Like paraphrasing, writing a summary shows a person’s understanding of a topic. However, despite being closely related to paraphrasing, the method of writing a summary is different. So, if you want to know the methods for writing a summary, this blog post is for you.
This blog post will teach you the most straightforward ways to write a good summary, including an automated method of writing an overview through summarizers. So, if you are up for a similar discussion, let’s get into it.
The Best Methods For Writing A Summary:
1. Reading The Original Text:
Writing a summary consists of two steps – reading and writing. The reading phase is essential to writing an effective summary. So, reading the original text is the first easy way to write an overview.
In this step, you will have to skim the original information to determine its main idea. To do so, you will look for the keywords, which can be the essential information in each paragraph or the paragraph’s topic sentence. So, while skimming through the original data, you can underline the keywords or the paragraph’s topic sentence to gather its central theme.
Generally, the first and last sentences of a paragraph describe its theme. So, if you are dealing with a lengthy text, you can only focus on each paragraph’s first and last sentences to cover more information in a short span.
2. Follow A Specific Summary Writing Format:
There is no specific summary writing format. But while writing a summary, you should follow and maintain a good paragraph structure. So, divide your summary into the following structure.
Topic Sentence:
The topic sentence should identify itself as a summary. So, you should include the original material’s author, speaker, or title in this sentence.
Supporting Sentence:
The supporting sentences are the main talking points of the material. So, while discussing the main points in your summary, mostly, you should follow the order of the original material.
However, sometimes while summarizing a story, the actual material doesn’t present the information in chronological order. So, in such a case, you can write your summary chronologically because it will make it easier for readers to understand the overview.
Concluding Sentence:
While writing a summary, a writer reports the information from someone else’s piece of writing. Therefore, an excellent overview needs to be objective, which means you should avoid including your opinion in the summary.
3. Consider Paraphrasing Instead of Copying The Information:
Summarizing and paraphrasing go hand in hand. Therefore, you should not include direct quotes from the original material while writing a summary. Instead, you should focus on paraphrasing the original information.
However, it is essential to paraphrase the information correctly. So, you can take help from the following tips for paraphrasing something.
Some Essential Paraphrasing Tips:
- Like the first methods for writing a summary guide, it is essential to read the original information thoroughly before paraphrasing something. This way, you can understand the theme of original information better, which will eventually help in better paraphrasing.
- It is essential to deal with an individual paragraph at once rather than paraphrasing the entire information in one go.
- When it comes to the writing phase of paraphrasing, you can change the sentence structure. For example, you can start a paragraph from a unique point.
- Similarly, you can change the voice of sentences from active to passive while paraphrasing the information.
- Most people rely entirely on paraphraser tools to rephrase something. Such tools work on the synonym-replacement mechanism to rephrase something, which is not a wrong approach. However, relying entirely on the synonym-replacement technique will provide comprehensive paraphrasing results.
- Undoubtedly, paraphrasing is a universal and one of the most effective approaches to avoid plagiarism. However, paraphrasing will only prove helpful in preventing plagiarism if you cite the source of the original information. Therefore, after paraphrasing something, you should include its source.
4. Include The Essential Points Only:
Creating a summary aims to educate the readers about a topic through a concise piece of text. Therefore, a summary must be clear to someone who has not read or seen the original material. That is why you should include all the essential points for a person to understand the information without reading the original source.
5. Avoid Including Statistics and Numbers:
A summary should not go beyond the essential points. Instead, you should keep the summary as brief as possible. Therefore, if you are summarizing something that contains specific details, like dates, figures, statistics, and numbers, you should not include them unless necessary.
6. Avoid Including Examples and First Person’s Perspective:
As mentioned earlier, a summary should only contain brief information. Therefore, if the author has asked some questions in the original text, you should avoid those questions while writing an overview. This way, you can easily prevent including the first person’s perspective while summarizing something.
Similarly, suppose the author has explained the concept of something in the original text through different examples. In that case, you should avoid including those examples while writing a summary to keep the information as concise as possible.
7. Take Assistance From AI-Based Summarizers:
Technology has made everything easier. The same is the case with summarizing. Therefore, a summarizer nowadays provides an easy way to write a summary.
Thus, the best text summarizers work on a scoring-based mechanism to assign a specific score to each sentence according to its importance. This way, while producing a summary, an article summarizer only includes the sentences with a higher score because they are the key talking points of the topic.
In A Nutshell:
A summary summarizes the main points of a topic and puts them in an easy situation for people to understand. It also serves as an additional reminder for people who read the full article and forget about their reading experience because a killer summary makes the readers go: ‘Aha! I get it now.’ Therefore, if you want to be successful in your writing, you should add the skill of writing an excellent summary to your skillset.
However, writing an excellent summary is not as simple as paraphrasing something because it involves several techniques. So, we have discussed the seven most straightforward methods for writing a summary in this guide to make writing a good summary easier for you.
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