Chapter 4: Summarizing the Work of Others
Why Summarize?
A summary is a condensed version of a text, put into your own words. Summarizing is a useful part of the analytical process because it requires you to read the text, interpret and process it, and reproduce the important points using your own language. By doing so, you are (consciously or unconsciously) making choices about what matters, what words and phrases mean, and how to articulate their meaning.
Questions for Reflection
What was the last movie you saw? Turn to a friend, a colleague, your cat or a tree and summarize the movie.
What do you include? What do you leave out?
How do you think these choices affect your audience’s understanding?
Why Summarize in Scholarly Writing?
There are many reasons you might find yourself summarizing others’ work in your writing:
- To support your own point
- To disagree with a relevant study
- To explain a concept, theory or teaching
- To compare/contrast a study’s findings with those of other studies
- To present the “state of knowledge” so you can identify an opportunity to add to the conversation
Adaptations
This section has been adapted from Chapter Five: Summary and Response in EmpoWORD: A Student-Centered Anthology and Handbook for College Writers by Shane Abrams, licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License, except where otherwise noted.
Media Attributions
- Raise Your Voice for Nature © Alejandro Ortiz adapted by Lindsay Cuff is licensed under a CC BY-NC-SA (Attribution NonCommercial ShareAlike) license
- Think © Kirby Wu is licensed under a CC BY (Attribution) license
An author reiterates the main ideas, arguments, and details of a text in their own words, condensing a longer text into a smaller version. Contrast with paraphrase.
