Writing is not one task with a specific, unchanging set of rules. Consequently, it’s often counterproductive to classify writing as “good” or “bad” because doing so necessitates an oversimplified view of what writing is. Instead of aspiring to the title of “Good Writer,” I propose that each of us should strive to become a more effective writer.
Characteristics of effective writers
Effective writers know that there are many different types of writing, from proposals to poems, from diary entries to legal defenses. They realize that different types of writing have different requirements: the elements that make a good poem are not the same ones that make a good encyclopedia entry. Effective writers also know how to adapt their writing to suit their particular audience, genre, topic, context, and purpose.
The ability to adapt your writing for maximum effectiveness is an immensely useful skill. And learning how is easier than you might think. You’ll need to focus on two things:
- increasing your awareness of the differences between writing situations and
- gaining the tools to respond to a given writing situation.
Let’s practice these two components of effective writing using summary, an essential building block in many modes of writing.
Know the three essential characteristics of a summary
A good summary has three basic characteristics: conciseness, accuracy, and objectivity.
Conciseness: unlike paraphrase, summary condenses information. The degree of density can vary: while you can summarize a two-hundred page book in fifty words, you can also summarize a twenty-five-page article in five hundred words. Both are summaries because both condense the material, although one condenses its material much more than the other does.
If the writing task is being assigned to you – in a work or school setting, perhaps – you’ll likely have the summary’s length defined for you. If not, there are a couple of factors to consider when deciding how long the summary should be. What is the goal of your communication? If the goal is just to present a summary, then you can use whatever space you need.
If, however, the summary is only a piece of the puzzle, you will want to be careful not to overdo the length. For example, if you are writing a book review, only part of the review summarizes the book. The other, and arguably more important, part of the review is the evaluation. Your judgment about the book, what you thought of it and why, is what readers are primarily looking for when they read your review.
Accuracy: summaries should provide a clear and precise picture of the material, shorter length notwithstanding. In order to do this, you as the summary writer must understand the material thoroughly, and you must convey your understanding so that the reader gets an accurate picture as well.
This can be a lot harder than it sounds. As you know, there are many ways for you as the writer to put yourself in the reader’s shoes. If the writing is less than clear, the reader may misunderstand. But when you summarize a written piece, you’re a reader first. As a reader, you may misunderstand the writer’s point if the writer hasn’t made it clear.
Objectivity: summaries should only contain the original author’s viewpoint, not your own. You are reporting, not editorializing. Even a seemingly innocuous statement like “Smith helpfully points out that…” is subjective. You are not just presenting Smith’s point; you are also expressing your opinion that Smith’s point is helpful.
Becoming aware of distinctions like these will add power and purpose to your summary.
Underused summary writing tools: critical reading, methodical thinking
You must apply your critical reading and thinking faculties in order to construct an effective summary. The following paragraphs take you through the reading, thinking, and writing processes one at a time.
The first thing you must be able to do is get to know the material you are preparing to summarize; take time and care to become comfortable with it. Read and review it repeatedly, breaking down the material into sections. It is often helpful to summarize smaller sections as you go. These “mini-summaries” will aid your understanding as well as make the summary process less painful later on.
Second, you must prioritize the information and/or arguments contained in the piece. Think about the piece’s structure, and decide what the piece’s main point is, which statements are supporting points, and which are details.
Not all pieces are organized in the same way. For example, some pieces state their main points up front, while others bury them in the middle of the essay. As a summary writer, you are always working backwards: looking at the finished essay and trying to discern the argument’s basic outlines. After all, outlines are all you have room for.
After you have prioritized the information, you will decide what to include, and how much of it, based on how much space you have to construct the summary. You’ll always choose to include the main point. If you have space, you can present a sketch of the supporting points. If you have even more space, you may refer to a few salient details to exemplify the piece’s approach.
When you’re ready to write the summary, get the original out of your sight. Instead, use the notes and “mini-summaries” that you constructed during the reading step. This will make it easier to put the points into your own words and sentence structures, which is important when summarizing.
After you have finished drafting, check your summary against the original for accuracy. On a separate review, check each sentence for hints of subjectivity or judgment, and remove them where you find them.
The summary is a mainstay of informative and persuasive writing. Conquer it, and you’ll be well on your way toward “effective writer” status.
Go back to the full list of Writing Power articles.
Image courtesy of Chris (via Flikr)
Summarizing, or writing a summary, means giving a concise overview of a text’s main points in your own words. A summary is always much shorter than the original text.
There are five key steps that can help you to write a summary:
Writing a summary does not involve critiquing or analyzing the source. You should simply provide an accurate account of the most important information and ideas (without copying any text from the original).
When to write a summary
There are many situations in which you might have to summarize an article or other source:
- As a stand-alone assignment to show you’ve understood the material
- To keep notes that will help you remember what you’ve read
- To give an overview of other researchers’ work in a literature review
When you’re writing an academic text like an essay, research paper, or dissertation, you’ll integrate sources in a variety of ways. You might use a brief quote to support your point, or paraphrase a few sentences or paragraphs.
But it’s often appropriate to summarize a whole article or chapter if it is especially relevant to your own research, or to provide an overview of a source before you analyze or critique it.
In any case, the goal of summarizing is to give your reader a clear understanding of the original source. Follow the five steps outlined below to write a good summary.
Step 1: Read the text
You should read the article more than once to make sure you’ve thoroughly understood it. It’s often effective to read in three stages:
- Scan the article quickly to get a sense of its topic and overall shape.
- Read the article carefully, highlighting important points and taking notes as you read.
