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Summarising

What is a summary ?

A summary is a condensed or shortened version of a book, article or other piece of writing. The summary presents the most important ideas in your own words and without any comment on the ideas. Summarizing assists understanding, organizing and retaining ideas. The summaries that you write at university can be either those you write for other people (such as a summary assignment) or those you write for yourself (such as when preparing for an assignment or an exam) (Anderson & Hidi 1988).

For a summary assignment you will need to:

For preparing for an assignment or an exam you:

When you are summarizing you can expect to work back and forth between the original and the summary you are writing.

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How to summarise

There are three processes you need for an effective summary. These are:

The main principle of summarising is to focus on how the author has structured the reading overall. To achieve this you can use the procedure below

1. Skim the reading to be summarised

To do this:

2. Read through the reading to be summarised

If there are some words that you don’t understand or know, try to guess what they might mean and either highlight or note them so you can look them up later.

3. Establish what are the most important or main ideas

Go through the reading again and highlight key words and phrases. Look for ‘signpost words’ such as ‘first’, ‘second’ and ‘finally’. Remember when you are selecting the main ideas that these are the ideas that are most important to the author of the reading and not the ideas that you find most interesting or unusual.

4. Draw a diagram or write a word outline of the main ideas

Diagrams are useful to help you identify simply the most important ideas in the reading and the connections between those ideas. Some different types of diagrams are outlined below and include the:

Spider diagram, network diagram, compare table and flow chart examples

Outlines help you set out the most important ideas in the reading using dot points that is, single words or phrases to identify those ideas. A word outline can be presented as:

Topic

5. Compare your diagram or outline with the prediction you made in Step 1 and with the ideas you highlighted in Step 3

If necessary go through the reading again. Have you represented all the major ideas in the reading? Have you accurately represented the relationships between these ideas? Have you given the ideas the same kind of emphasis as the author did?


Further steps for a summary assignment

A summary is divided into the introduction and the body.

6. Write the introduction to the summary

This would include:

7. Write the main part or body of the summary

Each of these main points is developed briefly in a separate paragraph in the body of the summary. Use your diagram or word outline to write a topic sentence which expresses each main idea completely.

8. Again compare your full summary with the reading

Your lecturers will expect you to have:

9. Final editing

Check the:

You will find that with practice, you will develop your own way of summarising, combining and reordering some of the steps above. Below is an example of a summary.

Reading of Summary (Approximately 150 words.)

In an article titled “An issue in a class of its own” in The Australian on 15 th November, 2000, Gary Gray states that education is a key issue for Australian voters. He points out that a majority of Australians indicate that education is an issue which influences their vote. He also reports that more Australian voters believe that the Labor party can manage education better than the Coalition parties and suggests that education will be a significant issue in some marginal seats in the next federal election.

Comment:

The introduction to the summary:

  • title of article

  • author’s name

  • source of the article and date

  • topic of the article

and

  • an outline of the main ideas covered in the article

Gray refers statistics that 78% of Australian voters indicate that education is an issue which influences their voting. Gray explains this as stemming from a belief by both parents and students that education is important for a person’s future prospects. This interest is consistent across different age groups but female voters are more likely to rate it as important than male voters. (Comment: main idea 1)

Gray also indicates that more Australian voters (40%) believe that the Labor party is a better manager of education than the Coalition parties (29%). However this varies across age groups with the under fifties preferring Labor and the over fifties preferring the Coalition parties, and a significant number of women (30%) indicating that neither Labor nor the Coalition is the better party to manage education. (Comment: main idea 2)

Gray concludes that because of these trends with the over 50s and female voters education may not be a decisive issue overall in the next federal election. However he adds that it could be the decisive issue in eight marginal seats where educational institutions are prominent.  (Comment: main idea 3)

Comment:

The body of the summary

  • the main ideas are developed in greater detail

(Ingleton & Wake, 1997)

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What to do if …?

What to do if the reading is very long

Divide the reading into a number of sections when you are first skimming it (Step 1) and identify the main ideas in each section. You will then need to collect together all the main ideas from each section as a whole to make sure that you represent the reading accurately as a whole.

What to do if the vocabulary is difficult

If the words used in the source reading are specialized or technical words related to the subject and/or if English is not your first language, then you may find that you cannot guess (as suggested in Step 2) what they might mean. You may also need to look them up in a specialized dictionary (e.g. Dictionary of Business, Dictionary of Science) rather than an English language dictionary. (Kirkland and Saunders 1991)

What to do if the ideas are difficult to understand

The reading may contain ideas that you are not yet familiar with. If so, you can consult a more general reading (such as a textbook for that subject or a specialized dictionary), or talk to your classmates or your tutor to become more familiar with the ideas before you begin summarizing. (Kirkland and Saunders 1991)

What to do if the reading is poorly organised and/or written

Problems may arise because the source is not clearly written and not because you just can’t understand them. Talk with your classmates about their impressions of the reading. (Kirkland and Saunders 1991)

What to do if your summary looks very close to the original

This can happen when you work through the reading sentence by sentence. Refer to the steps mentioned earlier and try to work through the reading. A summary which resembles the original reading too closely will be considered plagiarised.

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Sources:

Anderson, V & Hidi S 1988, ‘Teaching students to summarise’, Educational Leadership, Vol 46, pp 26-28.
Ingleton, C & Wake, B 1997, Literacy Matters: Strategies for teaching communication skills to university students, Adelaide, ACUE, University of Adelaide.
Jones, BF, Pierce, J & Hunter, B 1988, ‘Teaching students to construct graphic representations’ Educational Leadership, vol 46, pp 20 – 25.
Kirkland , MR & Saunders, MAP 1991, ‘Maximizing Student Performance in Summary Writing: Managing Cognitive Load’, TESOL Quarterly, Vol 25, No. 1, Spring, pp105-121.

 

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