2. What is summarizing?
• Buckley (2004), in her popular writing text “Fit to Print”, defines
summarizing as “reducing text to one-third or one-quarter its
original size, clearly articulating the author’s meaning, and retaining
main ideas”.
• Diane Hacker (2008), in “A Canadian Writer’s Reference”, explains
that summarizing involves stating a work’s thesis and main ideas
‘simply, briefly and accurately’.
3. Purpose
• The purpose of summarizing is to briefly present the key points of a
theory or work in order to provide context for your argument or
thesis.
• It helps to judge the understanding of an individual about the given
passage.
• Summarizing serves the purpose of providing relevant data to
people. In other words, conveying an idea or concept into brief
language.
4. Uses of a summary
• Summaries are useful in research.
• Summaries are useful as study guides for tests.
• It helps the students to improve their focusing skills.
• A student learns how to convert a large text into a small text.
• It acts as a great help for students to learn how to determine
essential ideas.
5. How to write a summary?
• Read the text.
• Break it down into sections.
• Identify the key points in each sections.
• Write the summary.
• Check the summary against the article.
6. Characteristics of a good summary
• Can be understood without reference to the original.
• Is brief without any unnecessary detail.
• Should be comprehensive, concise, coherent and independent.
• Only contains the ideas or information of the original.
7. Importance
• Summarizing is important for students to prosper in their careers as
it improves their vocabulary and grammatical skills.
• Students who can summarize a long text are good at focusing and
extracting the main ideas.
• Summaries are important because they educate readers.
• Writing summaries can also help students test their knowledge of a
source.
9. Descriptive summary
• A descriptive summary is a summary in which writers provide an
objective overview of the source they are summarizing.
• The writer of a descriptive summary does not include their own
opinions.
• Descriptive summaries depict the original text rather than directly
presenting the information it contains.
• Descriptive summaries often play the role of reviews for fictional or
literary works.
10. Informative summary
• Informative summaries convey the information contained in a text.
• An informative summary should be objective.
• Informative summaries are recommended for scientific , non-
fictional works.
• Types are outlines, abstracts and synopses.
11. Evaluative summary
• This type of summary requires the writer to evaluate the item being
summarized.
• This classification of summary is opinion heavy. While a few basic
facts about the piece are required, such as the author, the title and
the main point of the piece, the remainder consists of the summary
writer’s viewpoints of the work.
• Likely to be longer than the typical descriptive summary.
12. Example # 01
• Original paragraph: Skipping breakfast might seem like an easy
way for dieters to cut calories. However, new research finds that
the majority of people who are successful at losing weight and
keeping it off eat breakfast every day.
• Summarized paragraph: Research shows that people who wish to
lose weight do not skip breakfast.
13. Example # 02
• Original paragraph: Eating breakfast helps you spread out your
hunger and manage your food intake better throughout the day. If
you start out the day by eating something, you don’t get this
burning hunger later that causes you to overeat.
• Summarized paragraph: Eating breakfast keeps you feeling full
and prevents you from overeating.
