Some student summaries I have read make me cringe. No doubt they did the same to the teachers and professors who graded them. More than just issues with grammar and structure (that can be remedied with a good writing software), I was surprised by the lack of effort in creating an original retelling.

If you are assigned to summarize a given work, what is your first step to do it? Other individuals find it hard to summarize someone’s writing especially if it is long enough for them to work on. It may be true since you will feel absolutely depress knowing you need to summarize a more than a single page of someone’s writing.

However, even if you really don’t know how the writer made his work, you should still take the most important step in summarizing. That is, to read it from the beginning down to the very end.

You have to understand the concept of the topic and how the writer delivers his ideas in all his paragraphs. It is also necessary to dig for more information about the topic so that you will know what to eliminate when summarizing a given content.

Most writers skip this step of knowing the topic more, which is why they always end up summarizing a better content to an incomplete and weak one.

Basically, you don’t have to change everything and ruin the concept of the topic. You are there to summarize and not to write a new one.

There are a handful ways on how to summarize a writing well. You might want to keep this in mind so that the next time that you will work on someone’s writings, you can easily decide on what to do and to avoid eliminating important details on the original writing that you will have to work for.

When you summarize, the goal is to state the original material in your own words. You are not supposed to:

– paraphrase the original work
– cut and paste critical passages
– give your opinion

Always remember these things since most writers failed to avoid it over and over again. Instead, all you have to do is read the material and repeat its ideas in your own words, often in a shorter, more succinct manner.

When you create a summary, imagine writing it for someone who has not previously read the material. How will you convey its essential ideas while staying within the limits of your word count? How do you make sure they understand all the major details it discusses?

Even if you intended to “borrow” words from the original material itself to do this, you will likely end up having to use your own words, especially when trying to cram a major idea into a few sentences. Use reporting expressions liberally (e.g. “the author says…”) so that the attribution for the idea remains clear throughout the summary. Lastly, try to keep your opinions to yourself. Your personal views are unimportant in the summary – only those of the original source really matters.

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Category: Writing
Keywords: summary, writing summaries