What is a Summary?

A summary is a comprehensive, objective, and descriptive restatement of the main ideas of a text (an article, book, movie, event, etc.).

You’ll likely be asked to write summaries for one reason or another in most of your college courses. Being able to summarize lab results accurately and briefly, for example, is critical in a chemistry or engineering class. Summarizing the various theories of sociology or education helps a person apply them to his or her fieldwork.

Some summary assignments will expect students to condense material more than others. For example, when summary is the sole purpose of the assignment, the student might be asked to include key supporting evidence. When summary is being used to provide context about a source within a larger essay, a student might only include the main idea of the source by describing the claim and reasons of the argument, rather than an exhaustive list of the evidence as well.

Why Write Summaries?

Summaries provide a way for writers to reference the sources they are relying on for evidence. They prove that the writer has knowledge about a topic.

As we’ve discussed, the first step in joining any conversation is to listen. Summaries provide writers a way of thinking through the voices they’re hearing. Writing summaries forces a writer to take the time to understand what a source is really saying. It can help a student better understand a source or topic.

Summaries are also essential for academic writing, because summary is used to provide context. Providing a summary of the source or text that a writer is responding to is usually the first step in responding. Writers can use condensed summaries to provide general context for their arguments. Writers can also use summaries to provide context for their evidence. Summarizing an article briefly before providing a quote can help writers make their supporting evidence more understandable for their readers.

Examine the following passage from “First Year Composition Prepares Students for Academic Writing”:

Notice how the author, Tyler Branson, uses very condensed summaries of three different sources. By providing these very brief overviews of these different texts, he is able to quickly show his readers the main points of the general conversation and the voices within it. By providing this general context through summary, Branson is able to quickly show readers that his own argument is relevant and has exigency. Other people are talking about this subject, so it must be important!

Students can use summary to show their understanding of a text or resource, to provide background information for their essays, and to give context for the evidence they present.

This semester, your first assignment will be a Summary+Response essay. While this essay will specifically require you to evaluate and respond to the essay of your choice, it will first require that you provide a clear, accurate, and descriptive overview of the text.

The rest of this chapter will provide information about the features of and best practices for writing effective summaries.

Best Practices for Summary

Summaries have several key characteristics:

• use the writer’s own words rather than quotations
• condense the original text to provide only the most important information
• represent the complete text accurately
• avoid personal opinion or judgement about the topic
• do not require the reader to have previous knowledge of the text

A summary must stand alone as a separate and complete description of a text. Writers cannot skip over or leave out information without creating a misrepresentation.

In addition to being complete and accurate, summaries are descriptive.

Imagine someone trying to summarize the plot of a movie by only stating plot points and without any descriptions about who the characters are or why they make the choices they make. It would be confusing at best. Summaries need descriptive elements that explain the relationship between points. They explain the difference between the main claim an author makes and the evidence used to support the claim.

Compare the following example:

This example makes a common error. It lists ideas in order and fairly accurately. It introduces the author, uses signal phrases, and puts the ideas in the writer’s own words. But it isn’t a very strong summary of Wardle’s essay. Someone who has never read Wardle’s essay probably would not be able to make much sense of this summary.

Consider this example instead:

The words in bold are transitional phrases that help describe the connections between ideas. Notice that in the second example, a reader has a much better idea of the point Wardle is making because they can see how she makes her argument.

Rather than simply listing points, a summary will describe how a text is organized and how the evidence is used to support the claims and reasons. Good summaries understand that a reader needs this contextual information to make sense of the concepts being presented.

How to Organize a Summary

Introducing the Summary

You will almost always begin a summary with an introduction to the author, article, and publication so the reader knows what we are about to read. One of the trickier parts of creating a summary is making it clear that this is a summary of someone else’s work; these ideas are not your original ideas. Author and publication information will appear again in your bibliography, but is also necessary to provide the citation within the text.

So, for example, if you were to get an assignment asking you to summarize Matthew Hutson’s Atlantic article, “Beyond the Five Senses,” an introduction for that summary might look something like this:

In his July 2017 article in The Atlantic, “Beyond the Five Senses,” Matthew Hutson explores ways in which potential technologies might expand our sensory perception of the world. He notes that some technologies, such as cochlear implants, are already accomplishing a version of this for people who do not have full access to one of the five senses. In much of the article, though, he seems more interested in how technology might expand the ways in which we sense things. Some of these technologies are based in senses that can be seen in nature, such as echolocation, and others seem more deeply rooted in science fiction. However, all of the examples he gives consider how adding new senses to the ones we already experience might change how we perceive the world around us.

In this introduction, the reader knows when the article was published (2017) and that it first appeared in The Atlantic, which is a popular press magazine devoted to current event issues. Even if the reader has no idea who Matthew Hutson is, well read readers who can immediately see that this is a relatively recent text from a reputable source. However, if your audience didn’t know what The Atlantic was, a better introduction would explain the relevance of the source.

If you were summarizing one of the articles we read for class, you would provide the original source, Bad Ideas About Writing and possibly the publication information. It is an OER (open educational resource) edited by writing scholars and published in 2017. The title of the book can give your reader immediate information because it is clear and descriptive.

However, while long introductions can be appropriate for essay-length summaries, most students will use summary more often within an essay. Writers can use summary to give context for specific quotes or evidence. In that case, a more succinct and clear introduction of the source may be more appropriate.

To use one of the essays from Bad Ideas About Writing, you would need to state the author’s name and the title of the essay at minimum. It may be relevant to give information about the book title, but you likely would focus more on the identifying information for the essay itself.

Presenting the Body of a Summary

The body of your summary should present all main ideas of the text in chronological order. Start with the first point and progress through the main ideas in the order they are presenting. Be sure that you describe how the various claims and reasons relate to one another. How does the writer build their argument? Use transitional phrases to indicate the order:

First, the author describes. . .

Next, in order to prove the point, the author states. . .

Finally, the author acknowledges. . .

Summaries should do more than list points in order. Instead, effective summaries will describe how an author makes their argument and provide enough detail that a reader without previous knowledge of the source could still follow and understand. Strong summaries will explain the way the argument builds and the describe relationship between the claims, reasons, and evidence.

At minimum, a summary must

• State the main argument or claim clearly and accurately
• Explain the reasons or premises for the argument
• Describe the supporting evidence used to prove the argument
• Follow the order of the original text (chronological)
• Use transitions between points so show relationships

A summary should not:

• State opinions about the topic
• Provide opinions about the argument or evidence presented
• Misrepresent the source in any way

Signal Phrases

Regardless of how you are using summary, you will introduce the main ideas throughout your text with signal phrases.

Signal phrases are a technique that writers use to indicate the source of information. They include identifying information from the source and an action verb. You must use a signal phrase any time you summarize, quote, or paraphrase.

Signal phrases are necessary any time a writer is introducing information or wording from a source. Without a signal phrase, readers will not be able to tell what conversation or sources a writer is responding to.

Concluding a Summary

When you are writing an essay-length summary, there are a few options for concluding:

• Discuss any connections or loose ends that will help your reader fully understand the points being made in this text.
• State (or restate) the information that is most important for your readers to remember.
• Paraphrase the author’s concluding section or final main idea.

When you are using a summary as evidence in a larger argument:

• Explain how the source supports, illustrates, or gives new information about your larger claim.
• Connect the information in the summary to your own main point for that paragraph or for the essay so readers understand clearly why it deserves the space it takes up in your work.