Guidelines for writing a summary

• In the first sentence, mention the title of the text, the name of the author, and the author’s thesis or the visual’s central point.
• Maintain a neutral tone; be objective.
• Use the third-person point of view and the present tense: Taylor argues. . . .
• Keep your focus on the text. Don’t state the author’s ideas as if they were your own.
• Put all or most of your summary in your own words; if you borrow a phrase or a sentence from the text, put it in quotation marks and give the page number in parentheses.
• Limit yourself to presenting the text’s key points.
• Be concise; make every word count.