Summarizing

Normally, you summarize something that is rather long so that you can give the gist of it to your readers. For instance, you might summarize a technical report or scientific paper, reducing it to perhaps one-tenth the size of the original. Those summaries are usually called "abstracts," and they are often attached to the front of the report or article.

You may summarize a section or chapter of a book to incorporated in your own paper. Sometimes these summaries come at the beginning of your essay and act as a springboard into your own reactions to the other person's ideas. Sometimes these summaries are embedded in your essay. However, in either case, it is important to signal to your reader that you are beginning a summary of someone else's ideas and to indicate where the summary ends. You also need to signal where you got the ideas through some kind of reference.

There are two kinds of summaries when you are summarizing another person's ideas for use in your own work: (1) an objective, abstract-like summary; (2) a selective, slanted summary. In either case, however, you should avoid a "listing" summary. To avoid listing summaries, be sure your summary highlights a focus in the original and then supports that focus throughout the summary.

When you write an objective summary, you try to reduce the major sections of the original, but you try to keep them in proportion to the original and in the same order. This kind of summary conforms very closely to the original.

When you write a selective summary, you select that part of the original that is of particular interest to you, and you summarize it more completely than the rest. In fact, you summarize the rest of the original only to set a frame around the part you are interested in. By changing proportions of the original in your summary, you are highlighting a part that the original writer did not highlight in the same way; you are, therefore, slanting the summary, at least partially, to create a stronger emphasis than in the original. Although a selective summary can sometimes be unfair to the original, it need not be. It is quite common for writers to use selective summaries, because they want to zero in only on part of another person's ideas.

There are four steps in the act of summarizing.

1. Read and annotate the original. You can't really summarize something until you have read it thoroughly enough to understand it and to know its structure. The best way to do that is to skim it once quickly to get a global view of it and then to return with pencil in hand to read it more carefully. After you read a paragraph, write a word or phrase in the margin to help you remember what it is about. After annotating the original this way, skim back over your annotations looking for chunks of material. You should be able to see that two or three paragraphs go together and then another four paragraphs go together and then two, or something like that. Try to figure out what it is that holds these different chunks together and write a word, phrase, or sentence at the beginning of the chunk that indicates the chunk's common topic. We call these words, phrases, or sentences "superordinate terms" because they are above (super) the parts, which are under (sub) them. In other words, a set of paragraphs is subordinate to some superordinate term.
2. Once you have discovered or constructed the superordinate terms in the original, you can build an informal outline of the original by listing all of the superordinate terms in a list and listing under them the descriptive phrases for each paragraph. The paragraph phrases should be indented. Once you have done that, you will be able to see the original's overall structure.
3. Now that you know the original well, you determine whether you are using an objective summary or a selective one. If you are writing an objective summary, then simply use the outline you have created to write your own paragraph, including only as much detail from the outline as you deem necessary. Do not use the words of the original writer. If you are writing a selective summary, then summarize that section of the original you are interested in with your own words in some detail first. Then build a frame around that section by briefly summarizing everything that precedes and follows it in the original. You need include only enough material to give the context of the passage you are most interested in.
4. Finally, you need to add an introductory phrase to the summary, something like, According to Jane Adams, there are . . . . Or, Jane Adams argues that . . . . Or, One authority on the subject explains it this way. Besides this introductory signal, you also need to signal the end of the summary. Do that by putting a parenthesis with a reference to the original inside at the end of the summary something like this (Adams 322). In the example I just gave, the reader would know to look for Adams in the works cited at the end of the paper and then look up the original, page 322, to see what Adams really said.