Summarizing
The first three chapters in this section of Reading and Writing Successfully in College provide guidance for locating and evaluating sources. The rest of this section provides guidance for using the sources you have located. All of this guidance assumes that you understand the sources you are trying to use. If you don’t, review Part 1: Successful College Reading for reading techniques and/or talk with a classmate, your professor, or a tutor for help.
A summary is, by definition, a condensed version of the original. It’s shorter, and it must focus on the original’s main point(s) to be accurate.
Summaries vary in length. Some will be very short, even just a phrase. For example, if I write, “A coming-of-age story set in a fictional Southern town, To Kill a Mockingbird explores issues of racism and discrimination,” the phrase “a coming-of-age story set in a fictional Southern town” is a kind of summary. It doesn’t provide any details at all, but it still encapsulates the book. Notice that the idea that the book takes up issues of racism and discrimination is not a summary. That’s an interpretation.
Some summaries will be long. For example, in graduate school, I was asked to write 500-word summaries of major theories of literary criticism. In academic settings, professors sometimes assign long summaries to make sure that you understand the texts that you are working with, which is exactly what my graduate instructor wanted.
More often, though, summaries are somewhere in between. Writers summarize in order to make sure our readers understand the text in the same way we do. To accomplish this, our summaries need to be honest. From a sentence or two to a paragraph, writers usually offer summaries to make sure that reader and writer are on the same page, metaphorically speaking, before the writer uses the source to support their own work.
To write a summary well, we cannot misrepresent the ideas in a text, either by accident or on purpose, nor can we write a summary as if a minor point is the central idea of a text. Even if we are going to argue with an author’s points, the summary must accurately represent the ideas in the original.
Using Summaries to Improve Your Understanding
Honest summaries start with careful reading. You won’t be able to summarize well if you don’t understand what you are reading. Once you have a good understanding, you’ll be able to write a good summary.
The following activity will help you write a successful summary that covers the entire text. This activity assumes that you have carefully read the text and that you understand it.
- Divide the text into sections. Sometimes those sections are marked for you by headings or extra spaces between paragraphs. If they aren’t, look especially for transitions that indicate contrast or sequence, which frequently indicate a shift in focus. Don’t worry about getting these sections “right”; instead, make sure that you understand why you are grouping those particular paragraphs toge