Unlike a paraphrase, a summary presents only the main ideas of a source, leaving out examples and details.

Here is one student’s summary of five pages from Guterson’s book Family Matters. You can see at a glance how drastically summaries can condense information, in this case from five pages to five sentences. Depending on the summarizer’s purpose, the five pages could be summarized in one sentence, the five sentences here, or two or three dozen sentences.

In looking at different theories of learning that discuss individual-based programs (such as home schooling) versus the public school system, Guterson describes the disagreements among “cognitivist” theorists. One group, the “discovery theorists,” believes that individual children learn by creating their own ways of sorting the information they take in from their experiences. Schools should help students develop better ways of organizing new material, not just present them with material that is already categorized, as traditional schools do. “Assimilationist theorists,” by contrast, believe that children learn by linking what they don’t know to information they already know. These theorists claim that traditional schools help students learn when they present information in ways that allow children to fit the new material into categories they have already developed (171-75).

Summaries like this one are more than a dry list of main ideas from a source. They are instead a coherent, readable new text composed of the source’s main ideas. Summaries provide balanced coverage of a source, following the same sequence of ideas and avoiding any hint of agreement or disagreement with them.