APPENDICES: Academic Writing Basics
Appendix B: Writing a Summary
Suzan Last
An academic summary provides an objective, condensed (shortened) description of the content of a piece of writing or presentation. Unlike a review, it does NOT analyze, evaluate, or critique; your opinion of the work is not typically part of the summary (unless you have been asked to add your thoughts afterward). Since summaries usually occur within a context (eg., part of your essay), your thoughts about what you have summarized will probably be relevant to your subsequent analysis. But when writing the actual summary of someone else’s ideas, you must neutrally and accurately describe what you take to be the important ideas in the author’s or presenter’s work in as few words as possible. Occasionally, if the work you are summarizing has an unusual form, style, or tone that affects the content, your summary might describe HOW the author presents those ideas.
What is the purpose of a summary?
A summary is meant to inform your reader—who has not read the text or seen the presentation—of what the text is about. It describes its purpose or main idea, and summarizes the supporting arguments that develop that idea. Readers will then know if they will find it useful and want to read it.
There are many kinds of summaries that serve different purposes:
- An academic summary of someone else’s ideas, in the context of a research essay, helps you to support and develop your ideas. You may summarize someone’s ideas because they support your own, or because they differ from yours and allow you to introduce the idea you want to argue. Someone else’s theory may provide a framework for your analysis, so you might summarize the theory before beginning your argument. A summary can act as a springboard to launch your ideas.
- An abstract, written by the author(s) of the paper, describes the content and purpose of an academic paper and is included at the beginning of the article. Abstracts are written by the authors, and thus do not use signal phrases.
- Government workers often write briefing notes to give the busy ministers and directors a summary of important information needed for a meeting or for a decision
- In business, an executive summary gives the busy executive a quick overview of the contents of a formal report.
Being able to write a clear and useful summary is a valuable skill both in academic and professional contexts.
How do you write an effective summary?
Before you can summarize anything, you must understand the content of what you are summarizing and do some pre-writing. Some of the most common flaws in summaries come from not completing these pre-writing steps. For example, some summary writers get bogged down in the small details and neglect to present the main idea; or they present a series of unconnected thoughts that come directly from the source, but do not coherently indicate what that source was about or how ideas were developed; occasionally, a writer may summarize