Dos and Don’ts for Writing a Summary
Summarization of content means providing a brief context of the main points of an article or essay that needs to be written in the writer’s own words and ideas. Always remember that a summary should be shorter than the original text. So, while writing one, be simple, clear and provide accurate words and data to your content.
In order to write an effective summary, here we have provided a few tips on it that students should always keep in mind.
What is the right time to summarize?
According to experts, there are different kinds of situations where you need to summarize your content-
- To take down notes – this helps in remembering the text
- Preparing an outline of other author’s work in a review
- To write an article – to show the content is understandable and summarized properly
The main objective of summarizing is to provide your audience with a clear understanding of the text and its message. It is mostly relevant to summarize your content when it is important for your own academic work or you’re told to share an overview of text before analysis.
Understand your data
One should always read the content thoroughly to make sure it is understandable and well enough for summarization. This helps you in writing an effective summary for your text. Make sure that you scan the content scrupulously to get an overall view. Read the content very carefully as this helps you in identifying the most important points. Skimming the content to evaluate the points noted is an important practice for summarization.
Break your data into various sub-heads
While preparing headers for your content, it is important to first break the data into several parts. For writing content for each paragraph, make sure that you check the topic which needs to be focused here. If all the paragraphs cover the same topic, you can add them under the same sub-head. And the different ones need to be mentioned under different sub-heads. This will make the summary cleaner, and the audience will get a clear picture of your content.
Figure out the important points
In order to learn to write an effective summary, you must be able to identify and make notes of important points from your content, as the audience will expect you to provide an all-inclusive conclusion in the end. The only thing that you need to remember here is to not paraphrase every paragraph of your content. Instead, your main purpose should be to identify the main points and leave everything behind, which is not important.
Begin with your summary writing process
For writing a summary, you need to avoid plagiarism and paraphrase the author’s view on the given topic. It is not advised to copy/paste any part of the content from a different source, not even a line or sentence. Experts always say that while writing a summary, the writer should always keep the text aside and should focus more on his/her views for the text. When it comes to summarizing a large text, it is important to accurately mention the origin of the summary.
Re-read and revise the summary
The last thing that you need to focus upon while writing a summary is to read the summary again to ensure that there are no mistakes made in the content and the author has presented its work accurately to the audience. No important information should be missed here, and paraphrasing should be done correctly.
In case you need to provide an article without plagiarism, you need to write the summary in your own words after understanding the views of the author on the article. Provide relevant references and citations in your summary in order to give the right credit to the original author of the text.
Apart from this, if you ever need help regarding your academic assignments or projects, feel free to contact our online assignment writing services for professional help and guidance.
