A summary is a condensed reproduction of
the main points of some broad topic in the minimum number of words and in the
language distinctly different from that of the original. We make summaries
of many different things, including books, research papers, plays, films,
lectures, readings and so on.
A good summary has three principal
requirements.
1. It should offer a balanced
coverage of the original. (There is a tendency to devote more coverage to the
earlier parts of the source text.)
2. It should present the source
material in a neutral fashion.
3. It should condense the source
material and be presented in the summary writer`s own words. (Summaries that
consist of directly copied portions of the original rarely succeed).
As to the length of a summary it
must be admitted that it depends on the amount of details required in it. The
normal proportion of a summary is about 1 to 10 of the original.
To do a good job, you must first
thoroughly understand the source material you are working with. Here are the processing
steps in writing a summary:
1. Skim
the text, noting in your mind the subheadings. If there are no subheadings, try
to divide the text into sections. Form the plan.
2. Read
the text, highlighting important information or making notes.
3. In
your own words, write down the main points of each section.
4. Write
down the key support points for the main topic but do not include minor detail.
5. Integrate
the points of the plan into a rough draft of the summary. Avoid such phrases as
“the author says”, “the article reports”. Instead simply say what the author
says without noting that he does so.
6. Compare
the rough draft with the original and cut out non-essential points in it, if
there are any.
7. Write
a neat copy with an introduction, which clearly states the title, the author`s
name, the source from which the text is taken and the subject the summary is
concerned with.
Summaries
may be of two types – simple (or tradition) and comparative. Comparative summaries require
you to analyze and use
information from two or more sources rather than just one. In a comparative
summary, you often need to infer and make explicit the relationships among your
sources. Unlike a traditional summary, a comparative summary may not be an
objective representation of the original sources.
Quite often the term “summary” is
replaced by the synonymous words “synopsis” (“annotation”) and “abstract”.
A synopsis (annotation) is the shortest account of the main content and conlusions of the
original text. Normally it is a very brief summary of a play or a novel placed
at the beginning or at the end of the book.
The manner of presenting the
material in synopsis is very concise and it tends to be critical. When
summarizing the contents, the synopsis writer appreciates the material from his
own point of view. He uses as a rule a wide range of the so-called clichés,
which can be roughly divided into three groups:
1) those introducing the
leading theme of the original paper (“The text deals with…”, “The article is
devoted to…”, “The chapter is about…”, etc).
2) those drawing the reader`s
attention to the major points of the contents (“The author emphasizes the idea
of…”, “The author points out that…”, “The paper elaborates…”, “Attention
is drawn to the fact that…”, “The main finding of the chapter is that…”,
“Especially revealing is the author`s analysis of…”, “Of special interest is
his argument that…”, etc).
3) those forming a conclusion
to which the reader`s attention is drawn (“The author comes to the conclusion
that…”, “The author draws the following conclusion…”, “The author concludes by
saying that…”, “The basic approach of the author is that…”, “Underlined is the
conclusion that…”, etc).
An abstract is a summary of an article, a
monograph or a thesis published separately from the work with abstracts of
other works in the same field. One of the main purposes of an abstract is to
enable the reader to form a quick opinion as to whether the matter is worth to
begin detailed reading or not. But if a short content of the work is printed at
the end of the article or paper, it is more appropriate to use the word
“summary” in which case its French equivalent is “resume”.