, and W. F. Brewer (Eds.), Theoretical Issues in Reading Comprehension (pp. 38-58). Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.

Concise Statement of the Main Idea

Authors sometimes state their main idea in a thesis that will jump out at readers, but not always. And even those authors who seem to state a main point early in an article may refine that main idea by the end of the article. Sometimes, authors make several points in one text, and they expect readers to understand how the points relate to each other. So deciding on the main point of an essay can be difficult, especially when the author doesn't make the thesis stand out clearly. Looking for the main point many times means putting sub-points together on your own and/or summarizing information in a different order than it is presented in the original article. The key is to use your own words to generalize about the entire article, rather than following the organization and/or wording exactly as the author has described it.

Citing the Author and Title

A summary should clearly note that the information being conveyed is not your own. To be clear about who originally wrote the material, always begin your summary with the author's name and the title of the piece (i.e., book, article, Web page, etc.). You can introduce the author and title in any of several ways:

• According to author Mick Jagger in "Why My Lips are so Big," . . . (go on to main point).
• Mick Jagger, famous lead singer for the Rolling Stones, in "Why My Lips are so Big" describes . . . (go on to main point).
• An unfortunate childhood disease is the reason Mick Jagger provides for his readers in an article whose title reflects the question often asked of Jagger, "Why My Lips are so Big."

Even if you don't know the author, be sure to note the title at the beginning of your summary.

Details and Quotations

Once you have determined the main point and presented it for your reader, you need to note major supporting points if the author includes those. If not, look instead at the supporting detail that demonstrates to your reader how the original author makes his/her point. You do not need to summarize all the information an author provides; just show the key examples or details or outline the kinds of evidence the author uses. In other words, give your reader enough detail to illustrate the types of proof the author uses in the original article.

Documenting Sources

Even if your only purpose is to summarize a short article, you need to give your readers publication or copyright information about that article. Typically, any piece of writing that refers to another publication includes a "Works Cited" page or a "Bibliography." Quotations and/or paraphrases also need to be cited through footnotes, endnotes, or in-text documentation. The proper way to cite this information differs according to your audience.

Note: If you're writing a stand-alone summary of an essay from one of your textbooks, check with your teacher about whether you need to turn in a separate "Works Cited" page. Teachers will sometimes forego this formality when you're citing only a single source that is known to the whole class.

Style and Tone

Students often mistakenly assume that the style of a summary is unimportant. If the summary covers the main points, they think, then the summary is adequate. In fact, style and tone count heavily in summary. Most important, readers who look at a summary for the sole purpose of getting a quick glimpse of the article don't want to read extra words and phrases that don't further the meaning. So brevity counts! Moreover, readers want to be able to count on the summary for an accurate representation of the original piece. If the writer allows personal opinion to color word choice, then the tone of the summary can mislead readers.

Objectivity

Summaries should not include the opinion of the summary writer at all, not even in the smallest phrases or through biased word choices. Because we often use value-laden words without realizing it, we can easily misrepresent an author's view or color it with our own opinions. Especially when editing, watch for any value-laden words like these:

Compare the two student-written examples closely to see how easily opinion can slip through in a seemingly straightforward summary sentence.

Example Summaries

Non-objective summary : " Not surprisingly, the students did not like the test, for it showed their ignorance in a broad spectrum of topics.

Objective summary : The article reveals his opinion that students do not ask pertinent questions in an attempt to keep their ignorance concealed.

Both writers are summarizing the opinion of the author, but the first example does not attribute the thought to the author of the article. The highlighted sections allow the reader to infer that it is the summary writer's opinion that the students were ignorant and that the summary writer found this to be no surprise.

Using Author Tags

Even after you note the author and title at the beginning of your summary, readers can sometimes lose track of how much of your paper summarizes an article. When this happens, readers don't see the end of your summary and the beginning of your reaction or opinion. The best way to avoid this problem in an extended summary (or even one that includes only four to five sentences) is to repeat the author's name or appropriate pronouns. When you repeat the name, use verbs that underscore the author's purpose in writing the original article.

For example, Jaime O'Neill not only describes his classroom experiment in "No Allusions in the Classroom," but he also argues for "common knowledge." Look at the example summary again to see how many ways this student refers to O'Neill and describes O'Neill's writing.

