5c. Summarizing to deepen your understanding
MAKING THE MOST OF YOUR HANDBOOK
Knowing how to summarize is a key research skill.
Summarizing written texts: 4c
Summarizing researched sources: 51c
Your goal in summarizing an image or a multimodal text is to state the work’s central idea and key points simply, objectively, and accurately, in your own words, and usually in paragraph form. Writing a summary does not require you to judge the text’s ideas; it requires you to understand the text’s ideas. If you have sketched a brief outline of the text (see 5b), refer to it as you draft your summary.
To summarize an image or a multimodal text, begin with essential information such as who composed the text and why, who the intended audience is, and when and where the work appeared. Briefly explain the text’s main idea or message and identify its key features. Divide the summary into a few major and perhaps minor ideas. Since a summary must be fairly short, you must make judgments about what is most important.
Guidelines for writing a summary of an image or a multimodal text
- In the first two sentences, mention the title of the text and the name of the composer (or the sponsoring organization or company if you cannot identify a composer), and provide some brief information about the context—when, why, and for whom the text was composed and where it appeared.
- State the text’s central idea or message.
- Maintain a neutral tone; be objective.
- As you present the text’s ideas, use the third-person point of view and the present tense: The focus of the Zipcar advertisement is. . . . Devaney’s slide presentation argues. . . . (If you are writing in APA style, see 60b.)
- Keep your focus on the text. Don’t state the text’s or composer’s ideas as if they were your own.
- Put your summary in your own words; if you borrow a phrase or a sentence from the text, put it in quotation marks and cite the text (see 51c).
- Limit yourself to presenting the text’s key points.