Summary – Summarizing What Someone Else Wrote
We have all used summary in our daily lives. We recount a trip, tell others
about a recent movie, TV show, or book, and complain (summarize) about our
hectic day. The ability to effectively summarize material is a valuable skill and
one you will use often. Writing a summary can also help you determine if your essay is complete
and coherent. Summarizing what someone else wrote will help clarify the main points of the
work and aid analysis and evaluation of the work.
Purdue University’s online writing lab has some good material on writing a summary –
www………..
Some helpful hints before you summarize:
 Underline important words or phrases and annotate in the margins to indicate key points
 Your summary should include a restatement of the central ideas of the author
 Identify the thesis and main points of the material
 Assume your audience has not read the material
 A summary does not contain your opinion
 A summary does not contain the pronoun I
 Your summary is simply a recapitulation of the original material
 Know your material – you should know the material well enough to write a summary in
your own words
 Do not use quotations from the essay
Specifications:
 The summary should include the central idea or thesis and the main points that support
the main idea or thesis. The author’s name, title of the publication, and thesis should be
included.
 The summary should include generalized examples and those examples should contribute
directly to the understanding of the central thesis.
 The summary should contain as few words as possible and still convey the main idea and
support.
 A summary should not be plagiarized. It should be condensed and generalized through
the use of your own words and sentence structure. Replacing a few words in a sentence is
not summary.
 The summary does not contain you own opinion. (Just the facts ma’am!) You are just
telling your audience what the author wrote.
 You might divide the material into sections and decide what major points or ideas are in
each section and write a sentence describing that idea. The summary should then combine
your sentences with any additional examples that may be necessary.
 Sentences in your summary should be polished and coherent. You should use a variety of
sentence types with logical transitions between ideas.
 Paragraphs should be unified and coherent
 Paragraph summary should be approximately 125-200 words in length