How to Write a Summary: A Complete Guide for Academic Success

Summary is a brief and objective paraphrase of the content of the text using your own words instead of the original author's. The ability to summarize is one of those skills that is required in all thesis or writing subjects. 

You may be summarizing novels when writing book reports, essays when giving a reading response, or research papers in order to make presentations. It may seem easy, but most students end up plagiarizing or inserting their own personal judgments in the summary. 

So however, down below is a breakdown of this process into steps for different types of texts such as books, essays, stories, and other texts in general, with examples and simplified versions for students.

What Is a Summary?

Summary entails the reduction of the central concepts of a text into a shorter form using only your own words. There is usually a risk of mixing up a summary with two other activities:

• Paraphrasing is writing out a piece in your own words but maintaining its original length.
• Analysis involves providing your interpretation or evaluation of the text.

Neither paraphrasing nor analysis constitutes summarization; it involves reducing the size of the text and remaining objective in the presentation of the ideas presented by the source.

Summarization proves to an instructor that you understand what you have read; that is why it appears in virtually any class:

• Reading assignments
• Research papers
• Presentations
• Exam answers

Irrespective of whether you are summarizing a novel, an academic article, or any other type of text, the underlying ability is the same; that is, to take out what's important and leave the rest. In addition, it is an ability that improves with constant practice and one of the very few academic abilities that can be applied in the practical world outside of the class room. Summarization is something professionals do every day for meetings, research papers, and email exchanges.

How to Write a Summary: 5 Simple Steps

The process agreed upon by most educators and writing centers is similar, and this five-step summary writing technique applies equally well when summarizing a picture book or a novel with 300 pages. Taking these steps in sequence rather than trying to move straight to writing makes all the difference between hurriedly written poor summary and a good one. 

Step 1: Read (or Watch) the Full Original Carefully

• Omitting this step will be your biggest mistake as a student because using another person’s summary could mean losing important information or adopting his/her errors. 
• First, take one reading for a general understanding and a second reading to mark out details that you may need to include later. 
• Such two-stage reading is especially important for difficult texts, which cannot be understood fully on the first try.

Step 2: Take Notes on the Main Points

• While reading, write down the thesis/main point of the text, its key arguments, and, if it is a narrative, key plot events. 
• Do not pay attention to any insignificant information, minor examples, and additional characters because inclusion of all information does not make any sense at all in summarizing.

Step 3: Create a Simple Outline

• Make an outline of what you have written down one main point and three to four supporting points, along with a conclusion. 
• his step may not be as important as it sounds, but it can transform a scattered list of notes into something you can write your paper directly off of. 
• This process will make the actual writing stage much easier.

Step 4: Write Your First Draft in Your Own Words

• It is the stage when the risk of committing plagiarism becomes the highest. Avoid rewriting the original sentence by sentence or changing just a couple of words. 
• Try to reproduce the meaning of each sentence using your own words and grammatical structures. 
• If you have to look at the original work every other minute while creating the draft, then most probably you are paraphrasing.

Step 5: Review, Cut, and Polish

• Before declaring your summary done, make sure that it remains objective, is indeed much shorter than the original. 
• If you have cited your sources, and that there is nothing extraneous left to delete. 
• It is at this stage that an okay summary becomes an excellent summary.

How to Write a Good Summary: What Makes It Effective

Once you become familiar with summarizing skills, it may be handy for you to have a checklist of important elements that you can compare your work to before turning it in. The following are the five important elements included in any summary:

• Objectives: There is not a single personal opinion and interpretation in the summary.
• Concise: It is much shorter than the original piece; the average percentage is between 15 and 25 percent.
• Your own words: There is no plagiarism in the summary.
• Accurate: The summary summarizes all major points without twisting, omitting, or narrowing them down.
• Organized: It uses a logical sequence of presentation, usually following the structure of the original.

Moreover, you need to learn the signs showing that you have stopped summarizing and started doing other things:

• Following the text in exactly the same order as the author does.
• Summarizing everything that takes place without any kind of compression.
• Starting with such words as "This essay is about..." or "This story is the tale of..."

Any one of these is a sure sign that you’re still summarizing even though your task might actually be analytical in nature. The distinction is most crucial in higher-level courses because your professor expects you to get past summarizing and go into interpretation. 

That's why it’s always a good idea to go back to your assignment question to see if you’re supposed to do only summarizing. Checking your draft with the following checklist will help you catch the mistakes professors find most annoying.

How to Write a Summary of a Book

The summary of a book is also completed in the identical five steps; however, on a slightly larger scale with a few unique details to be considered when summarizing a book.

• In any event, ensure that the title, author, location, important characters, and conflict are included at an early stage, since this will be necessary information for someone who has no idea what the book is about at the start of the summary.

• As opposed to remembering all the important information from a book when you have finished reading it, try to remember the important things as you progress through the chapters or sections of the book, since there will always be information you end up forgetting.

• In general, a book summary consists of four elements, including the exposition, the major event(s)/main conflict, the climax, and the resolution, which resemble those in the story summary yet are longer, as there is a lot more information.

• In case of a book report, make sure to start off with stating the genre and theme of the book in the very beginning of your summary.

