20 Strategy: Writing Summaries
Process and Hints to Summary Writing
One major challenge with summary writing is deciding what to include and what to leave out. A bit of instruction on the process to follow, along with useful techniques, will have you writing expert summaries in no time.
- Read the text for understanding, without editing. Make sure you understand the content, including major and minor sections, as well as the overlying message being conveyed. Look closely at topic sentences and key words repeated throughout.
- Read through the material and cross out non-vital information. Underline what you believe to be the most important points, even if those points are words or phrases.
- Write your summary in your own words.
- Begin your summary with the type of work, title, author, and any other pertinent information
- Use the present tense
- Follow both the organization (follow the same order of the original text) of the original as well as its tone, though you need to make sure your own point of view is purely objective (reporting content of the text, only).
- Opinions should not appear in a summary. Any words or phrases from the original need to be properly documented and punctuated.
- Do not include anything that doesn’t appear in the original version
- Your summary should be 15 to 20% the length of the original.
- Be sure to go back when you’ve finished your summary and compare it to the original for accuracy.
Effective and Ineffective Summaries
ORIGINAL TEXT
“For nearly 1,400 years Islam, though diverse in sectarian practice and ethnic tradition, has provided a unifying faith for peoples stretching from the Atlantic to the Indian Ocean and beyond. Starting in the 1500s, Western ascendancy, which culminated in colonization, eroded once glorious Muslim empires and reduced the influence of Islam. After the breakup of the Ottoman Empire following World War I and the decline of European colonial empires following World War II, Muslim nations adopted Western ideologies–communism, socialism, secular nationalism, and capitalism. Yet most Muslims remained poor and powerless. Their governments, secular regimes often backed by the West, were corrupt and repressive” (Belt 78).
Belt, Don. “The World of Islam.” National Geographic. January 2002: 76-85. Print.
POORLY-WRITTEN SUMMARY
Despite Western-style governments, Muslim countries are mired in deep poverty and radical governments. This despite the fact that the religion has existed for several centuries. European colonization ruined the Islamic religion for a long time. You would find it hard to imagine how many Muslims there really are out there.
Analysis
This summary…
- does not follow the order of information found in the original
- the phrase “several centuries” minimizes the historic significance of the religion
- sentence-level problems like “mired,” “you would,” and “out there” change the formal tone of the original to a biased, informal representation
- it is approximately half the length of the original, which is too long
- no credit is given to the original source
WELL-WRITTEN SUMMARY
For almost 1,500 years, Islam has united people globally. Western interference, through colonization and political ideologies, has not improved Muslims’ lives (Belt 78).
Analysis
This summary…
- follows the order of the original
- maintains the original tone
- is approximately 20% of the original’s length
- is properly documented and punctuated
Built-In Practice: Writing Summaries
Try your hand at summarizing the following passages.
PRACTICE PARAGRAPH 1
“In 1925 the land aristocracy of Germany owned most of the large estates which occupied 20.2 per cent of the arable land of the country. They had 40 per cent of the land east of the Elbe River. All told, these large estates constituted but 0.4 per cent of the total number of landholdings in Germany. At the base of the pyramid were those who occupied small holdings: 59.4 per cent of the total holdings of Germany accounted for only 6.2 per cent of the arable land” (Lasswell 17).
Lasswell, Harold. Politics: Who Gets What, When, How. New York: Meridian Books, Inc. 1960. Print.
Type your summary in the space provided.
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PRACTICE PARAGRAPH 2
“The Indian tribes of North and South America do not contain all the blood groups that are found in populations elsewhere. A fascinating glimpse into their ancestry is opened by this unexpected biological quirk. For the blood groups are inherited in such a way that, over a whole population, they provide some genetic record of the past. The total absence of blood group A from a population implies, with virtual certainty, that there was no blood group A in its ancestry; and similarly with blood group B. And this is in fact the state of affairs in America” (Bronowski 92).
Bronowski, J. The Ascent of Man. Boston: Little Brown and Company, 1973. Print.
Type your summary in the space provided.
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“A solenoid is an electrically energized coil that forms an electromagnet capable of performing mechanical functions. The term ‘solenoid’ is derived from the word ‘sole’ which in reference to electrical equipment means ‘a part of,’ or ‘contained inside, or with, other electrical equipment.’ The Greek word solenoides means ‘Channel,’ or ‘shaped like a pipe.’ A simple plunger-type solenoid consists of a coil of wire attached to an electrical source, and an iron rod, or plunger, that passes in and out of the coil along the axis of the spiral. A return spring holds the rod outside the coil when the current is deenergized, as shown in figure 1” (Lannon 432).PRACTICE PARAGRAPH 3
Lannon, John. Technical Communication. New York: Longman, 2000. Print.
Type your summary in the space provided.
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CC LICENSED CONTENT, ORIGINAL Revision and Adaptation. Provided by: Lumen Learning. License: CC BY-NC: Attribution-NonCommercial CC LICENSED CONTENT, SHARED PREVIOUSLY Summary Writing. Authored by: David Wehmeyer. Provided by: Wisc-Online. Located at: https://www.wisc-online.com/learn/humanities/literature/trg2603/summary-writing. License: CC BY-NC: Attribution-NonCommercial
Built In Practice 2: Additional Summary Paragraphs for Practice
Summarize the following paragraph:
By and large Yosemite has been preserved as though it were a painting. The boundaries of the park are the gilt frame around a masterpiece, and within the frame we are urged to take only pictures, leave only footprints. There are enormously important reasons to do so—there are too many people coming to the park to do it any other way—and yet I cannot help feeling something is sadly missing from this experience of nature. Looking is a fine thing to do to pictures, but hardly an adequate way to live in the world. It is nature as a place in which we do not belong, a place in which we do not live, in which we are intruders. A tourist is by definition an outsider, a person who does not belong, a stranger in paradise.
Solnit, Rebecca. Savage Dreams: A Journey into the Landscape Wars of the American West.
Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999. Print.
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Interactive summarizing activity #1 from the Excelsior Online Writing Lab: Summarizing Reference Guide: https://owl.excelsior.edu/orc/what-to-do-after-reading/summarizing/summarizing-activity-1/
Interactive summarizing activity #2 from the Excelsior Online Writing Lab: Summarizing Reference Guide: https://owl.excelsior.edu/orc/what-to-do-after-reading/summarizing/summarizing-activity-2/
Interactive summarizing activity #3 from the Excelsior Online Writing Lab: Summarizing Reference Guide: https://owl.excelsior.edu/orc/what-to-do-after-reading/summarizing/summarizing-activity-3/
An additional helpful OER resource for summarizing: From Excelsior Online Writing Lab: Summarizing Reference Guide.
