Writing a summary

One MISTAKE that a lot of teachers and educators make is that they assume summary writing is easy, and that all students can do it on their own. This is clearly seen in the given assignments that relate to “reading and writing a summary about a text, an article, a movie”. Although the word summary might appear to be self-explanatory, it is not as simple as that. It is an academic skill that requires training and specific sub-skills from students.

What is summarizing?

To summarize means to write a summary. A summary is defined as a brief account of the main ideas of something (it can be a text, video, movie…etc. Summarizing is a technique that requires condensing ideas, examples, and details of a large and unconcise text into a short and abridged text. Summarizing is a powerful strategy that increases understanding of the text and retention of information. When students write a summary (summarize), they should focus on only the main points of a text using their own words.

The importance of a summary

Summarizing is a very important reading skill that helps students understand and learn the most important part of a text. 1) – It improves their reading comprehension skills and makes them able to remember and retrieve most of what they read. 2) – It is an academic skill that students are going to need in their academic journey, particularly in high school and high education. 3) – It develops students’ critical thinking skills as they become able to make decisions about what should be left in the text and what to remove. This is basically the most difficult part of summarizing. 4) – It improves students’ writing and editing skills and enhances their mastery and proficiency in the language.

What is the difference between summarizing and paraphrasing?

Paraphrasing	Summarizing
A paraphrase is not short A paraphrase should be about 90% of the original text It describes the original text in different words and it doesn’t remove any detail.	Summarizing is very short. It is about 25% of the original text. It focuses on only the main ideas and removes examples and details

Summarizing skills don’t come out of anywhere. They require training and practice. When students are asked to summarize, they will just copy paste and they end up writing very long summaries. The problems students usually face when writing a summary are writing down every single piece of information of the original text, writing nothing of the original text, writing too much, or writing less than required.

Golden rules of summarizing

Remove the things that don’t really matter such as examples
Focus on the main ideas.
Remove the things that are redundant and already repeated.
Select or write a new topic sentence
Make sure you paraphrase

General steps to write a summary

Read the text twice
Reading the text to understand
Underline the main ideas
Underline keywords
Highlight examples and details
Removing additional and repeated ideas
Keeping the same order of the original text
Writing a new topic sentence
paraphrasing

Summary writing guidelines

Writing Skills: How To Summarize effectively?

When writing a summary

As you write your summary, make sure of the following things.

The length of your summary depends on the length of the original article; (usually 10% of the original article)
Focus on the main point of the article; and
Use your own words; avoid copying phrases and sentences from the article.