• Be careful not to include all subplots. Concentrate on the plot, which is the basis for the central conflict, and include subplots only when it affects the decisions of the main character.

How to Write a Summary of Essay

In an essay summary, you need to begin by paraphrasing the thesis statement of the essay because the thesis statement is the main point which all other parts of the essay are intended to support. It is important to trace the arguments and the evidence used in the essay in the order in which they have been presented in the original essay rather than in the way that suits you.

• Unlike a book or a story, an essay does not have any storyline or character development.
• It does not involve a process of following a sequence of events. Your summary of the essay must therefore follow the line of reasoning of the author rather than presenting a sequence of events.
• The relation of evidence to the main point that the writer's essay make is important to note.
• Do not include any opinion regarding whether the argument is convincing enough.
• This is a completely different issue and belongs in another section of the paper.

How to Write a Summary of Story

There is also a unique pattern for summarizing a story, which will be known to you if you have already learned how to do the book summaries:

• Introduce the protagonist or protagonists and where the action takes place.
• State the conflict of the story.
• Narrate the most important events until the climax.
• End with the resolution.

The plots of the stories usually compress very quickly due to the fewer events contained and the good summary of the story can consist only of several sentences.

• Optionally, you can include one line in which you state the theme of the story, or the message being conveyed by the story, without analyzing or making any sort of subjective statements about the story.
• A single sentence stating the theme of the story is enough, and anything beyond that would begin to move towards an analysis, which is not appropriate for this task.
• It is acceptable to be honest when discussing the resolution if there is a twist ending.

How to Write a Summary for Kids (Simple Steps for Younger Learners)

Summarization becomes a very easy process when it is broken down for younger students. This is how you can explain summarization to kids in brief: Read it and analyze what happened in the story, and relate it again in a short version. These are the three basic steps of summarization.

SWBST is one of the most commonly used methods for young readers. The abbreviation stands for Somebody, Wanted, But, So, Then. It goes something like this:

• Somebody - who is the main character in the story?
• Wanted - what did the character wish to accomplish?
• But - what obstacles came in his/her way?
• So - what did he/she do to overcome the obstacle?
• Then - how did the story end?

Use this technique in a story which almost all children will have heard of, the Tortoise and the Hare. Somebody (the tortoise) wanted (to win the race) but (the hare was much faster) so (the tortoise moved very slowly throughout the course of the race) then (the tortoise won as the hare took rest in between). There you have a complete summary of the story. 

How to Write a Summary of an Article or General Text

In addition to assignments that require summarizing books, essays, or stories, there are numerous assignments that require you to summarize a news article, a research paper, or a summary of text in general. In this case, the same process should be followed with some modifications in mind.

• It is recommended to find out the main idea of the article at the very beginning – the first paragraph or even the headline, because it is characteristic of news and informational articles to contain the major information at the very beginning.
• Notice all statistics, findings, or quotes that serve as the evidence of the main idea of the article. Try not to cite everything mentioned there.
• Notice the organization of the article and try to use it in your summary. It can either move from the general to the specific or come to a conclusion.
• The length of the summary should be proportional to the length of the article. Sometimes the news article may be so short that just two or three sentences will do.

The versatility of this process makes it applicable to practically any kind of text that requires summarizing.

Example of Good Summary

An actual case study makes the entire process much more comprehensible than any explanation could do. This is a brief sample passage, which is then followed by its summary.

Sample: "Urban beekeeping has seen great rapid growth in the American cities during the last ten years due to the increasing number of hives being put up on rooftops, in community gardens, as well as on balconies. The supporters claim that such urban hives are useful for helping plants to be pollinated and spreading information about the decrease in the bee population among the general population. Yet the opponents note that uncontrolled urban beekeeping leads to the spread of diseases among the wild bees and sometimes causes safety problems for people who are not used to beekeeping."

Summary: The trend of urban beekeeping is increasingly gaining popularity in the US with proponents touting its pollination advantages as well as awareness advantages whereas opponents fear disease transmission and safety problems. As a result, some cities have started issuing permits and hive separation rules.

See how this is an effective summary: This is shorter than the original, uses different sentences and words than the original, totally objective, and contains the main ideas of the article.

Common Summary-Writing Mistakes to Avoid

Some mistakes can be committed by many students while writing their summaries, and recognizing them prior to that can enable you not to commit them before your instructor identifies them for you.

• Copy of words verbatim: As little as two phrases can sometimes be taken as plagiarism, and it is essential that the words be paraphrased entirely.

• Expressing personal opinions: You can express your personal opinion elsewhere on the assignment and not in the summary.

• Summary that is too long: If the summary is as long as the work being summarized, then it can really not be said to be a summary at all.

• Failure to mention the source: In any summary of work, it is essential that the source of the work, including the title and the author, is mentioned.

• Failure to make the point: While there might be many details in the summary, it is still possible to miss the main point of the piece altogether.

• Disorganized Summary: By arranging the facts/points in the source to suit your style, you might have misinterpreted the points presented in the source, and hence need to stick to the sequence of points.

• Vagueness and generality: Phrases such as "the author mentions a number of topics" do not give any information to the reader. The specific points must be mentioned.