Chapter 15: Summary
As a student, you are probably most comfortable with summary writing because it is a genre introduced to students early in their academic journey. A summary is an accurate retelling in your own words of the main points or events from something you read, saw, or experienced.
For example, your friend asks you about the latest movie you saw and what it was about. You mention an interesting article to your instructor and they ask for a description. You probably responded with a shortened version of the plot of the movie or main points of the article. That is summary.
Summary is a useful tool for writers and can do the following:
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provide background information for your audience,
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entertain your audience, or…
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persuade your audience by supporting a point you make.
When you write a summary, you will need to think about your audience and purpose. If you are writing a summary in order to provide background information, you will need to include the key ideas your audience needs to know in order to understand what follows the summary. If you are writing a summary for an annotated bibliography, you are writing to other researchers and also to your future self. You will need to include all the important information so that you can remember what that article was about when you pull all of your sources together for a larger writing project. Summarizing is also a comprehension aid, which forces you to read in-depth to understand a reading.
The video below gives you tips on summarizing in an academic paper:
Summary: Features
Presents the author’s main points
One feature that distinguishes summary from other genres is that it accurately introduces the main points or events of the text you are summarizing. If you are summarizing an argument, you might ask: What is the author’s thesis or main idea? What are their supporting claims or points? If you are summarizing a story or fictional work, you might include the main events or ideas. In order to keep your summary concise, leave out minor or unimportant details.
In addition, you should try to present the author’s ideas accurately and objectively, even if you disagree with the author. Because you are the go-between for the author and your audience, you should consider what your responsibility is to both. Set aside personal commentary or analysis so that readers don’t confuse your ideas with the author’s ideas.
Uses your own words
When you write a summary, your goal is to summarize the original piece of writing using your own words and phrases. If there is a time when you need to use the author’s words or phrases, use these tools:
- If you are introducing a specific word or term, specifically if you are talking about a word as a word: use italics.
- If you need to use a direct quote or characteristic word: place in quotation marks. For example, Rodriguez writes that he was driven by “the haunted zeitgeist” of his generation. (Notice how this is still my summary, but I’ve put quotes around a phr