“Quick-Fix Workshop” Communications Centre

1. How To Summarize “Quick-Fix Workshop” Communications Centre

2. What is a Summary? A summary is a shortened version of an original text. It includes the thesis and major supporting points, and should reveal the relationship between the major points and the thesis.

3. How Long is a Summary? It may be any length, from 25% of the original to one sentence.

4. What you Need • A big, ugly, overwhelming text: to dissect and shrink. • A Hi-lighter: to locate the text’s important parts. • Paper: to write down the main point, purpose of the text, major points and documentation information. • A ruthless, but respectful attitude: to conquer the mess.

5. BEGIN

6. Step 1: Topic • Locate the topic. • The topic is a word or phrase that says what the text is about. • Try to be as specific as possible about the topic.

7. Step 2: Purpose • What is the purpose of the text. • Does it tell a story (narrate)? Inform? Persuade or raise readers' awareness of an issue?

8. Step 3: What is the Thesis? • Look for the thesis (what the author is saying about the topic). • Look first in the introduction, then in the conclusion; writers often write explicit thesis statements. • Write the thesis in your own words (and make sure it matches your sense of the author's purpose).

9. Step 4: Divisions in the Text • Look for the major divisions of the text. In your own words, summarize each division in one sentence. • (That may mean summarizing each paragraph, but often several paragraphs go together). • Make a list of all major points.

10. Step 5: Organizing Sentences • Work with the sentences you have created to produce a summary. • Be ruthless: a good summary is SUCCINCT (you may leave some information out -- as long as it is ‘extraneous’) • Make sure you reveal the relationships between the ideas. Are therecontrasts or comparisonsbetween some of the ideas?

11. REMEMBER • Summaries are short restatements of a work's main points. • When writing a summary, be sure to record the work's major ideas. • Summaries condense a text's main ideas into a few concise sentences. • A summarized work is always much shorter than the original. • A summary of a work's thesis and supporting points should be written in your own words.

12. Tips • When summarizing, avoid examples, asides, analogies, and rhetorical strategies. • Only quote and paraphrase words and phrases that you feel you absolutely must to reproduce exactly the author's or authors' full meaning. • Keep in mind that your summary must fairly represent the author's or authors' original ideas.

13. Checklist • Reread your source until you fully understand it. • Write a one sentence restatement of the source's main idea without looking at the source. • Use the text’s main idea as your summary's topic sentence. • Pull out the text’s main ideas. • Write the summary in your own words. Avoid looking at your source while writing your summary. • If you must include some of the source's original words and phrases, quote and paraphrase accurately. • Document the source's author, title, date of publication and any other important citation information.

14. The Difference Between Paraphrasing and Summarizing • To paraphrase means to express someone else's ideas in your own language. To summarize means to distill only the most essential points of someone else's work. • Think about how much of the detail from your source is relevant. If all your reader needs to know is the ‘bare bones’, then summarize.