How to Write a Top-Notch Summary
A summary is a concise narration of the original text, conveying essential information in which details are excluded. However, not every student knows how to do it right. That is why we have gathered helpful tips to prepare and write a summary worth the highest grade. If you are looking for examples of how to start a summary, see this page.
The critical factor is, first of all, a complete understanding of the original text. If the text is not understood, it is not determined what is central and secondary; a summary becomes a random, chaotic removal of some aspects from the original text. And secondly, for a top-notch summary, it is essential to have the skills to shorten the text.
When writing a summary, it is not necessary to preserve the stylistic features. Still, the main thoughts of the author, the sequence of events, the personalities of the characters should be conveyed without distortion. A summary reveals the degree of understanding of the text. It is necessary to preserve only the most essential things: the main idea, artistic details, and linguistic features, without which it is impossible to understand the ideological orientation of the text. The ability to retell the content concisely is a necessary skill to work on the text.
Sometimes students are asked to write a selective summary. In this case, following the assignment, it is necessary to retell not the entire text, but only the selected part, that is, to reproduce some selected topic of the source text: material associated with a particular character, event, phenomenon.
In a selective summary, you need to highlight individual topics in the text, isolate material related to a particular topic, build a statement based on the collected material and convey it in detail.
How to Write a Summary
Usually, the students need to convey the main content of a particular theme or the entire text as a whole while maintaining the semantic sequence.
During the first reading, read the text carefully and with concentration, highlight essential things, mentally divide it into semantic parts to understand what is said in each of them. Then, determine the general theme of the text, its main idea, following which individual parts and the entire text are written, to understand why it was written.
Pay attention to the supporting words and the peculiarities of the author’s narration: which words define and how they reflect the author’s style.
It is not recommended to take notes during the first reading of the text.
After reading, you can write down the keywords on the draft, leaving large distances between them so that you can later supplement your notes.
Determine the style of the text and the type of speech, pay attention to the features of the construction of the text, highlight its compositional parts: for a narration – the beginning of events, the climax, the denouement; for a description – the subject of speech and its significant, essential features; for reasoning – thesis, proof, conclusion.
Make a detailed outline of the text. First, it is necessary to highlight the micro-themes of each part and give them titles. Next, write down the names of the points in the plan, leaving room for the keywords.
During the following readings, specify the first impressions of the text, if possible, make written corrections and additions to the prepared text outline. Decide on the number of paragraphs of your summary: it is necessary to correlate individual parts with crucial words in meaning to create a whole text. Pay attention to the logic of the author’s reasoning and compare it with the prepared text plan.
Write a draft of the summary following the highlighted micro-topics according to the plan. Check the interrelation of micro themes in parts of the text.
Re-read the draft, if necessary, think about what can be further shortened. Make final corrections and additions. Double-check the draft.
Rewrite the summary into a clean copy. Check at least two times.
A short algorithm for writing a summary looks like this:
- Divide the text into parts.
- Highlight those sentences, the absence of which will lead to a distortion of the meaning or its misunderstanding.
- Omit irrelevant material, the absence of which will not affect the understanding of the meaning of the text.
- If necessary, rearrange some sentences: from several sentences, compose one (that is, to compress them).