Summary essayenglish 101

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summary essay

• A summary is a brief statement of the major points of a reading, and it is always shorter than the original.

• Unlike a paraphrase, a summary does not attempt to cover all of the reading’s key points and details. Rather, it is a brief statement of major points and main ideas.

• Usually a summary is about one-fifth the length of the original or less.

Writing a summary improves your grasp of a writer’s ideas. 1. Writing a summary clarifies your thinking because you must identify key ideas and explain how they relate to one another.

2. Writing a summary saves you time when you are reviewing or studying for an exam. Summaries make it easier to keep track of and focus on important ideas while eliminating less important information.

3. College instructors across the disciplines—not just writing instructors—assign summaries. For example, you may be asked to write a plot summary of a short story, a summary of a news article for an economics course, or a summary of your findings for a science laboratory experiment.

4. Summarizing is an important workplace skill. Today’s workplace values precise, concise information. You might be asked to summarize a meeting, condense a lengthy report, or briefly describe the outcomes of a sales conference you attended.

Writing summary

1. Complete the reading before writing your summary. Feel free to highlight and/or annotate as you read.

2. Review the reading. Review your highlighting and/or annotations, or use your review to highlight and annotate for the first time.

3. Write an opening sentence that states the author’s thesis or main point.

writing summary

4. Explain the author’s most important supporting ideas.

Refer to text you have underlined or highlighted. Be sure to express the author’s main ideas in your own words; don’t copy phrases or sentences.

If you can’t express an idea in your own words, you probably don’t fully understand it. In that case, look up words, reread, talk to someone about the passage, or seek other information about the passage to clarify its meaning.

writing summary

5. Include restated definitions of key terms, important concepts, procedures, or principles. Do not include examples, descriptive details, quotations, or anything not essential to the main point. Do not include your opinion. 6. Present the ideas in the order in which they appear in the original source. 7. Reread your summary to determine if it contains sufficient information.

writing summary

8. Ask yourself this question: if someone had not read the article, would your summary be a good substitute that covers all the author’s main points? If not, revise your summary to include additional information.

9. Indicate the source of the material you summarized.

Original Selection

Differences in physical alignment, or body language among

friends talking to each other, leap out at anyone who looks at segments of videotapes one after another. At every age, the girls

and women sit closer to each other and look at each other directly. At every age, the boys and men sit at angles to each

other—in one case, almost parallel—and never look directly into

each other’s faces. I developed the term anchoring gaze to

describe this visual home base. The girls and women anchor their gaze on each other’s faces, occasionally glancing away,

while the boys and men anchor their gaze elsewhere in the room,

occasionally glancing at each other.The boys’ and men’s

avoidance of looking directly at each other is especially

important because researchers, and conventional wisdom, have

emphasized that girls and women tend to be more indirect than

boys and men in their speech. Actually, women and men tend to

be indirect about different things. In physical alignment, and in

verbally expressing personal problems, the men tend to be more

indirect. —Tannen, You Just Don’t Understand: Women and Men in

Conversation

Carlos’s Summary

Although researchers and others have

traditionally believed men to be more direct than women, videotapes of friends interacting

show that this is an overgeneralization. The

truth is that men and women tend to be indirect about different things. Specifically, men tend to

be indirect in body language and in talking

about personal problems. In each of these

tapes, women sit closer to each other than men

and look more directly at each other than men

do.

James’s Summary

There are many differences in physical alignment as seen on

videotapes of men and women. During each tape, women and

girls align themselves closer (sit closer) than men and boys. Men

and boys sit at angular positions—not facing each other. In fact, they never even look at each other’s faces. The word anchoring is

used to describe their visual gaze. It is said that girls and women

anchor their gaze on each other’s faces, but boys and men anchor their gaze everywhere else in the room except on each other’s

faces. They only glance at each other sometimes.Researchers find

the fact that boys and men avoid looking into each other’s faces

interesting because the idea that girls and women are usually

more indirect than boys and men has always been universally

accepted. Also researchers have advocated the idea that girls and

women have a tendency to be less direct in their speech than

boys and men. In reality, men and women are both indirect about different things. In the verbal expression of problems and in

physical alignment, men tend to be less direct.

Visualize the text

See the worksheets

See p. 91 for summary outline

Watch the video and create a visual

summary

https://www.ted.com/talks/angela_lee_duckworth_the_key_to_success_grit

/transcript?language=en