Example Summary

Note: The author tags are underlined

Author Jaime O'Neill's article, "No Allusions in the Classroom," emphasizes the communication problem between teachers and students due to the students' lack of basic knowledge. The author supports this assertion by using a combination of personal experience, evidence obtained from recent polls, other professors' opinions, and the results of an experiment he conducted in his own classroom. The experiment O'Neill conducted was an ungraded eighty-six question "general knowledge" test issued to students on the first day of classes. On this test, "most students answered incorrectly far more often than they answered correctly." Incorrect answers included fallacies such as: "Darwin invented gravity" and "Leningrad was in Jamaica." Compounding the problem, students don't ask questions. This means that their teachers assume they know things that they do not. O'Neill shows the scope of this problem by showing that, according to their teachers, this seems to be a typical problem across the United States. O'Neill feels that common knowledge in a society is essential to communicate. Without this common knowledge, learning is made much more difficult because teacher and student do not have a common body of knowledge from which to draw. The author shows the deterioration of common knowledge through poll results, personal experience, other teachers' opinions, and his own experiment's results.

Jaime O'Neill, No Allusions in the Classroom, Newsweek , September 23, 1985.

Putting it All Together

Look at one more sample of a stand-alone detailed summary assigned to give students practice in the summary skills noted here as Key Issues. Look for a concise statement of the main idea, citation of the author and title, author tags throughout the summary, details and quotations to illustrate types of proof, and the style and tone. The sample is annotated with instructor’s comments.

Note: Comments are accessible at the bottom of the page.

John (Fire) Lame Deer, Richard Erdoes Summary of "Talking to the Owls and Butterflies"

John (Fire) Lame Deer and Richard Erdoes once had a discussion *Comment 1 about how they believed white men have made it difficult for themselves and Indians to "experience nature in the good way by being part of it" by creating a materialistic and unnatural society and way of life, but not necessarily without final hope. *Comment 2 Richard Erdoes wrote about their conversation in "Talking to the Owls and Butterflies," a request for the modern people of the world to sit down like the stones and trees, and "think and feel like animals."

John (Fire) Lame Deer believes that men have not only changed animals' living habits and attitudes, but they have also changed themselves by living such an organized life of career and habits, so that they are now trapped in the materialistic world that they put themselves in. "Watch the ashes, don't smoke, you'll stain the curtains. Watch the goldfish bowl, don't breath on the parakeet, don't lean your head against the wallpaper; your hair might be greasy. Don't spill liquor on the table; it has a delicate finish." *Comment 3 John (Fire) Lame Deer tells us of a reservation joke. "What is cultural deprivation? Answer: Being an upper-middle-class white kid living in a split level suburban home with a color TV." Americans have learned to sanitize everything, so that all nature has been taken out of it. This includes humans, food, and life. White men got rid of the man and woman smells, using perfumes and deodorant. White men have made food artificial, the taste and color. "Raw liver, raw kidney--that's what we old fashioned full bloods like to get our teeth into." Changing the food in this way results in bad nutrition; the Indians didn't need the vitamins and pills. He believes that white men do not enjoy the life in the open, the way he feels it should be. He gives us a vision in the beginning of the critique of how he believes life is supposed to be experienced. Let's have the grass for a mattress, experiencing it's sharpness and softness." "Talking to the Owls and Butterflies" speaks of how all life is sacred. "Men are spreading death" living in this world of materialistic, artificial trade. John *Comment 4 (Fire) Lame Deer says that white men do not want to experience the world, they don't want to hear it, smell it, taste it, feel it. He says that men are scared of the world they have created. The Indians of long ago didn't have heart trouble or cancer. All the illnesses they had, the medicine men had a cure for, but the white men destroyed their sweat lodges along with the cures. The men of the planet should not take it for granted, literally taking and not giving; selecting animals to die depending on the income they bring. The Indians use to apologize, explain, and pray to the spirits of the animals they killed. He wants modern men to experience nature, the earth, the weather, living beings and spirits the way that he and his people do.

