How to Summarize
This Resource Page will help you:
- Understand the importance of summarization
- Differentiate summarization techniques
- Create concise and coherent summaries
- Avoid plagiarism and maintain academic integrity
- Understand how to use summarization in your research and academic writing
What is Summarizing?
Summarizing is the process of condensing a longer piece of text, such as an article, book, or presentation, into a shorter version while retaining its essential meaning and main points. The purpose of summarizing is to capture the core ideas, key details, and significant arguments or findings of the original content in a more concise and digestible form. Summaries provide readers with a quick overview of the source material, allowing them to grasp the main message without having to read the entire document.
In academic and professional settings, summarizing is a valuable skill that helps you effectively communicate complex information, facilitate understanding, and save time for both the writer and the reader.
Summaries can take various forms, including written summaries, abstracts, executive summaries, and oral presentations, depending on the context and purpose.
To learn more about the definition and purpose of summarizing, check this resource from
What is the Difference between Summarizing, Paraphrasing and Direct Quoting?
Summarizing involves condensing the main ideas of a source into a shorter version, capturing the essential points while omitting minor details. Summaries provide an overview of the source's key arguments.
Paraphrasing allows you to rephrase the source's content in your own words, maintaining the original meaning but altering the sentence structure and vocabulary. It requires a deeper engagement with the material and demonstrates your grasp of its nuances. To learn more about paraphrasing, check our resource page on how to paraphrase.
Direct Quoting involves using the exact words from another source and placing them within quotation marks. Direct quotes are valuable when you want to emphasize the author's specific wording, particularly when it's a unique or influential phrasing. To learn more about how and when to use direct quotes, check our resource page on direct quotes.
For more information on the difference between paraphrasing, quoting, and summarizing, check this video from .
Why Do We Summarize in Academic Writing?
Summarizing benefits both writers and readers in various ways. Here you will learn about the purposes and benefits of summarizing.
- Improve Understanding: To distill essential information, you must engage actively with source materials, i.e., comprehend the content thoroughly, thus enhancing your overall understanding of the subject matter.
- Identify Key Arguments: Summarizing requires you to identify and articulate the key arguments or central points in a source. This process sharpens your critical thinking skills by discerning the most significant aspects of a text.
- Evaluate Evidence: When summarizing, you must assess the quality and relevance of the evidence presented in the source. This critical evaluation helps you distinguish between reliable and weak information, fostering a more discerning approach to academic sources.
- Write Effective Notes: When you extract the main ideas and supporting details from sources, you create a condensed version that helps you quickly understand and review the material.
- Avoid Plagiarism. By condensing source material into your own words, you ensure that your work remains original while still drawing from authoritative sources.
- Demonstrate Synthesis Skills: By summarizing various viewpoints and findings from multiple sources, you showcase your ability to integrate diverse perspectives and construct a well-rounded argument.
- Maintain Focus and Relevance: By summarizing only pertinent information, you ensure that your writing remains focused on your research question or thesis, avoiding unnecessary digressions.
- Integrate Source Material: You can integrate summaries into your writing (e.g., literature review section of your paper) to provide context or support your arguments. This integration enhances the clarity of your writing, making it more persuasive and informative.
What are the Key Components of an Effective Summary?
At the heart of every summary are the main ideas or key points. These are the central concepts, arguments, or findings that the original text seeks to convey. To identify and convey the main ideas in your summary:
- Pay close attention to the introduction and conclusion of the source, as they often contain the central message.
- Look for topic sentences in paragraphs, as they frequently introduce key ideas. To learn what topic sentences are, check The Basics of Paragraphs resource.
- Identify and emphasize keywords or phrases that encapsulate the main concepts.
While the main ideas are crucial, effective summaries should also include key supporting details. These details help provide context and evidence for the main points. When incorporating supporting details into your summary:
- Be selective: Choose the most relevant and essential supporting details that bolster the main ideas.
- Paraphrase: Rephrase and condense the details, maintaining their accuracy and integrity.
