What is a Summary?
While a paraphrase (see Learning Strategy 2) changes a sentence or two into the about the same number of your own words, a summary condenses the source material into fewer words. A summary can condense a paragraph to a sentence, reduce ten pages to a paragraph, or even sum up a book in a few sentences–or even one. Therefore, you can see that a summary provides a lot of flexibility in the degree of condensation. It all depends on your purpose.
Why Should You Summarize?
Speaking generally, summarizing is valuable because it requires you to
- spend time with the information you are to condense
- think about the information and which parts are more important and which are less important
- rewrite in your own words the points or ideas you have identified for inclusion in your summary
All of these activities enhance learing: time spent with a book, article, or subject has the highest impact on learning it; thinking about the relative importance of part of information improves your critical thinkiing and analytical skills; and rewriting in your own words increases understanding and retention.
More specifically, summarizing–rewriting the information in your own, fewer words–is helpful for learning because it causes you to
- simplify the material, making understanding it easier
- focus on what is most important
- condense the information, omitting less important details and examples
You are certainly aware that there is an enormous amount of information in the world, and the situation is not going to get any better. Too much information can actually be detrimental to learning. Our brains simply do not have the capacity–the mental horsepower–to process and retain it all. So condensing helps retention. “Less is more” as they say.
To summarize and make the result shorter than the original
- retain the most important or key ideas
- omit less important ideas
- condesnse or omit less important examples, details, descriptions, narratives
Summaries vary in the degree of condensation they use. The degree depends on the information and what the planned use of the sumary is. (Study guide, abstracted information for a research paper, condensation for future reference long after you’ve read the entire work, or simply an exercies in helping you remember what you’ve read.)
Some summaries reduce the material to one fourth of the original (25%), while others might condense to a tenth (10%0 or even a twentieth (5%) of the original. Generally, the longer the original, the more condensed the summary. For example, you wouldn’t want to summarize a 400-page book to a 25% size (100 pages) because the effort would be too great and 100 pages is too much material to deal with as a summary. (Summaries are intended to be short, accessible tools for highlighting the crucial aspects of a book or article or other information set.)
Some questions to ask as you plan your summary are:
- What is the purpose or use of this summary? Study guide, learning tool, archive of important points so I won’t have to read the work a gain?
- What are the key ideas?
- What is the main point?
- Which lesser ideas can be omitted?
- Which examples, details, tangents, and so forth need to be kept but condensed, and which can be omitted?
Working with any material this closely will help you understand and remember it. And you will improve your thinking skills also.
As a learning strategy, summarizing is quite powerful because it requires you to
- understand the material in order to summarize it
- reread the material or portions of it to refresh your understanding of the main points
- distinguish between what are the main ideas that must be included in the summary and which ideas can be omitted
- rewrite the ideas in your own words
There is just too much information in the world for anyone to attempt to process even a tiny fraction of it. To reduce the quantum of information you must deal with–and in many cases remember–apply some of these strategies for making the sum of all knowledge easier:
- Read book summaries or abstracts before you read the book. You might discover that the summary is all you need. You can even summarize the summary.
- Divide and conquer. If you have three books to read and summarize, find two capable people with the same assignment, and have each person summarize one book and share. The summarizer becomes the curator of the book and its contents and answers any questions the others in the group may have about that book.
- Use summary shortcuts. Many textbook writers (and lots of other authors) use a plain vanilla paragraph structure, where the first sentence of each paragraph is the topic sentence and the remaining sentences supply details, examples, reasons, and so forth. You can create a quick and dirty summary by reading just the first sentence of each paragraph. Sometimes this method will give you a clear enough overview of the chapter or book that you can write a summary (when you do read the entire work) more easily. Having the context and sense of development in mind allows you to distinguish the important from the unimportant.