Want to put in some practice time writing summaries? We suggest doing this five-minute exercise. You can do it once a day, twice a day or more — even with just a single daily session, though, it can foster serious improvements in your writing skill set over time.

Good Summaries

Pick up a popular broadsheet newspaper in your area. Turn to the editorial pages and look at the stories. Often, the editorials will be introduced by a short summary that distills the entire argument or opinion in 20 to 30 words.

Often, these summaries will open with a statement that grabs attention, like a startling statistic, an interesting fact or a provocative opinion. That way, the reader is quickly hooked in with the promise of something they can actually care about. At the end of the summary, notice how it closes with a transition to the actual editorial. Take note of the various elements of the summary — sentence length, sentence structure, word choice and such.

Doing that should clue you in on what makes good summaries. Take notes if you feel like you need to write down some of your discoveries. Later on, you’ll use them when writing your own summaries.

You can do this for five minutes a day for the first week to prepare you for the actual writing practice.

Summary Writing Practice

The actual practice session goes like this:

1. Find a short story in a newspaper, magazine or on the web. Start out with op-ed pieces as that’s what you’re using for basis (i.e. the summaries you reviewed earlier). Later on, as you get more comfortable, you can move on to other types of writing, such as features and stories.
2. Read it and write three summaries. Yep, three different ones using different introductions, bodies and endings.
3. Read each one aloud. How do they sound?  Are they snappy and on-point like the ones in newspapers?  Or are they dragging and just a little unclear?
4. Just think about that for the remainder of the time. Let it sit in your mind, without you having to think about them consciously.
5. The next day, for your next five-minute session, you will write a new summary for the same story. You will finish it, review it, revise it and finalize.
6. Do over for the next two days after.

Doing this trains you to write summaries fast — as you did while whipping up those three right after reading the story. However, it also trains you in letting things percolate. The second day, there’s a good chance the best version of the summary will flow right out of you, as the story and the summaries you’ve written for it have all had a chance to sink in.

Writing a novel isn’t always about depicting each scene in detail.  Sometimes, you’ll have to use summaries to fast-forward into the action, too.    There are several instances in a novel where a summarized, rather than detailed, description is useful.

Repetitive Events

Summaries are useful when informing the reader of events that happen regularly, such as a couple meeting illicitly every Tuesday night before opening up the next scene on their latest tryst.

Jumping From One Major Scene To Another

In between significant events in a novel, there may be multiple other occurrences that explain some things that happen in the next event.  A summarized description will work better in that case than boring the reader with the blow-by-blow of an insignificant scene.

Summarize Things That Happen Over A Long Period

If the reader needs to be informed of something that happened over the last five years, it’s usually best summarized.  Detailing something that’s secondary to the plot just isn’t a good use of limited space — plus, it’s going to be ridiculously long.

To Focus On Emotion

Summaries are a great way to shine attention on your character’s emotions, rather than the different actions that happen.   Keep it short to maintain a healthy pace, though — you don’t want to waste half the chapter discussing the protagonists’ feelings.

Facts and opinions from outside sources can offer good supporting material for your arguments in writing.   However, you need to manage their use in your work, since too much others’ opinion leaves little room for expressing your own ideas.

Paraphrasing Quoted Material

The best way to preserve the flow of your ideas while quoting material is to paraphrase the words and integrate the thought into your own sentences.  For citation, you can include the source in parentheses or with a footnote reference in order to maintain the flow of your own writing.

Direct Quotes

Be selective with your direct quotes.    Doing so always runs the risk of breaking the flow of your piece, but they do add a variety that makes for more interesting reading.  The best recourse when using the words of the original author is to integrate some of it in your own sentences, usually mid-way through a paragraph.

Summaries

Rewriting other people’s material for inclusion in your work is a labor-intensive task.  Don’t fool yourself into thinking it’s better than direct quotes or paraphrases, though.  A paragraph consisting entirely of summarized material can end up interrupting the development of your own arguments  — since it’s  a mere retelling and doesn’t involve engaging intellectual processes.  Be very careful when opting for summaries over paraphrases for that very reason.

When composing longer pieces of writing, it can be hard for readers to keep track of all the ideas you present, even if your writing has been duly fixed up by a complete writing software.  As a solution, you’re usually advised to divide the paper into logical sections.  Smaller chunks are easier to digest, after all, than the entirety of several thousand words that span dozens of different ideas.

Even with logical divisions, though, readers can still lose track of the various thoughts in your paper.  One of the most effective ways to ensure it sticks is to use summaries.

Good readers tend to mentally summarize each section of a paper after finishing them.  That allows them to process each major concept before moving to the next — an excellent way to get them to internalize the ideas they just read.

