Eng 99
Writing a Summary
The purpose of a summary is to give a concise description of what a text is about. A well-written summary will
demonstrate not only your writing skills but also that you are able to extract a main idea and the important details
from a text. Throughout your college career, you will be asked to write summaries of varying lengths. For the first
part of this quarter, I have very specifically asked you to write a one-paragraph, 5-7 sentence summary of a text.
This is harder to do than a longer summary! How do you do it?
Think in terms of real estate. One paragraph is far less space than one or two pages, just like a studio apartment is
far less space than a three-bedroom house. If you move from a house to a studio, you’re going to have to get rid of
some of your favorite furniture simply because it won’t fit. At the same time, you will need to keep your
essentials. Which is more important for your daily life: your bed or the beautiful china cabinet and all the china
you inherited from your grandmother? Dishes to eat your meals from or your favorite set of decorative bowls?
Even though it hurts, you have to make the same decisions about your writing. If you only get 5 sentences, you
need to cover the meaning of the whole text in that space, but you can’t write about every thing the author
mentions. Don’t work in order. Work in order of importance. If you only get 5 sentences, every word has to have
meaning.
One possible strategy:
Sentence 1: Your first sentence is the setup. It’s not about the first thing that happened in the text. It should give
the main idea of the entire text. You have to be certain about this: what you write will need to
encompass all the points you mention in the rest of the summary. In addition to the main idea, you
need to give the title of the text and the author’s full name. (Note: every time you mention the
author after this, use only his/her last name.)
Sentences 2 – 4(6): This is where it gets tricky. Before you write, you should brainstorm – list all the events,
ideas, whatever that you can remember. Then, go back and ask yourself how you can distill the
entire text into three (or four) chunks that connect back to the main idea you mentioned in the first
sentence. What are the most important things for your readers to know? What are details that you
can let go of? What are details that you can combine or compress into additional phrases or clauses
within one sentence?
Next, write a sentence about each of your three chunks. Get your ideas down first – later you can
refine or add participial phrases, relative clauses, sentence variety, etc. You will also have two
extra sentences to play with once you know the shape of your summary. Add those in later: a
detail you just can’t let go of or a description or fact included in the text that you feel is very
important to the main idea. For now, just get the main points down.
Sentence 5 (7): Finally, you conclude. If you’ve been able to summarize the whole text in the preceding
sentences, hooray! If not, it’s time to wrap it up. Your conclusion could be a final point from the
text or an echo of your first sentence. Remember: summaries are not opinion; you’re just
presenting the facts (like a reporter).
Once you have a draft of your summary, go back and play with your word choices and sentence variety. Check
your grammar. Then: walk away. Go do something else. Later, come back one last time and read for spelling and
punctuation.