Adapted from a shared FYW resource
The ability to write a summary is an important part of academic writing, no matter the discipline. Abstracts, literature reviews, annotated bibliographies, and other academic genres involve some degree of summarizing. Summarizing sources is something you’ll likely do in every major writing assignment in this course. Being able to summarize information can help writers with many non-academic writing genres as well–business reports, grant proposals, and news releases, to name a few. Listed below are strategies you can use to write effective summaries in a variety of writing environments.
- The original source’s main argument must appear in the first paragraph no matter where it actually appears in the source. Longer articles might reveal their core “thesis” in the second, third, or fourth paragraph (and sometimes much later). Succinctly re-formulate that main argument it and bring it to the first paragraph of your summary.
- Avoid writing a “list summary” that provides a chronological account of the source (e.g., “The author’s first point is…. Next, she claims….”). Instead, organize your summary so that readers see how you understand the source and what you find important about it. The point is not to replicate the authors’ organization and argument point by point. Therefore, you will need to to distill their arguments into a more condensed and strategically organized space. You will have to cluster their ideas effectively and clearly, using your paragraphs as strategic containers for related ideas.
- Do more than say what the source is about. One purpose summaries serve is for you to show readers that you understand the sources you’re using. This helps you gain your readers’ trust. So besides restating the source’s argument, make sure you accomplish the following:
- Provide context: Mention what the author’s purpose is, who their audience is, and what situation they’re responding to (rhetoricians call this last part exigence). This helps readers see the bigger picture the piece fits into, and it’s helpful for readers if you provide this information sooner rather than later.
- Clarify the methodology: Let readers know the evidence the source’s argument is based on and how the author gathered this evidence. This information can sometimes be relayed in a quick introductory phrase, as in this example: “Based on her interviews with 100 individuals of all ages in the Wisconsin area, Deborah Brandt argues….”
- Offer some key examples or evidence: In longer summaries, provide some examples that show how the author supported his or her claims. You don’t have to reproduce all of the source’s evidence, just one or two of its best pieces of evidence.
- Keep the summary balanced but don’t try to cover everything. Make sure your summary is balanced and doesn’t spend disproportionate amounts of time on one particular section of the original source. At the other extreme, avoid the temptation to try to cover everything the source says; cover instead what you see as the most important details readers need to understand the source’s argument.
- Restate what the source says in your own language and quote selectively from only the most interesting and substantial parts of the main text. Remember that one rhetorical purpose summaries serve is to prove to readers you understand your sources and can be trusted. So avoid simply copying the source’s sentence structure and replacing keywords with synonyms. Likewise, quote sparingly. This isn’t to say you can’t quote at all. For instance, you might quote a phrase or short passage whose language is particularly evocative. But don’t just quote information–that’s easy material to paraphrase. When you do quote, try to use a complete sentence to set up the quote, then introduce the quote itself (or break up the quote itself) with an attributive tag, a strategy discussed in more detail below.
- Consider citation styles: In this summary assignment, we are composing on a blog for a mainstream audience of non-specialists. Simply using links is our primary form of citation (no works cited list needed, etc., as the book should be mentioned, and linked to, in the blog post itself). But in your future work beyond this course, you will have to be careful to follow a given disciplines citation style when composing summaries.
- Maintain a neutral tone and choice of words. When first summarizing a source, avoid inserting your own personal beliefs or judging the source’s argument up front. This will allow you to summarize the source accurately and avoid any misunderstanding on your reader’s part. This isn’t to say, of course, that you don’t want to be critical; simply reserve this more critical stance for when it comes time to analyze and respond to the source near the end of your summary.
- Use attributive tags to make sure a reader is able to clearly judge which ideas and arguments belong to the source. Attributive tags are especially important when you’re summarizing to accomplish some other task (to provide the basis for a critique, for example). Your reader needs to be able to tell the difference between what the source says and what you say. You can also use descriptive verbs in your attributive tags to help quickly capture the tone and purpose of the author. For example, “Smith argues that…”; “Jones critiques ideas which…”; “Brown compares….” It is important to always maintain the “summary frame”: don’t become the source and voice their argument as your own, but rather use those tags to relate the other author’s idea.
- Present a condensed and concise version of the source. How long a summary you write depends on the situation you’re responding to and the genre you’re writing, but one purpose of a summary is to provide a condensed version of the source that readers can process efficiently. One way to achieve this is to combine multiple ideas into one sentence using subordination and complex and complex-compound sentence structures.