This document discusses techniques for summarizing academic texts. It provides guidelines for summarizing, including clarifying the purpose, understanding the main idea, selecting key ideas and phrases, organizing ideas, avoiding copying directly from the text, and citing sources. Good summarizing extracts the essence of a text by focusing on important details and key concepts, rather than including all information or adding new ideas. Summaries should be concise while maintaining the overall meaning and message of the original text.

1. Activity 1.
Read the following statements below
and identify the situations that
describe best practices in summarizing.
Then, write S if the statement portrays
good summarizing and N if not.

2. 1. Sean copied everything from the
book.
2. Tomas extracted the key ideas in
the text.
3. Red concentrated on the important
details.
4. Anita looked for key words and
phrases.
5. Sen simplified ideas

3. 6. Kai revised the main idea.
7. To add more information, Alexa added her
analysis and comments to the ideas of the
author.
8. Maria wrote down the general and specific
ideas of the text.
9. Sean added some of his related research to
the information presented in the text.
10. Lalaine extended the message of the text
and included some of her interpretations.

4. Competency:
Uses various techniques in
summarizing a variety of an
academic text
(CS_EN11/12AEAPP-Ia-c-5)

5. Objective:
- Discuss summarizing and
its techniques

6. TECHNIQUES IN
SUMMARIZING ACADEMIC
TEXTS

7. Guide questions:
What is a summary?
How to summarize?
What are the guidelines in
summarizing?

8. A summary or a precis is a synopsis
or digest of the essence of an entire
text. Usually, a summary is included in
reviews (as in a review of a book or an
academic text) or a literary critique
(as in a summary of a short story or a
novel).

9. Why is summarizing
important?

10. • deepen your understanding of the text;
• learn to identify relevant information or
key ideas.;
• combine details or examples that support
the main idea/s;
• concentrate on the gist or main idea and
key words presented in the text; and,
• capture the key ideas in the text and put
them together clearly and concisely.

11. What is not
summarizing?

12. • write down everything
• write down ideas from text word-for-word;
• write down incoherent and irrelevant
ideas;
• write down ideas that are not stated in the
text; or
• write down a summary that has the same
length or is longer than the original text.

13. Guidelines in Summarizing
1. Clarify your purpose before you read.
2. Read the text and understand the
meaning. Do not stop reading until you
understand the message conveyed by the
author. Locate the gist or main idea of the
text, which can usually be found either at
the beginning, in the middle, or in the end.

14. 3. Select and underline or circle the key
ideas and phrases while reading; another
strategy is to annotate the text.
4. Write all the key ideas and phrases
you identified on the margins or on your
notebook in a bullet or outline form.

15. 5. Without looking at the text, identify
the connections of these key ideas and
phrases using a concept map.
6. List your ideas in sentence form in a
concept map.
7. Combine the sentences into a
paragraph. Use appropriate transitional
devices to improve cohesion.

16. 8. Ensure that you do not copy a single
sentence from the original text.
9. Refrain from adding comments about
the text. Stick to the ideas it presents.
10. Edit the draft of your summary by
eliminating redundant ideas.
11. Compare your output with the
original text to ensure accuracy.

17. 12. Record the details of the original source
(author’s name/s, date of publication, title,
publisher, place of publishing, and URL [if
online]). It is not necessary to indicate the page
number/s of the original text in citing sources in
summaries.
13. Format your summary properly. When you
combine your summaries in a paragraph, use
different formats to show variety in writing.

18. Formats in Summarizing

19. 1. Idea Heading Format ➢ In this format, the
summarized idea comes before the citation.
Example: Benchmarking is a useful strategy
that has the potential to help public officials
improve the performance of local services
(Folz, 2004; Ammons, 2001). Once the
practice of a particular city is benchmarked,
it can be a guidepost and the basis for the
other counterparts to improve its own.

20. 2. Author Heading Format ➢ In this
format, the summarized idea comes
after the citation. The author’s name/s
is/are connected by an appropriate
reporting verb.

21. Example: The considerable number of users
of FB has led educators to utilize FB for
communicating with their students (Grant,
2008; as cited in Donmus, 2010). The study
of Kabilan, Ahmad, and Abidin (2010) shows
that the students perceived FB as an online
environment to expedite language learning
specifically English.

22. 3. Date Heading Format ➢ In this
format, the summarized idea comes
after the date when the material
was published.

23. Example: On the other hand, active
participation of the citizens in development
contributes to a sound and reasonable
government decisions. In their 2004 study on
the impact of participatory development
approach, Irvin and Stansbury argue that
participation can be valuable to the
participation and the government in terms of
the process and outcomes of decision making.