- Maintain Balance: Ensure that the summary strikes a balance between brevity and completeness by including enough details to support the main ideas.
Conciseness is a hallmark of effective summaries. In academic writing, where clarity and brevity are prized, a summary should distill complex information into a concise format. To achieve conciseness:
- Avoid redundancy, i.e., restating the same idea in different words.
- Remove unnecessary information such as irrelevant or tangential details.
- Use clear and precise language to express ideas succinctly.
Objectivity is a critical component of academic writing and extends to summaries as well. An effective summary should present the information in an unbiased and neutral manner. To ensure objectivity in your summary:
- Avoid Personal Opinions: Do not insert your personal opinions, biases, or judgments into the summary.
- Maintain the Author's Voice: Preserve the author's tone and perspective from the original text.
- Accurate Representation: Strive for an accurate representation of the source material, even if you disagree with it.
For more tips on effective techniques to summarize in academic writing, check this resource from
Summary Example
Read the example below and click on the hotspots that illustrate the main elements of this summary.
Original text
America has changed dramatically during recent years. Not only has the number of graduates in traditional engineering disciplines such as mechanical, civil, electrical, chemical, and aeronautical engineering declined, but in most of the premier American universities engineering curricula now concentrate on and encourage largely the study of engineering science. As a result, there are declining offerings in engineering subjects dealing with infrastructure, the environment, and related issues, and greater concentration on high technology subjects, largely supporting increasingly complex scientific developments. While the latter is important, it should not be at the expense of more traditional engineering.
Rapidly developing economies such as China and India, as well as other industrial countries in Europe and Asia, continue to encourage and advance the teaching of engineering. Both China and India, respectively, graduate six and eight times as many traditional engineers as does the United States. Other industrial countries at minimum maintain their output, while America suffers an increasingly serious decline in the number of engineering graduates and a lack of well-educated engineers. (169 words)
(Source: Excerpted from Frankel, E.G. (2008, May/June) Change in education: The cost of sacrificing fundamentals. MIT Faculty Newsletter, XX, 5, 13.)
One-paragraph Summary
How to Write Effective Summaries
The video below shows you how to make summaries by using a sample text on Generative Artificial Intelligence. You can pause the video to read the text, notes and final summary more in detail.
Adapted from: Keyhani, M., Hemmati, H., Arzuaga, L. S., & Conversation, T. (2023). Why student experiments with generative AI matter for our collective learning. Phys.org. Retrieved March 1, 2024, from
Common Challenges in Summarizing
Check the presentation below to learn about common challenges students face when summarizing.
Instructions: Click on the arrows below the progress bar to go to the next page or the previous page.
Common Types of Summaries in Academic Writing With Samples
Click the left column to learn about each type of summary. Then click the right column to read an example.
Abstracts are concise summaries of research papers, articles, or other academic documents. They serve as a standalone representation of the main content, making it easier for readers to decide whether the full text is worth their time. Key elements of an abstract include:
- Purpose: Clearly state the purpose and objectives of the study.
- Methods: Briefly describe the research methods or approach used.
- Results: Summarize the main findings or results of the study.
- Conclusions: Present the conclusions or implications of the research.
Remember, an abstract should be brief, typically ranging from 150 to 250 words, and it should provide a clear overview of the entire paper.
Executive summaries are similar to abstracts but are more commonly used in business and technical writing. They condense lengthy reports or documents into a concise format for decision-makers or stakeholders. Key points to consider when writing an executive summary include:
- Context: Provide a brief introduction to the document and its purpose.
- Summary: Highlight the most important findings, recommendations, or actions.
- Conciseness: Keep it brief, ideally no more than one page.
- Audience: Tailor the language and content to the intended audience's level of expertise.
Critical summaries go beyond mere description and involve evaluating and analyzing a text's content. This type of summarization requires you to assess the strengths and weaknesses of an argument or piece of research. Here are some key elements to consider:
- Main Argument: Identify the author's main argument or thesis.
