1. What is a summary?

A summary is a brief summarization of a larger work that gives the reader a comprehensive understanding. To write a summary, a writer will gather the main ideas of an article, essay, television show, or film they’ve read or watched and condense the central ideas into a brief overview. Summaries provide an abridged description of another work in the form of a paragraph, providing enough detail so that the reader understands the subject of the summary, while highlighting the summary writer’s personal understanding of the subject matter.

2. Steps of writing a summary

There are five key steps that can help you to write a summary:

1. Read the text
2. Break it down into sections
3. Identify the key points in each section
4. Write the summary
5. Check the summary against the article

Step 1: Read the text

You should read the article more than once to make sure you’ve thoroughly understood it. It’s often effective to read in three stages:

1. Scan the article quickly to get a sense of its topic and overall shape.
2. Read the article carefully, highlighting important points and taking notes as you read.
3. Skim the article again to confirm you’ve understood the key points, and reread any particularly important or difficult passages.

There are some tricks you can use to identify the key points as you read:

• Start by reading the abstract. This already contains the author’s own summary of their work, and it tells you what to expect from the article.
• Pay attention to headings and subheadings. These should give you a good sense of what each part is about.
• Read the introduction and the conclusion together and compare them: What did the author set out to do, and what was the outcome?

Step 2: Break the text down into sections

To make the text more manageable and understand its sub-points, break it down into smaller sections.

Tip: To see at a glance what each part of the text focuses on, try writing a word or phrase in the margin next to each paragraph that describes the paragraph’s content. If several paragraphs cover similar topics, you may group them together.

Step 3: Identify the key points in each section

Now it’s time go through each section and pick out its most important points. What does your reader need to know to understand the overall argument or conclusion of the article?

Keep in mind that a summary does not involve paraphrasing every single paragraph of the article. Your goal is to extract the essential points, leaving out anything that can be considered background information or supplementary detail.

In a scientific article, there are some easy questions you can ask to identify the key points in each part.

Step 4: Write the summary

Now that you know the key points that the article aims to communicate, you need to put them in your own words.

To avoid plagiarism and show you’ve understood the article, it’s essential to properly paraphrase the author’s ideas. Do not copy and paste parts of the article, not even just a sentence or two.

The best way to do this is to put the article aside and write out your own understanding of the author’s key points.