This document discusses what a summary is and how to write one. It defines a summary as a new text that exposes the main ideas of an original text in an abbreviated way while maintaining grammatically complete paragraphs and sentences. The summary should be adapted to a new communicative context depending on its purpose and intended audience. There are different types of summaries, including informative summaries that synthesize content and message, descriptive summaries that explain a text's structure and parts, and abstracts that typically head scientific articles and inform readers of a text's contributions. When writing a summary, one should analyze the context, understand and select the original's key ideas and data, and apply reduction techniques like elision, generalization, coalition, and condensation to text