Guidelines for Writing a Summary

In writing a summary, you are looking to demonstrate your understanding of some body of

content and to convey that understanding in your own words. The summary itself should

extract from the presented content only those elements that are most important — the main

idea (or thesis) and its essential supporting points, which may have to be disentangled from less

important material.

Please do not confuse summary with analysis. Analysis is a matter of evaluating the ideas,

techniques, and/or meaning in some body of content. A summary, on the other hand, forgoes

all such evaluation and focuses instead on clearly articulating the substance of the content

covered. A good summary will helpfully reconstruct the overall point of said content, beginning

with the thesis or main idea, followed by the points or details that support, explain or develop

that idea.

In writing a summary, bear in mind that you may have to reorganize the content presented. A

point made at the beginning of some body of content may, for example, need to be grouped

together with another point made toward the end – what matters is that you find a way to

structure and articulate that content as clearly and concisely as possible so as to better convey

what one should attend to.

And one final note. A summary should make sense as a piece of writing in its own right. It

should not read like a disjointed collection of points, but like a fully developed account of the

content in question, where connections and transitions are clearly flagged. Careful attention,

then, should be paid to word usage, sentence structure, paragraph breaks, etc., all of which can

be strategically employed to ensure your summary is not only informative, but a pleasure to

read.

These guidelines closely follow those recommended by the Dr. Murray and Anna C Rockowitz Writing Center at Hunter College.

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