John (Fire) Lame Deer feels that white men will soon come around, that they are at the end of their vicious materialistic and industrial circle. *Comment 5 Everything as it is now will end and men will soon live with the earth as Lame Deer illustrates. "The day is coming when nature will stop the electricity....There is a Light Man coming, to bring new light." Men will learn about the weather and about nature when they leave their houses and offices. Life will slow down, no more heart problems, just like the old Indians. Lame Deer believes men are moving back towards the natural part of life, living life as the Indians did. He believes that the original spirit and wisdom lies within each man, just like they see it in the animals of the wild. "Sometimes I feel like the first being in one of our Indian legends. This was a giant made of earth, water, the moon and the winds. He had timber for hair, a whole forest for trees. He had a huge lake in his stomach and a waterfall in his crotch." Each man is part of nature, is able to feel and live with nature, only if they let themselves be.

Bibliography Lame Deer, J., & Erdoes, R. (1998). "Talking to the Owls and Butterflies." In T. H. Crusius and C. E. Channell, The Aims of Argument: A Rhetoric and Reader , 2e; pp. 209-215. Mountain View, CA: Mayfield.

Comment 1: A good summary always includes the title and author. For this essay that involves a unique collaboration, the student has found a graceful way to explain that Lame Deer talked to Richard Erdoes who then wrote and edited the essay. Comment 2: This writer finds a successful way to capture the sense of the overall argument in the introduction to the rest of the summary. Comment 3: In an essay so dominated by details, each summary writer will choose those that best capture the "flavor" of the original. In this sample, the writer chooses to quote some details and paraphrase others but includes many of the details that make the original essay interesting to read. Comment 4: Notice that this writer uses Lame Deer's name as well as "he" and "his" as author tags. Many of the verbs the writer uses with his author tags reinforce the emotional element of Lame Deer's position. Comment 5: This writer uses a paragraph break in the summary to indicate the two main chunks of the original essay.

Processes for Standard Summaries

The descriptions that follow focus either primarily on reading or writing, although they both make reference to each other. Choose the one that best represents your own preferred way of writing: do you begin with reading and spend a lot of time with sources? If so, choose source analysis.

Or, do you begin writing as soon as possible, consistently revising? If so, choose writing.

Process For Finding Main Point

Deciding on the main point of an essay can be difficult, since authors frequently make several points in one text. While all the points made might be important to demonstrate why the author believes what he does, they can usually be subsumed into a more general point that the entire article makes. Looking for this more general point many times means putting sub-points together on your own and/or summarizing information in a different order than it is presented in the original article. The steps here help ensure that you find the main point rather than only the first point that the author makes.

Steps For Finding Main Point

• Read the article through once.
• Read again, listing all points made.
• Look over the list for a more general purpose these points serve.
• Write one sentence that summarizes this general purpose. (i.e., the "why anyone wrote this thing to begin with" line).
• Check that purpose for accuracy by re-reading the article.
• Revise summary statement accordingly.

Process For Summarizing Support

Once you have your one-sentence summary of the overall purpose and content of the article, it's time to concentrate on demonstrating to the reader the types of support and proof the author uses to make his/her point. You may be able to use your original notes for this information, but it's frequently useful to return to the text again with a different focus in mind. Your question this time is: how does she/he demonstrate his/her point?

Steps For Summarizing Support

• Read through the article again, listing every example, quote, or argument the author uses.
• Look through your list for commonalities or categories of proof. For example, does the author use several different types of statistical analyses or does she rely on other published sources?
• Write a summary sentence that introduces all the different categories of proof.
• Provide one or two representative examples from your list. Choose examples that are either the most common or the most persuasive.

LeCourt, Donna, Kate Kiefer, &Stephen Reid. (1996). Summaries. Writing@CSU . Colorado State University. https://writing.colostate.edu/guides/guide.cfm?guideid=30

Summarizing

by jleemcga | Aug 18, 2023 | Resources for Students , Writing Resources

What is summarizing?

A summary of a text is a short overview of the main ideas written in your own words. While paraphrasing involves expressing specific ideas or details from a larger text in your own words, we generally summarize whole texts (whether it is an essay, article, chapter, book, et cetera). So, in order to ensure our summaries are not too wordy or confusing, we only cover the main ideas or argument presented within a whole text.

It’s best to summarize when you’re contextualizing a topic by letting your readers know about the current, ongoing conversation. By summarizing relevant sources, you’re providing your audience with an overview of what has already been said about this topic to help them understand how you’ll be adding to it. Summarizing material within your paper allows you to:

• Condense key ideas or arguments relevant to your paper
• Simplify the connection between a source and your own writing

How do I summarize?