Depending on readers to do the summarizing on their own isn’t exactly the best approach.  Why leave to chance something you can do yourself?  By that, we mean writing a summary of each section after you finish them, repeating the significant parts you presented so the reader can carry it onto the subsequent sections.  Additionally, a summary gives the reader something to compare their understanding of the material to.  If they’re mistaken in some of their understanding, they can quickly go back and reread the section before moving on to the rest of the text.

When some students are asked to write a book, film or performance review, they end up submitting a summary essay.  While there’s nothing inherently bad about summaries, that’s not what you’re supposed to produce when composing a review.   As a result, they end up with bad grades, even though they worked diligently on the piece, even using a writing improvement software to give it polish.

A review essay’s primary intention is to offer a critical analysis of a piece of work, whether that be literature, an academic article or a musical concert.  Rather than merely report on what the source material contains, it should discuss its merits and shortcomings, as well as its contributions to the field as a whole.

Summaries, more often than not, do have a place in review essays.  However, they should be kept as a way of keeping the reader abreast on the main points of the material being discussed, rather than as the primary purpose of the work.

How much summary should a review essay include?  The bare minimum — as in, as short and straightforward as possible.  You don’t even need to give away much of the plot when reviewing a novel, for instance.  Instead, you can limit them to whatever length is necessary to keep the reader informed while going over your critical analysis.

In academic writing, summarizing and paraphrasing are very essential skills. With majority of college writing essays geared towards proving a point, you will very likely need to depend on a lot of source material to effectively argue your case.

First, a bit of refresher:

• Summarizing is all about reducing a material down to its most important points, often bringing it down to roughly a third or less of the original source.
• Paraphrasing, on the other hand, is about restating a passage in your own words, often as an alternative to using a direct quotation.

In the case of your college essays, you will employ both techniques to integrate evidence from previous writing into your own work. If you’re struggling to put together either type, the following advice might help.

Summarizing

• Scan the text.
• Locate and highlight the main points. A good first place to look for are the topic sentences on each paragraph.
• Rewrite the material using the main points you found, setting aside evidence and examples.

Paraphrasing

• Review the source text.
• Rewrite it in your own words.
• Use reporting verbs and phrases to show attribution.
• Put unique and author-driven phrases in quotes.

Like other parts of your essays, summaries and paraphrases are best done with the help of a competent writing software.  While the thoughts you will express in them aren’t original, the words you will be using are and they’ll be best served with a dose of polish from such a tool.

After you’ve done all the pre-writing work, as we’ve outlined a few days ago, you should be ready to begin writing your summary.  Pull out your notes or annotated document, whichever you prefer to work with, and sit down to begin the task.

Always start summaries with the title of the piece, the name of the original writer and the work’s main thesis (preferably, in eight words or less).   Keep in mind that summaries cannot be more than one-fourth the length of the original piece.  Make sure to cover all the necessary information you’ve noted in your preparation stages during the writing process.

Compress ideas using coordination and subordination, taking careful note of the transitions in the original work.  Make sure that the writer’s main idea is reflected throughout the summary (as opposed to your own), from the beginning to the conclusion.  This is especially important for summary writers – it’s not about what you think, but what the original author was trying to communicate.  Leave your opinions out for a different project.

Like all pieces of writing, you will need to edit and revise your summary.  For the writing mechanics, use a good grammar software to work through the various elements of writing.  For the actual content, the most important thing is to check for accuracy and adherence to the author’s original ideas.  If you have doubts, check your notes and annotations, to see if you contradict anything that the original writer insinuates.

Summaries, on the surface, seem easy to write.  All the thinking, research and presentation has already been done for you.  All you need to do now is take the best parts and present it in a more concise manner.

Despite that, most people still find it difficult to write good summaries.  From poorly-written text to badly-presented ideas to missed crucial points, useful abridged versions of materials just don’t come by all too often.

Like most other forms of writing, preparation is key to a good summary.  The actual text can fashioned into shape with attention, time and a good writing software, but poor preparation leads you down the wrong path from the start.

Reading The Material

Before being ready to write the summary, you’ll need to go over the material in detail.  Read it carefully for the essence, making no notes or markings on the pages, with your sole purpose to understand the whole point of the text.

After you’ve read it, write down the main idea that you’ve taken away from the material in one sentence.  Then, go over the text again and look for the writer’s main thesis.  Compare the two, carefully revising your own main idea to better reflect the writer’s goals with the piece.

Pick Out Ideas

The next step in the preparation is to pick out the ideas throughout the work that support the main thesis (as you have determined above).  I personally like to do this by underlining from the text, but you can do whatever works best for you (e.g. writing things down as an outline).  Make sure to highlight “key” elements that link one idea to another (I encircle them) too as you will need them in your summary.    All examples, detailed arguments and quotations can be skipped (I cross them out).