- Evidence: Evaluate the quality and relevance of supporting evidence.
- Logic: Assess the logical flow and coherence of the argument.
- Bias: Be aware of potential biases in the text and their implications.
Critical summaries are valuable for engaging with and critiquing academic literature, making them an essential component of literature reviews.
“During settlement, migrant youth negotiate between various transitional spaces, which include educational, mediated and transnational spaces. To what extent can critical media literacy education acknowledge and strengthen young migrants’ resilience? In this article, we evaluate the Netherlands-based participatory action research project Critical media literacy through making media. Gathered empirical data include participant observation in two classes, in-depth interviews with 3 teachers and 19 students, as well an 18-minute film reflection. The focus is on how understandings, procedures and affectivity shape young migrants’ mindful media literacy practice. In order to develop media literacy education which works for all, we need to move away from a one-sizefits-all model based on the norms of Western, educated, industrialized, rich and democratic societies. Drawing on our experiences of co-creating, practicing and evaluating a curriculum with teachers and migrant students, we demonstrate the urgency of situated, reflexive, flexible, culture and context-aware critical media literacy education.”
Source: “Practicing Critical Media Literacy Education With/For Young Migrants: Lessons Learned” Bruinenberg, Sprenger, Omerović, and Leurs, 2021.
The National Education Goals Report: Building a Nation of Learners
The 1989 Education Summit led to the adoption of six National Education Goals, later expanded to eight by Congress.2 Essentially, the Goals state that by the year 2000:
- All children will start school ready to learn.
- The high school graduation rate will increase to at least 90%.
- All students will become competent in challenging subject matter.
- Teachers will have the knowledge and skills that they need.
- U.S. students will be first in the world in mathematics and science achievement.
- Every adult American will be literate.
- Schools will be safe, disciplined, and free of guns, drugs, and alcohol.
- Schools will promote parental involvement and participation.
The National Education Goals Panel was formed shortly after the Goals were announced in 1990. The Panel was charged with reporting national and state progress toward the Goals, identifying promising practices for improving education, and helping to build a nationwide, bipartisan consensus to achieve the Goals.
Source: National Education Goals Panel. (1999). The National Education Goals report: Building a nation of learners, 1999. Washington, DC: U.S. Government Printing Office.
Participants and their contexts - Survey
An online survey was developed to collect demographic, as well other data relevant to the focus of this study. The link to the survey was sent to the 45 Association for Educational Communications and Technology (AECT) members who had responded to the invitation sent to all AECT members, indicating their interest to participate in the study. Of this group, only 26 people (57.8%) completed the online survey. Table 1 shows a breakdown of the demographic characteristics of this sample.
The majority who completed the survey were women (73.8%). The respondents were also mainly from the higher education sector (84.6%). Age wise, most of them (73.1%) were in the 30's to 50's age range. Eight of the 26 respondents (30.8%) were from institutions outside the United States with representation from almost every continent; Eurasia (Azerbaijan and Georgia), Africa (Nigeria), Asia (Indonesia), Europe (United Kingdom) and North America (Canada). In addition, the respondents also represent a myriad of perspectives, experiencing the impact of the global pandemic in a variety of roles. In higher education, among the respondents were doctoral students; instructional designers including those with administrative and academi c duties related to instructional design; full-time faculty, some of whom also served in academic administrative roles; adjuncts, as well as a librarian who also serves as a liaison to one of the colleges on campus. In the K-12 arena, there were a few teachers bringing their perspectives from the elementary, middle and high school contexts. Finally, there was also representation from one of the departments in government bringing the perspective of an instructional designer and training management advisor on the impact of the pandemic on the execution of training programs. (Nethi and Simonson, 2020)
Nethi, V., & Simonson, M. (2020). SUMMARY: Trends, Critical Issues, and Observations--Instructional Technology in a Time of Crisis. Quarterly Review of Distance Education, 21(3).