To approach summarizing a source, try the following steps:

• First make sure you carefully read the original source material to understand it. Like paraphrasing, summarizing effectively requires an accurate understanding of the source material
• Identify all the main ideas from the text. It helps to look for the thesis or overall claim the author is presenting, as well as any important reasons they give to back their claim. Basically, you’re looking for why their argument is what it is
• When you begin your summary, you might use a TAG line. This stands for Title, Author, Genre and allows you to formally introduce the text before you summarize its ideas. An example of a TAG line is: In the article “Stuck on the Streets of San Francisco in a Driverless Car”, Cade Metz reports … TAG lines add a helpful framework for the summary
• Be sure not to include any specific examples, details, or evidence from the text. In summaries, we don’t describe the author’s examples (this would be like rewriting the entire text). Instead, we offer a map of the main idea and major points
• Once you finish writing your summary, check to make sure your summary concisely and accurately captures the author’s main ideas
• Remember to cite!

Examples of summarizing

Here is an example of a writer summarizing a main idea from the source Social Death: Racialized Rightlessness and the Criminalization of the Unprotected by Lisa Marie Cacho in their essay about a Salvadoran poet and her poetry’s relationship to reclaiming identity:

The ambiguity that is scored onto the bodies of Salvadoran migrants creates an impoverished sense of time and freedom by keeping these individuals indefinitely “temporary,” an ephemera that imposes a constant threat against safety and belonging for Salvadorans in the US. This weaponization of time also contributes to the condition of social death that Cacho describes as being prevalent for people of color, and particularly immigrants, in the US. According to Cacho, part of the criminalization of people of color within the US— not based on one’s behavior, but by their appearance— is heightened further by the notion of documentation. The rhetoric surrounding immigration in the US ultimately aims to invalidate those without documentation by using slurs like “illegal” (Cacho).

Note: The writer quotes some key terms, like “temporary” or “illegal” that the author emphasizes in the original source but describes the main ideas of the source in their own words. Note, too, that the summary focuses on the big-picture ideas of the source without mentioning examples that are too specific.

Things to keep in mind when summarizing

Some important things to remain mindful of while summarizing in your assignments are:

• There is no specified length for writing summaries; they may be a few sentences or a few paragraphs depending on your writing project. For most academic essays, a summary of a few sentences to a short paragraph is appropriate. Concision is key
• Do not include your opinions on the topic or the author’s ideas in your summary; your ideas are important, but summary is a genre of writing that requires objectivity
• Do not include specific details or examples from the text—just focus on the big picture ideas

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ENGL000: Pre-College English

How to Summarize

One of the most important skills for any writer (and any active reader!) is summary. You may be familiar with the concept of summary already; writing effective thesis statements and crafting logical transitions require writers to summarize their ideas. Read this article to learn more about the art of summary. At the end of the article, complete the practice activity to summarize Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's story "The Five Orange Pips", which you read at the end of unit 3.

S ummarizing is a critical study skill and, fortunately, one that is easily learned. A summary condenses an original piece of writing and contains only the most important information. The thesis of the original work should be very clearly indicated, and minor details are not usually included. In this way, a summary focuses on the major points made throughout the original.

A summary is not a critique of a work. Do not include your own ideas, opinions, or criticisms when writing a summary.

The length of a summary will vary depending on the length of the original. If your instructor does not tell you how long your summary should be, try to make it about one-fifth to one-quarter the length of the original work.

Remember that you must put everything in your own words and use your own sentence structure. If you choose to use direct quotations, even if only one or two distinctive words, you must place quotation marks around them. Plagiarism is unacceptable at any time. The proper use of quotation marks and the proper acknowledgment of other people's words and ideas is often difficult to keep in mind, but its importance cannot be overemphasized.

