Writing Summaries

• The goal of writing a summary is to offer an accurate and complete sense of an original article, a chapter, or a book but in a more condensed form. A summary restates the author's main point, purpose, intent, and supporting details in your own words.
• First, read the original text carefully, making notes on or highlighting the important points. Identify the main idea in the reading, which is usually in the first paragraph. Note the supporting elements the author uses to explain or back up his/her main information or claim.
• Next, make an outline that includes the main idea and the supporting details. Arrange your information in a logical order, for example, most to least impoortant or chronological. The way you organize the outline may serve as a model for how you divide and write the essay.
• Then, write the summary, making sure to state the author's name in the first sentence. Present the main idea, followed by the supporting points. The remainder of your summary should focus on how the author supports, defines, and/or illustrates that main idea. Remember, unless otherwise stated by your instructor, a summary should contain only the author's views, so try to be as objective as possible.
• Finally, as you revise and edit your summary, compare it to the original text and ask yourself questions such as: Does the author succeed? How and why or why not? What are the strengths, weaknesses? Why? What did the author do well? Not well? Why?

Information is taken from Columbia University School of Social Work.

http://www.columbia.edu/cu/ssw/write/handouts/summaries.pdf

Example Summary

(With original main point underlined.)

Author Jaime O'Niell's article, "No Allusions in the Classroom," emphasized the communication problem between teachers and students due to the students' lack of basic knowledge. The author supports this assertion by using a combination of personal experience, evidence obtained from recent polls, other professors' opinions, and the results of an experiment he conducted in his own classroom. The experiment O'Neill conducted was an ungraded eighty-six question "general knowledge" test issued to students on the first day of classes. On this test, "most students answered incorrectly far more often than they answered correctly." Incorrect answers included fallacies such as: "Darwin invented gravity" and "Leningrad was in Jamaica." Compounding the problem, students don't ask questions. This means that their teachers assume they know things that they do not. O'Neill shows the scope of this problem by showing that, according to their teachers, this seems to be a typical problem across the United States. O'Niell feels that common knowledge in a society is essential to communicate. Without this common knowledge, learning is made much more difficult because teacher and student do not have a common body of knowledge from which to draw. The author shows the deterioration of common knowledge through poll results, personal experience, other teachers' opinions, and his own experiment's results.

Jaime O'Neill, No Allusions in the Classroom, Newsweek, September 23, 1985.

http://writing.colostate.edu/guides/documents/standsum/pop5c.cfm