The Art of Summary

A summary is when you use your own words to explain something written by someone else.

Summaries are an important aspect of writing. They offer a way to provide background information, explain research, events, or other texts in fewer words than originally presented. They are also a manifestation of the writer's own skill and understanding of whatever it is they are summarizing.

When to Summarize

Summarize when you need information from somewhere else. Need. Don't just summarize for the sake of providing information or filling space. Make sure the information you provide by summarizing is relevant to your own argument or project. If you’re summarizing a book, it's unlikely you will need a paragraph explaining the premise of every single chapter; just a description of the main points relevant to what you are saying.

Summaries provide more than just additional information. They're a way to demonstrate your understanding of a text, and, in turn, how knowledgeable and reliable you are about the topic you're writing about. For example, in an episode of The Simpsons, Bart summarizes Sir Walter Scott's Ivanhoe as “the story of a Russian farmer and his tool.” Bart deserves some credit for creativity, but from this incorrect summary, it'll be difficult to trust anything else he has to say on the subject.

A poorly written or inaccurate summary let alone misinterpreting the very premise of the text, says you either did not read whatever it is you are summarizing, or you didn't understand it. The only solutions for bad summaries are either get to know the original text better, or just not summarize it.

Summarize Ethically

Here's a situation. You're well into a research project. You find a source that seems useful, but halfway through, it starts making perfectly valid claims that refute the thesis of your own research. What do you do?

What you should do is revise your thesis to accommodate the new research.

What you should not do is ignore the new information, or, even worse, include the source but conveniently omit the details that refute your thesis. That's an unethical summary. When you summarize, represent what you summarize honestly. Don't ignore something just because it doesn't fit with what you were saying in the first place.

In short, honestly provide the information that is relevant.

Providing Citations

Any time you use information from somewhere or someone else, provide a citation. This is especially true of summaries because you don't use quotation marks to set their exact words, and summaries can span several sentences. Give credit where credit is due. Take a few words or a sentence to signal you are using someone else's idea and provide the appropriate citation, in-text and on your Works Cited/References/Bibliography page. If you don't signal you're summarizing, the border between your ideas and their ideas gets fuzzy. If you don't cite, your information can't be checked or further researched by your reader; and it’s being lazy.

If you don't introduce the summary and cite it, then there's nothing to say the information is someone else's. That's called plagiarism.

Summarizing is an important part of writing, and writing research in particular; but if it’s not done appropriately, it can cause problems, the least of which is making yourself look bad. The worst is looking like a thief. Respect your sources. Do them justice. Treat them fairly, and as the property of others.