Follow the steps outlined below to write a successful summary:

• Read the original carefully . You may find that you must read the piece two, three, or even four times in order to understand it completely and accurately . Try highlighting the main ideas or taking notes as you read. Look up any words or phrases you do not understand from the context. The goal here is to have a clear and accurate understanding of the reading as a whole.
• Now write one sentence that states the main idea or thesis of the entire writing. Typically, you can look carefully at the first and last paragraphs of the original to find the thesis.
• Next, break the original down into related paragraphs or sections. Sometimes the original will already have subheadings you can use.
• Then write a one or two sentence summary for each group of related paragraphs. These sentences should reflect the main idea of each section clearly and accurately.
• Create an outline using the sentences you just wrote. First, write down the thesis. Then, list the main idea sentences for each section you identified, keeping them in the original order.
• You're now ready to begin writing your summary. Be sure to be reader-friendly. Start with a summary introduction , which includes the name of the article or book, the author , and, if appropriate, the date and name of the journal , magazine , or newspaper in which the article appeared. 
• Your summary introduction should also include your statement of the overall thesis of the original. Remember, this statement should be in your own words.
• After the summary introduction is the body of your summary. Start with the sentences you wrote for each group of related paragraphs. Build upon these sentences to create the summary's body. Focus on the major points of the original.
• In your final draft, eliminate repetitions and generally make your summary coherent. Use transitional words or phrases , such as "moreover", "in addition", "next", to create proper flow and to show connections between the ideas of the original. Your final product must read smoothly as well as reflect the information in the original accurately.
• Check your summary against the original. Did you cover all of the important points? Did you state the thesis? Did you use your own words?
• Lastly, check your summary for grammar, spelling, and punctuation. If you used direct quotations, did you use quotation marks?

Keep in mind this basic goal: Your summary should give the reader a clear and concise understanding of the original without them having to read the original. If the reader needs to look at the original in order to understand your summary , try again.

Practice: 

Write a summary of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's The Five Orange Pips , which you read earlier. Remember to include enough information so the reader can see that you understand the material, and can identify the key plot points while leaving out unnecessary details. When you finish, check your work against the guide to responding .

Module 2: Using Sources

How to write a summary.

Proficient students understand that  summarizing , identifying what is most important and restating the text (or other media) in your own words, is an important tool for college success.

After all, if you really know a subject, you will be able to summarize it. If you cannot summarize a subject, even if you have memorized all the facts about it, you can be absolutely sure that you have not learned it. And, if you truly learn the subject, you will still be able to summarize it months or years from now.

Proficient students may monitor their understanding of a text by summarizing as they read. They understand that if they can write a one- or two-sentence summary of each paragraph after reading it, then that is a good sign that they have correctly understood it. If they can not summarize the main idea of the paragraph, they know that comprehension has broken down and they need to use fix-up strategies to repair understanding.

Summary Writing Format

• When writing a summary, remember that it should be in the form of a paragraph.
• A summary begins with an introductory sentence that states the text’s title, author and main point of the text as you see it.
• A summary is written in your own words.
• A summary contains only the ideas of the original text. Do not insert any of your own opinions, interpretations, deductions or comments into a summary.
• Identify in order the significant sub-claims the author uses to defend the main point.
• Copy word-for-word three separate passages from the essay that you think support and/or defend the main point of the essay as you see it.
• Cite each passage by first signaling the work and the author, put “quotation marks” around the passage you chose, and put the number of the paragraph where the passages can be found immediately after the passage.
• Using source material from the essay is important. Why? Because defending claims with source material is what you will be asked to do when writing papers for your college professors.
• Write a last sentence that “wraps” up your summary; often a simple rephrasing of the main point.

Example Summary Writing Format

In the essay Santa Ana , author Joan Didion’s main point is ( state main point ). According to Didion “… passage 1 …” (para.3). Didion also writes “… passage 2 …” (para.8). Finally, she states “… passage 3 …” (para. 12) Write a last sentence that “wraps” up your summary; often a simple rephrasing of the main point.

• Provided by : Lumen Learning. Located at : http://lumenlearning.com/ . License : CC BY: Attribution
• Authored by : Paul Powell. Provided by : Central Community College. Project : Kaleidoscope Open Course Initiative. License : CC BY: Attribution
• Authored by : Elisabeth Ellington and Ronda Dorsey Neugebauer. Provided by : Chadron State College. Project : Kaleidoscope Open Course Initiative. License : CC BY: Attribution

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How to Write One Sentence Summary Effectively

Table of Contents

Want to discover what a unique one sentence summary entails? You are in the right place! Let’s begin by defining what a one-sentence summary means and why it is essential.

Why a One-Sentence Summary

To intrigue someone into reading your book. While your book is in its early stages, consider your audience. It’s all about the audience you hope to impress.

When someone asks you, “What’s your book about?” it’s the first thing you say.

A one-sentence synopsis simplifies a long novel with many characters and subplots. It shows a clear, concise narrative that grabs the reader’s attention and piques their interest in reading the rest of the book.