- Skim the article again to confirm you’ve understood the key points, and reread any particularly important or difficult passages.
There are some tricks you can use to identify the key points as you read:
- Start by reading the abstract. This already contains the author’s own summary of their work, and it tells you what to expect from the article.
- Pay attention to headings and subheadings. These should give you a good sense of what each part is about.
- Read the introduction and the conclusion together and compare them: What did the author set out to do, and what was the outcome?
The AI-powered Citation Checker helps you avoid common mistakes such as:
- Missing commas and periods
- Incorrect usage of “et al.”
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Step 2: Break the text down into sections
To make the text more manageable and understand its sub-points, break it down into smaller sections.
If the text is a scientific paper that follows a standard empirical structure, it is probably already organized into clearly marked sections, usually including an introduction, methods, results, and discussion.
Other types of articles may not be explicitly divided into sections. But most articles and essays will be structured around a series of sub-points or themes.
Tip: To see at a glance what each part of the text focuses on, try writing a word or phrase in the margin next to each paragraph that describes the paragraph’s content. If several paragraphs cover similar topics, you may group them together.Step 3: Identify the key points in each section
Now it’s time go through each section and pick out its most important points. What does your reader need to know to understand the overall argument or conclusion of the article?
Keep in mind that a summary does not involve paraphrasing every single paragraph of the article. Your goal is to extract the essential points, leaving out anything that can be considered background information or supplementary detail.
In a scientific article, there are some easy questions you can ask to identify the key points in each part.
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If the article takes a different form, you might have to think more carefully about what points are most important for the reader to understand its argument.
In that case, pay particular attention to the thesis statement—the central claim that the author wants us to accept, which usually appears in the introduction—and the topic sentences that signal the main idea of each paragraph.
Step 4: Write the summary
Now that you know the key points that the article aims to communicate, you need to put them in your own words.
To avoid plagiarism and show you’ve understood the article, it’s essential to properly paraphrase the author’s ideas. Do not copy and paste parts of the article, not even just a sentence or two.
The best way to do this is to put the article aside and write out your own understanding of the author’s key points.
Examples of article summaries
Let’s take a look at an example. Below, we summarize this article, which scientifically investigates the old saying “an apple a day keeps the doctor away.”
Example of a full article summary
Davis et al. (2015) set out to empirically test the popular saying “an apple a day keeps the doctor away.” Apples are often used to represent a healthy lifestyle, and research has shown their nutritional properties could be beneficial for various aspects of health. The authors’ unique approach is to take the saying literally and ask: do people who eat apples use healthcare services less frequently? If there is indeed such a relationship, they suggest, promoting apple consumption could help reduce healthcare costs.
The study used publicly available cross-sectional data from the National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey. Participants were categorized as either apple eaters or non-apple eaters based on their self-reported apple consumption in an average 24-hour period. They were also categorized as either avoiding or not avoiding the use of healthcare services in the past year. The data was statistically analyzed to test whether there was an association between apple consumption and several dependent variables: physician visits, hospital stays, use of mental health services, and use of prescription medication.
Although apple eaters were slightly more likely to have avoided physician visits, this relationship was not statistically significant after adjusting for various relevant factors. No association was found between apple consumption and hospital stays or mental health service use. However, apple eaters were found to be slightly more likely to have avoided using prescription medication. Based on these results, the authors conclude that an apple a day does not keep the doctor away, but it may keep the pharmacist away. They suggest that this finding could have implications for reducing healthcare costs, considering the high annual costs of prescription medication and the inexpensiveness of apples.
However, the authors also note several limitations of the study: most importantly, that apple eaters are likely to differ from non-apple eaters in ways that may have confounded the results (for example, apple eaters may be more likely to be health-conscious). To establish any causal relationship between apple consumption and avoidance of medication, they recommend experimental research.
An article summary like the above would be appropriate for a stand-alone summary assignment. However, you’ll often want to give an even more concise summary of an article.
For example, in a literature review or research paper, you may want to briefly summarize this study as part of a wider discussion of various sources. In this case, we can boil our summary down even further to include only the most relevant information.
Example of a concise article summary
Using national survey data, Davis et al. (2015) tested the assertion that “an apple a day keeps the doctor away” and did not find statistically significant evidence to support this hypothesis. While people who consumed apples were slightly less likely to use prescription medications, the study was unable to demonstrate a causal relationship between these variables.
Citing the source you’re summarizing
When including a summary as part of a larger text, it’s essential to properly cite the source you’re summarizing. The exact format depends on your citation style, but it usually includes an in-text citation and a full reference at the end of your paper.
You can easily create your citations and references in APA or MLA using our free citation generators.
APA Citation Generator MLA Citation Generator
Step 5: Check the summary against the article
Finally, read through the article once more to ensure that:
- You’ve accurately represented the author’s work
- You haven’t missed any essential information
- The phrasing is not too similar to any sentences in the original.
If you’re summarizing many articles as part of your own work, it may be a good idea to use a plagiarism checker to double-check that your text is completely original and properly cited. Just be sure to use one that’s safe and reliable.
Read our comparison of the best plagiarism checkers of 2022, or check out the Scribbr Plagiarism Checker directly.Frequently asked questions about summarizing
If you want to cite this source, you can copy and paste the citation or click the “Cite this Scribbr article” button to automatically add the citation to our free Citation Generator.
McCombes, S. (2022, July 14). How to Write a Summary | Guide & Examples. Scribbr. Retrieved November 1, 2022, from //www.scribbr.com/working-with-sources/how-to-summarize/