A summary is an outline of the major aspects of a piece of text. The aim of the summary is to provide the reader with some idea of the message the text is saying. It can be helpful to write brief summaries of your work; however, more often, you’ll write summaries of work by other authors, like movies, plays, articles, or stories, as well as lectures or even presentations.
Why Summarize?
In the course of your studies, you’ll likely be asked to write a summary of a particular text and a task in which it is your sole purpose to summarize the text. The summaries you write will be used in more comprehensive ways, however, by incorporating them with quotes, paraphrases as well as your personal opinions into more intricate documents. You could summarize for many reasons, both during your studies as a student as well as in your daily life beyond education.
Here are a few common examples:
- A summary will help you understand the major elements of the reading or watching, and therefore, your teacher may ask you to write a summary to prove that you’ve learned the content.
- You may summarize a part of an article or the entire source if the concepts in that source are crucial to an assignment you’re working on, and you believe they must be included; however, they will take up too much space in their original format.
- It is also possible to summarize the main ideas of an article that are crucial to be included in your writing, but the specifics contained in the same area in the same way as the main concepts don’t need to be included in conveying your message. For instance, technical papers or research studies may be able to provide more depth than you’re likely to require to back your argument to a broad audience. This is a situation where an overview could be an ideal alternative.
- It is also a great method to ensure that you comprehend a text. If you are able to summarize the concepts within it, you’ll be able to comprehend the content it presents. This is useful in school-related tasks like taking the exam or researching a subject for a research paper, but it can also be helpful in everyday situations when you are confronted with documents on subjects that are personally or professionally appealing to you.
What Makes Something a Summary?
If you ask yourself after you’ve read an article (and possibly having to read it several more times), “What was that article about?” and you write it down-from memory, not going back to the original piece to utilize the language or words-three points that stand out as the article’s major aspects, and you’re making a summation. They have many key characteristics.
- It’s a good idea to summarize your thoughts.
- Makeup yourself in your words.
- Significantly reduce the text.
- Give accurate representations of the most important points in the text that they sum up.
- Beware of personal opinions.
The summaries are often smaller than the original text. A general rule of thumb is that they shouldn’t be greater than 10% or 15% of the length of the original. In fact, they are usually shorter than that.
It is possible to be natural when writing an article to include our personal opinions. It is possible that we agree or disagree in a strong way with what the writer is telling us, wish to compare their content against the information in other sources or be inclined to offer our own opinions about the subject. If you still struggle with expressing your opinion succinctly, try getting help here https://studycrumb.com/pay-someone-to-do-my-homework. Sometimes, our opinions slip into summary form even though we try to keep them distinct. They aren’t the purpose of a summary but. A summary should just focus on the most important aspects of the text.
Concentrating on only the concepts that most strongly back a claim we’d like to make and ignoring those that do not support the point is a tempting option. This strategy has two major issues, however:
It is the first time that it doesn’t accurately represent what was originally written, and it misleads the readers about the ideas that are contained in the text. A summary should provide your reader with an accurate picture of what to expect when we open the original text to go through.
It also undermines your authority as an author when you do not accurately represent the information. If readers aren’t confident in the accuracy of an author’s representation of the facts, they might not be able to trust the author to fully and precisely present a fair idea.
How Should I Organize a Summary?
Similar to traditional essays, a summary contains an introduction, a body, and a conclusion. The format of these elements can differ depending on the objective that you’re devising your summary. The introduction, body, and finalization of your work that is centered specifically on summarizing something will be slightly different from the case where a summary isn’t the main objective.
Hi, I am an Author who believes in making the life of their readers interesting with his writing. Writing was always my first interest. Ever since I was a teenager, I was already into writing poems and stories. Today, I have gained a great experience in my work. Check out my work and share your views.