5 Formulas to Help Write a One-Sentence Novel Summary

Becoming a better writer is about improving your writing skills and learning how to write a one-sentence summary. It is not an easy task, but it is possible. 

If your goal is to write a one-sentence summary of your book, you should consider using these five formulas to develop your summary. 

These formulas will help you write the kind of one-sentence synopsis that editors and agents typically highlight and recommend.

Here are the five formulas to help you write unique a one-sentence summary:

• If you’re trying to persuade someone, you can use the following formula:

Claim + Reason(s) = Synopsis

Because of this recent study and my own experience, I believe this diet can help you lose weight…”

2. Writing a how-to article :

Specific Subject + Reader Benefit = Summary.

For example, “This post will teach bloggers how to construct headlines that will pique the interest of their readers.”

3. Writing a sales page:

Any [YOUR AUDIENCE] can [SOLVE THEIR PROBLEM] by using [YOUR PRODUCT] because [HOW IT SOLVES THE PROBLEM].

For example, “Any writer may enhance their productivity by using the ‘Writing Planner App’. The Writer Planner App helps them juggle all of their writing assignments and measure their progress.” 

4. Writing a memoir, personal essay, or story:

This is about x, as illustrated by y, to be told in a z.

X represents the theme of your essay that your readers can relate to. Y represents the storyline you like to convey, and z represents the place the story is to be told.

Here’s an example:

Tricia shares: “It’s about what pets do for us that we can’t do ourselves. This is to be exemplified by my life with my dog, chubby, to be detailed in a blog post.”

5. If writing a novel :

WHO is your main character + WHERE the story takes place + WHAT is the situation + WHY it matters + HOW the character solves the problem.

Remember there’s usually only one main character in a novel, and it’s usually an obvious character. Go with the character who’s going to save the day!

Crafting a One-Sentence Summary to Strengthen Your Writing

A one-sentence synopsis aids in the creation of a narrowly focused piece of literature. When you’ve finished your first draft and are ready to edit, utilize the summary as a guide to ensure that each paragraph is connected. It also aids in the focus of your writing, making each sentence more powerful and concise.

With a comprehensive summary, you can get right to the heart of your story without getting bogged down by plodding descriptions. 

 A one-sentence summary provides a voice for the idea(s). Think about what would make your concept more compelling and thrilling and which words you would use to make it more vivid and exciting. 

Where and how do you see your story told? The ideal situation is to find the most compelling way to tell your story that will strike a chord in your readers. This often requires reading widely and frequently and attending to “Why?” 

This will suggest that you work out what your story is about. What is your strong point?—and where is the weak spot in your story. 

Do your pre-publication reading and analysis, and work out your situation. The more you work out the story development in advance, the easier and more enjoyable the writing is. 

What Unique One Sentence summary Entails

• When writing for a range of audiences, it’s critical not to forget about your audience in the initial draft. When editing your writing, pay special attention to the audience. 

Instead of reading it from beginning to end, skim it for facts and questions. To make the summary more brief, forceful, and specific, aim it in the other direction.

• To create a sizzling synopsis, think of a situation where your fictional character is faced with a problem. The answer lies in a tight sentence that describes the character’s personality and motivation and connects directly to your theme.

When you’re actively writing – even watching TV – you’re asked to take in everything at once. However, you can develop a systematic back to your theme.

For example, in my blog posts, I’ll write something like, “In today’s article, you’ll learn three different ways to create a …” The readers know where I am taking them immediately.

It is often effective when writing a short story or personal essay to include often a line such as, “This is a…”

You might prefer to communicate your piece in a roundabout way, perhaps through a story or dialogue.

• You should convey the theme and direction of the piece somewhere in the introduction to your article or the first chapter of your book.

The adage “write what you know” may sound very trite, but it works. Try to write about what you know. If you don’t know it, keep reading. Keep a stock of stories and pieces of writing that you like, and use them again and again.

As long as you’re willing to work hard, you’ll be able to come out with a compelling yet brief overview of any text . The more you practice, the more fluent you become in this language and the more skill you develop in writing a one-sentence summary.

Pam is an expert grammarian with years of experience teaching English, writing and ESL Grammar courses at the university level. She is enamored with all things language and fascinated with how we use words to shape our world.

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