Reading 0950 class, consider the summary as a report. Your
boss wants you to summarize some incredible amount of information
and give it to him. He doesn't want your opinion on it; he
merely wants you to make the size more manageable for him.
is a shorter version of a non-fiction piece of writing. (For
fiction, like movies and books, it's called a synopsis.) How
short it is depends on who is requiring it. Let me use my own
writing as an example.
In the past, many new authors of novels could actually be "discovered" by sending their whole novel, in manuscript form to various editors. In their free time, the editors would dig into the "slush pile" to read and see if they liked the books sent to them. However, the book business has changed. It has gotten leaner and meaner. Editors are too busy to take unsolicited books any more. Instead, they use agents to cull out the icky novels. And now, even agents won't read your whole book. You have to send them a chapter or two and then summarize the book.
Let's look at the math. My first novel (Spirit Reader) is about 100,000 words long. In manuscript form, it's approximately 500 pages. It has 40 pretty short chapters. Some agents ask for a page of summary for every chapter of the book. That would be 40 pages. Other agents want no more than five pages of synopsis. That's a synopsis that's 1% of the original size of my book! And of course, when you first pitch the story to an agent, you'll have to summarize it in three short paragraphs.
The worst of it all is having to summarize the whole thing in one sentence. I did that on a business card to try to pitch my book: "An ex-assassin with an extrasensory skill seeks redemption by rescuing a young girl abandoned in the mountains of New Mexico."
Now I'm only asking
for your summary to be 20-25% of the original article. If I
can reduce my book to one sentence, you can reduce an article you
choose to one-fifth or one-fourth its size.
So how do you do that?
Well, first, you need to understand the article and recognize which of the ideas are main ideas and which are details. Chapters 5 in our textbook should help you with that. Marking your readings also will help.
Be careful, though. In high school, it seems most of what you had to know was the details. The questions you were going to be asked on tests tended to be the names, the dates, the numbers, etc. So you might be in the habit of noting only the details. (This information is what you focus on for the Study Reading Project or for taking a test.)
Now, while identifying
the main ideas, you need to see
relationships of ALL the ideas -- how those details prove or illustrate
or give examples of the more main ideas, which themselves support
THE main idea. Recognizing the organization of a writing helps
you see which of the ideas are more important than the other ideas.
|Paragraph by paragraph:||
The best way to summarize, then, is to take it paragraph by paragraph. Why? A paragraph is the writer's way to say THIS is one topic. The next paragraph is a new topic. So after reading the paragraph, cover it up, and write one sentence that tells the main idea of the paragraph. As you do so, use your own vocabulary, your words that mean the same thing as the author's words. (The instructions for this usually read "summarize in your own words.")
Another way to get the main idea of a paragraph is to think, what is the purpose of this paragraph? Does it add more support to the main idea? Or does it transition from one topic to another? Does it introduce the topic, or another, related topic? Does it conclude? Often you can tell the purpose of the paragraph by its first words, the transitions. Again, you can also tell the purpose of the paragraph through the organization of the article. What part of that organization does this paragraph serve?
So even though you won't turn in the paragraph-by-paragraph paraphrasing, it is one step to get you closer to your summary.
Once you have one sentence that expresses the meaning of each paragraph, group the sentences into paragraphs, without changing their order. The order is important because that's the order of the main ideas that the author chose.
Let me try to
illustrate what I mean using a structure outline for a simple essay.
The Main Idea (Thesis) -- My dog, Shiloh, is more interesting to watch than TV.
Paragraph 1 describes how we had lost my old dog and I wanted a puppy.
Paragraph 4 begins the support that shows how she is more interesting than TV -- that she is very smart (so we like to watch her reasoning things out).
Paragraph 8 adds another piece of support -- that she does funny things (which are fun to watch).
Then paragraph 13 is the conclusion -- where I describe how my husband and I will sit and watch her instead of the TV.
Now if you gather the supporting paragraphs with the idea they were supporting, you'd have the sentences for paragraphs 1-3 serving as the introduction (group the sentences together to make one paragraph or your own writing.) Then the sentences for paragraphs 4-7 would be another paragraph. Then you'd group the sentences for paragraphs 8-12. So the summary for a 13-paragraph essay would be three paragraphs.
If that's not short
enough, take the main idea of each of your summary paragraphs
(basically, the sentences for paragraph 1, 4, and 8). But
usually, one sentence for each paragraph is good for the length of
your summary. (One possible exception is when the article is a
news story or done in the journalistic style. News reporters write very,
very short paragraphs because the editor of a newspaper can cut the
end of the story off to fit into the space available, but the editor
can ONLY cut between paragraphs. Writing many little
paragraphs makes it easier to cut the story as needed so the article
won't end with an unfinished sentence. If the
article you have chosen to summarize is such an article, your
solution to this problem would be to think of the tiny paragraphs in
"paragraph groups" without rearranging the paragraphs, and then
write one main idea per paragraph group.)
|Nothing but article:||
Here's another point
that's very crucial. You must NOT put any comments of your own
in the summary. Sometimes a teacher will say she wants a
"summary" but if she expects your opinion in the assignment, then
technically, it's not a summary; it's a report that includes both a summary and a response. A
true summary tells only what the author of the article said.
It's a little like if a friend asks you to tell you what a movie is
about. If all you say is how good it is, you're not telling
your friend what it's about. If you tell your friend what it's
about, then at the point you start saying how good it is, you leave
first sentence must tell the title of the article and the author's
name. I subscribe to the convention -- rule -- that the title cannot
give information that is not expressed in the summary, so basically,
you need to start out with the crucial information in the summary
itself, whether you've given that information in the summary title
The easiest way to do this is to have 1[the article title], by 2[the author] expresses 3[the main idea.] But there are so many different ways to do it. Here are some examples:
Then you follow with the sentence paraphrases of the paragraphs, grouping them into their own topical paragraphs. As you write, continue to refer to the author, especially if some of the information you are writing is opinionated and might look like your opinion. Do it like this: Dr. Dyke says using a compress is better than taking aspirin.
There is no need for a conclusion. If you feel the need, you may paraphrase the article's conclusion, but that will be it.
Type your summary up
double-spaced on MS Word (or whatever word processing program you
use) and save it under "Summary."
summary and check it for organization and accuracy. Use this
as you look over your summary.
By accuracy, I
mean what the author wrote and in the order he wrote it. You
may think you know better than the author, for example, and that the
author is wrong in a statement, but you cannot correct the author.
Instead, you must say, "The author wrote such-and-such information" even
if it's wrong! Saying he's wrong would be injecting your own
knowledge/information, and you are not, at that point, summarizing
the article. By the same token, do not change the order the
author presents the information in.
|This page last updated Wednesday, January 01, 2014, by Connie Gulick.|