Summarizing

What is Summarizing?

A summary is a condensed version of a reading that briefly explains the author’s main point and key details. Summaries exist for different purposes:

Summary assignment. Your instructor may assign you to write a summary of a particular reading, film, or other work to show you completed and understood the material.
Summary in an annotated bibliography. An annotated bibliography is a list of sources for a research paper with brief summaries of each entry. You may be assigned to create an annotated bibliography, or you may choose to create one on your own in order to remind yourself of each source’s main points.
Summary in note-taking. Summarizing is the most common way to take notes from a source. (Other types of note-taking include direct quotations and paraphrases.) You may summarize an entire source, a chapter of a book, or even just a brief passage from an article.
Summary integrated into another text. Especially when writing a research paper, you may find it necessary to incorporate short summaries of other authors’ writings. If done with care, the use of summary in this way can provide details, give specific examples, and lend support to an argument.
Summary versus abstract. You may have encountered an abstract in a scholarly journal or in a periodical database online. Abstracts provide an overview of the article, and they may look like summaries, but there are important distinctions.

Just as all readers bring their own individual perspective to a text, all summaries should reflect the unique purposes and insights of the reader. Those insights need to be fair, accurate, and delivered respectfully.