Writing a summary


Good summarizing skills are essential for success in writing, and are crucial in preparing to write
research papers and essays. You need these skills because summarizing is efficient and it helps you
distinguish between more and less important material.


            Summary is a shortened version of someone else’s writing or thoughts. Summaries vary in
length and amount of details depending on a teacher’s requirements, the length of the original
source (article, book, passage) and the purpose of the summary; however, all summaries must:


·         be shorter than the original source (article, book, passage) approximately one third the
length of the original source;

·         include the main idea of the original source in your own words;

·         include major details (also known as supporting ideas) in your own words;

·         should not include your knowledge, ideas or opinion unless your teacher requests it;

·         identify the author, title of article, title of publication, where published, publisher,
year of publication, and page information, at the top of the page of your summary (or in-text);

·         use phrases like: “according to the author“, “the author says“, “the author points out“,
“the article/the author shows/emphasizes/suggests/considers that …“, “this article
presents/examines“.

Look at the example summary to see how many ways this student refers to O'Neill and describes
O'Neill's writing.

Author Jaime O'Neill's article, "No Allusions in the Classroom," emphasizes the communication
problem between teachers and students due to the students' lack of basic knowledge. The author
supports this assertion by using a combination of personal experience, evidence obtained from
recent polls, other professors' opinions, and the results of an experiment he conducted in his own
classroom. The experiment O'Neill conducted was an ungraded eighty-six question "general knowledge"
test issued to students on the first day of classes. On this test, "most students answered
incorrectly far more often than they answered correctly." Incorrect answers included fallacies such
as: "Darwin invented gravity" and "Leningrad was in Jamaica." Compounding the problem, students
don't ask questions. This means that their teachers assume they know things that they do not.
O'Neill shows the scope of this problem by showing that, according to their teachers, this seems to
be a typical problem across the United States. O'Neill feels that common knowledge in a society is
essential to communicate. Without this common knowledge, learning is made much more difficult
because teacher and student do not have a common body of knowledge from which to draw. The author
shows the deterioration of common knowledge through poll results, personal experience, other
teachers' opinions, and his own experiment's results.

Jaime O’Neill, No Allusions in the Classroom, Newsweek, September 23, 1985.