Like paraphrasing, a summary is indirect quotation that re-casts the source in your own words; unlike a paraphrase, however, a summary is a fraction of the source length—anywhere from less than 1% to a quarter depending on the source length and length of the summary. A summary can reduce a whole novel or film to a single-sentence blurb, for instance, or it could reduce a 50-word paragraph to a 15-word sentence.

A summary does not include your opinions or interpretations of the source text.

The procedure for summarizing is much like that of paraphrasing except that it involves the extra step of pulling out highlights from the source. 

1. Determine how big your summary should be (according to your audience’s needs) so that you have a sense of how much material you should collect from the source.
2. Read and re-read the source text so that you thoroughly understand it.
3. Pull out the main points, which usually come first at any level of direct-approach organization (i.e., the prologue or introduction at the beginning of a book, the abstract at the beginning of an article, or the topic sentence at the beginning of a paragraph).
   • Disregard detail such as supporting evidence and examples.
   • If you have an electronic copy of the source, copy and paste the main points into your notes; for a print source that you can mark up, use a highlighter then transcribe those main points into your electronic notes.
   • How many points you collect depends on how big your summary should be (according to audience needs).
4. Paraphrase those main points (see the previous page for advice about paraphrasing).
5. Edit your draft to make it coherent, clear, and especially concise.
6. Ensure that your summary meets the needs of your audience and that your source is cited. Again, not having quotation marks around words doesn’t mean that you are off the hook for documenting your source(s).

In Summary…

When you summarize a source, you make it shorter in a way that meets the needs of the audience while remaining true to the meaning or intention of the original. (That’s a summary of this page).