- As a stand-alone assignment to show you’ve understood the material.
- To keep notes that will help you remember what you’ve read.
- To give an overview of other researchers’ work in a literature review.
A summary is a short overview of the main points of an article or other source, written entirely in your own words.
- Start by reading the abstract—this already contains the author’s own summary of their work, and it tells you what to expect from the article.
- Pay attention to headings and subheadings—these should give you a good sense of what each part is about.
- Read the introduction and the conclusion together and compare them: what did the author set out to do, and what was the outcome?
An article summary like the above would be appropriate for a stand-alone summary assignment. However, oftentimes, you’ll want to give an even more concise summary of an article.
Table of contents
In any case, the goal of summarizing is to give your reader a clear understanding of the original source. Follow the 4 steps outline below to write a good summary.
Using national survey data, Davis et al. (2015) tested the assertion that “an apple a day keeps the doctor away” and did not find statistically significant evidence in support of this hypothesis. While people who consumed apples were slightly less likely to use prescription medications, the study was unable to demonstrate a causal relationship between these variables.
The study used publicly available cross-sectional data from the National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey. Participants were categorized as either apple eaters or non-apple eaters based on their self-reported apple consumption in an average 24-hour period. They were also categorized as either avoiding or not avoiding the use of healthcare services in the past year. The data was statistically analyzed to test whether there was an association between apple consumption and several dependent variables: physician visits, hospital stays, use of mental health services, and use of prescription medication.
If you want to learn summary writing, work through this blog, and understand what steps are required for writing a perfect summary.
- The length of a summary can range from two sentences to even several pages. In any case, write complete sentences to describe the main points of the author.
- To summarize the author’s argument, use the present tense.
- Do not include information that is not in the original text. Also, do not include your own opinion or ideas.
- It is important to refer to several source materials, especially for research summaries. So, information can be considered to present and explain the main idea to a number of references discussing the same subject.
- If you are using the author’s original words, don’t forget to put quotation marks to show that the quoted information does not belong to you.
- How long should a summary be?
- How to write a summary of an article?
- How many sentences are in summary?
- What is a one-page summary?
- What is the sentence summary?
- What should a summary include? Etc.
Make sure your summary includes all the major supporting ideas into a final version that should be complete and coherent throughout.
What is Summary Writing?
For writing a good summary, the best approach to this task is to review the piece you are analyzing a couple of times. If you understand the subject, you will be able to summarize it easily. However, if you can not summarize a subject, it clearly means you have not learned it well.
Once you are done with the writing, it is important to edit your work. Reread your summary a number of times and make changes along the way. You can also ask someone else to read your work and provide you feedback. Make changes in your summary according to the provided feedback to come up with an effective piece of writing.
The thesis statement is important to include especially if you are writing a book summary. It is important to identify the main idea of the text for writing a thesis statement that will highlight the main argument.
Writing a summary essay becomes a lot easier once you understand its complete essay structure. If you anytime face confusions about what is the purpose of writing the summary essay you should take our assignment help Perth. Our experts will guide you on how to prepare a summary essay outline in an easy way. To begin with, the main feature of a summary essay is that you have to repeat the ideas of the source text by paraphrasing them in your own words. You should never add any extra information from your side neither provide your own examples in the summary. Moreover, a summary essay should be an organized content that is it should follow a proper format.
Remember that the introductory paragraph should not provide how you evaluated the text. You do not need to mention your own opinions anywhere in the summary essay introduction.
When you are done summarizing the article, your summary essay is complete. Yes, there are no conclusions in the summary essay because it is not about your interpretations and opinions. It is about the author’s opinions and ideas. In certain cases, your instructors might ask you to provide a concluding paragraph. But, unless it is mentioned in your guidelines do not write any conclusion on your own. Consider the summary essay example given below and try to match it with the outline that we have presented above.
The introduction begins with the title of the story written as per the referencing format guidelines such as APA or MLA. The first sentence of the introduction begins with an author tag in which you tell the name of the author. You may also include little background details about the author here.
Understanding The Key Features of A Summary Essay
The summary essay starts with an introductory paragraph. This paragraph focuses on the main ideas that are presented by the author in the text. You are also required to provide a thesis statement which summarizes the main point of the source.
Here is another summary essay example which contains just one paragraph. See how the essay writer has tried to make it short and concise, keeping in mind the essence of the summary essay.
Summary writing is a common assignment given to students in many college courses. You can be asked to prepare a summary of the chapter, article, journal paper, novel or scientific work. There are basically two kinds of summary writing. The first one is a basic reader summary that you will prepare to develop a nice understanding of what you have read. Then there is a summary essay that is generally written for someone else in such a way that they can get a complete overview of a text. Today, we are presenting you some essay help expert tips on how to write a great summary essay.
In spite of the fact that the executive summary is commonly toward the start of a record, numerous writers advantage from composing it last. This enables the author to altogether build up all ends and contentions amid different phases of the composition procedure, and just spotlight on condensing and inducing in the executive summary (as opposed to growing new contentions).
The First Paragraph: Similarly, as a motion picture may start with a battle scene or a magazine article open with an amusing tale, you’ll require a solid snare for your executive summary. The principal passage needs to urge the pursuer to peruse whatever is left of the summary.
What to Avoid: The reason most business people get executive outlines wrong is that they trust the objective of the executive summary is to get the speculators to give them a check. The objective of the executive summary is to get the speculator to peruse the marketable strategy or to meet with you.
Executive summary lengths change as indicated by the length of the bigger report, and are typically somewhere in the range of 1-4 pages.
The Role of an Executive Summary
Accepting you are composing the executive summary last, don’t add anything new to it
In view of that, unmistakable your vocabulary of any superlatives, buzzwords, or cases that can’t be sponsored up. Abstain from utilizing terms like “the best”, “earth-shattering,” “bleed edge” and “world-class.” “Financial specialists see those words nonstop and in the long run, they lose meaning.
An executive summary is a brief document which covers detailed reports or proposals so that the reader does not have to go through all details of the report and can get the idea of all report. For the business plan, the most important section is an executive summary. Its length usually two to four pages. Generally, after the whole plan is complete then the executive summary is written for it.
– This paragraph is about an alternative approach to making career choices.
If, on the other hand, your goal is one paragraph total, then one or two sentences per paragraph summary should do the job. This is why it is important for you to get totally clear on how many words you want in your final summary.
Furthermore, parents are often motivated by factors other than their child’s sense of fulfillment. Psychologists claim that parents are often unconsciously guided by their own self-interest or by a false sense of security. They want the best for the future of the family as whole, and that is often associated with a high status. In other words, it may be more important for the parents that their child make them a proud member of a community by gaining a high post or a lucrative salary. They may also consider some careers more stable and safe. This notion persists in parents in spite of overwhelming evidence that the stability of a career is highly dependent on the employee’s satisfaction with the career choice. Those who feel miserable at the job sooner or later find a way to escape it and end up taking a pay cut in return for higher job satisfaction.
For example, we moved the example of Ahmad from the beginning of the article to the end of the section about parental pressure in career planning. That’s where this example really belongs.
Paragraph 3
Remember, at this stage, you just have a sequence of sentences that you spliced together in the previous steps. Now, you need to make sure that the entire summary reads smoothly.
You see, if the author begins an article with an example, the reader doesn’t have a frame of reference because she doesn’t know what this is an example of.
To make the article easier to comprehend, your task is to arrange your summary from general to specific. This means the following:
This step allows you to deal with the article one paragraph at a time instead of trying to swallow it whole. You don’t even have to do multiple readings. Just make sure that each of your paragraph summaries is accurate.