Writing a Summary

 

          Most of the summaries you will write in college will be from expository prose, usually not from poetry, which loses it poetic rhythms and much of its imagery in summary. Fiction and drama demand a special kind of summary, plot summaries that simply tell the stories of their original texts. Essays and other kinds of expository prose are often used in academic studies, in which case you may be called on to summarize ideas. For this reason, you should practice writing summaries on a variety of expository writings. You will find that some material, dense with facts or reasoning, is more difficult to summarize adequately than simpler prose. Learn various methods of summarizing; some may work better for you than others. You may note the main ideas as you read, then restate them briefly. You may condense paragraph by paragraph, focusing on topic sentences, following the same outline as the author. You may reorder the material into a simpler or clearer format; if the author has stated his or her thesis at the end of the article, you may want to move it to the beginning.

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          Remember, if you are merely taking notes, an informational summary (in which you give only the content of the text) is most efficient and useful, but if you are using the information in your essay, you need to employ the descriptive summary method, which means giving your source an introduction (stating the title and author) and referring frequently to the author to remind the reader that the material and ideas are borrowed from another source and are not originally yours. Your sources, whether quoted, paraphrased, or summarized, must always be documented according to an approved style sheet such as MLA or APA. COMP 102 students use the MLA (Modern Languages Association) style sheet, which is presented in your COMP 102 handbook and online at “The OWL at Purdue,” the Online Writing Lab at Purdue University.

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          Summarize by condensing a text to its main ideas and chief supporting details. For most material, a good summary is about one-fourth the length of the original. In writing both paraphrases and summaries, you must be careful to give complete and accurate representations of the original and to retain the original emphases among the different elements the original work presents. Although you are responding to what you are reading—agreeing or disagreeing—you should keep these evaluative responses out of your paraphrase or summary. Other forms, essays of analysis and synthesis, are appropriate vehicles for your personal responses. Read “God’s Grandeur,” a poem by Gerard Manley Hopkins, and then look at the two types of summaries of the poem in the following table:

 

Informational Summary

Nature shines with God’s glory, but people ignore it, degrading nature and desensitizing themselves as they do so. But God’s Spirit continues to care for His creation, and each morning brings a renewed sense of life to the world.

 

Descriptive Summary

In “God’s Grandeur” the poet Gerard Manley Hopkins expresses his faith that God continues to care for His world, even though human sin, as seen in the way people ignore His presence in nature, degrades the beauty and fertility of the earth and desensitizes human life. The poet affirms that new hope comes with each morning’s sunrise because God’s Spirit sustains creation in love.

 

          Because you are most likely to summarize expository prose in both academic and professional settings, study the fourth paragraph of Adler’s “How to Mark a Book” and then the two types of summaries in the table below. Note that the descriptive summary is a little fuller, explaining more to the reader about the source:

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Informational Summary

Possessing a book can mean two different things. You can buy the book and own it physically, or you can read and understand a book and make it your own intellectually. To own it intellectually, you must write in it to really assimilate it.

 

Descriptive Summary

Early in Mortimer Adler’s essay “How to Mark a Book,” he insists that mere physical ownership of a book is not sufficient. For the book to be put to best use, what Adler calls “full ownership” the owner must take intellectual possession of it, marking, writing marginal notes, or drawing illustrations in it. Adler compares this kind of “assimilation” of a book to someone buying, and then eating, a beefsteak.

 

Assignment

Writing a Summary

 

          Now you can apply all that your teacher has explained to you and all that you have read here to writing a summary of your own—an accurate, concise, and complete summary of an original document. Your teacher will assign which reading you will summarize. You’ll need to read the assigned reading carefully a few times, taking notes or highlighting the major points and main supporting evidence. As you start writing the summary, keep the following guidelines in mind:

 

Your summary MUST . . .

1. be brief, 1/4 the length of the original

2. be complete and include all the points of the original

3. be objective—no opinion, no distortion of facts or author's intent. You are a reporter.  Use these to introduce points: “The author writes that . . . .” and “Lewis states that . . . .”

4. use present tense ("writes," not "wrote")

5. be in your own words: You may use one or two quotations, but you must use quotation marks around these. Word-for-word borrowing without quotation marks and reference to author is plagiarism.

6. mention the title and author in the first paragraph (e.g., In so-and-so’s essay titled “ . . . ,” the author exposes the plight of . . . .)

7. be in the same order as the original information (i.e., consecutive sequencing)

8. mention the author’s name (or “he” or “she” pronouns) frequently in the summary to remind the reader of the source

9. title your summary like this: A Summary of “. . . “

10. avoid using any first person and second person words

 

Suggested Selections for Summarizing (downloads)

1. “What Are We to Make of Jesus Christ?” by C.S. Lewis

2. “Another School Year, Why?” by John Ciardi

3. “Letter from Birmingham Jail” by Martin Luther King, Jr.

4. “How It Feels to Be Colored Me” by Zora Neale Hurston

5. “The Channelled Whelk” by Anne Morrow Lindbergh

6. from Walden, ”Where I Lived and What I Lived For” by Henry David Thoreau

7. from The Idea of a University by John Henry Newman

8. “The Dogma is the Drama” by Dorothy Sayers

9. “Statesmanship and Its Betrayal” (selected paragraphs) by Mark Helprin

10. “Letter to Alfred Corn” (selected paragraph) by Flannery O’Connor

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