Writing
How to write a summary
A summary restates the main ideas of a text in your own words and in far fewer words than the original. It names the author and title, gives the central point first, includes only the key supporting ideas, and leaves out your opinion, minor details and most examples.
Summaries are everywhere in school and work: the paragraph before you respond to an article, the opening of a book report, the note in an annotated bibliography, the email that tells your team what a long meeting decided. Writing a good one proves that you understood a text well enough to separate its main ideas from its details. It is harder than it looks, and it is a skill worth practicing.
What a summary includes and leaves out
| Include | Leave out |
|---|---|
| The title and author, in the first sentence | Your opinion of the text |
| The main idea or central argument | Minor details and side points |
| The key supporting points, in the original order | Most examples, stories and statistics |
| The conclusion or outcome | Long quotations |
| Your own wording throughout | Phrases copied from the original without quotation marks |
How long should a summary be?
There is no fixed rule, because it depends on why you are writing it. A one-sentence summary gives just the main idea. A paragraph summary of an article usually runs 75 to 150 words. A summary of a book chapter might take a page. A rough guide is to aim for a quarter of the original length or less. If your teacher gives a word limit, that limit wins.
How to write a summary in six steps
- Read the whole text once without taking notes, just to understand it.
- Read it again and mark the main idea (often in the introduction or conclusion) and the main point of each section or paragraph.
- With the text closed, write the main point of each section in a few words of your own.
- Write a first sentence that names the author, the title and the main idea.
- Add the key supporting points in order, using transitions to connect them.
- Compare your summary with the original. Check that you got the meaning right, left out your opinion, and did not copy phrases.
Summary template
In "[Title]," [author's full name] [argues / explains / describes] that [main idea].
[Author's last name] first [point 1].
[He / She / They] then [point 2].
[Author's last name] also [point 3].
Finally, [author's last name] concludes that [conclusion].
Use the author's full name the first time and the last name after that. Write in the present tense ("Park explains," not "Park explained"), which is the usual convention for discussing texts. The Elements of Style makes the same point in Rule 17: pick one tense for a summary and stay with it.
Example: an article and its summary
Here is a short informative article, written for this page, followed by a paragraph summary and a one-sentence summary of it.
When a honeybee discovers a rich patch of flowers, she faces a problem. The flowers may be a mile or more from the hive, and her sisters cannot see them. She cannot point, and she certainly cannot draw a map. Yet within minutes of her return, other bees are flying straight toward the flowers she found. Her secret is a dance.
Inside the dark hive, the returning forager climbs onto the upright surface of the honeycomb and performs what scientists call the waggle dance. She runs forward in a straight line while shaking her body from side to side, then circles back and repeats the run, again and again. The other bees crowd around her, following her movements by touch.
The dance carries two pieces of information. The angle of the straight run tells the direction of the food. If the bee runs straight up the comb, the flowers lie in the same direction as the sun. If she runs at an angle to the right of straight up, the flowers lie at that same angle to the right of the sun. The length of the waggle run tells the distance: the longer the bee waggles, the farther away the food.
Because the sun moves across the sky during the day, the dancer adjusts her angle over time, and the bees that follow her directions adjust too. This system lets a colony send its foragers to the best flowers quickly, without wasting energy on random searching. A colony that shares information well gathers more food, and a well-fed colony is more likely to survive the winter.
In "How Honeybees Give Directions," Lena Park explains how a honeybee that finds food tells the rest of the hive where to go. Park describes the waggle dance, in which a returning forager repeatedly runs in a straight line on the honeycomb while shaking her body. She explains that the angle of this run, measured from straight up, shows the direction of the food compared with the sun, and that the length of the waggle shows the distance. Park concludes that this system helps colonies find food efficiently and survive.
In "How Honeybees Give Directions," Lena Park explains that honeybees use a waggle dance, whose angle shows direction compared with the sun and whose length shows distance, to send hive mates to food quickly.
Notice what the summary leaves out: the opening puzzle about maps, the detail that bees follow the dance by touch, and the description of the dancer circling back. Those details make the article lively, but they are not needed to understand its main point. Notice also that the summary keeps the original order and uses the author's name to show these are her ideas, not the summary writer's.
Verbs for summarizing
Varying your verbs keeps a summary from sounding repetitive, and choosing the right verb shows you understood the author's purpose. Someone who argues is taking a side; someone who describes is not. Be careful with implies: an author implies, and a reader infers (see imply vs. infer).
| If the author is... | Try these verbs |
|---|---|
| Taking a side | argues, claims, contends, insists, maintains |
| Explaining or informing | explains, describes, shows, outlines, reports |
| Suggesting something | suggests, proposes, recommends, implies |
| Comparing | compares, contrasts, distinguishes |
| Wrapping up | concludes, finds, emphasizes, warns |
Summarizing a story
For fiction or a personal narrative, the main idea is the plot and what it means. A frame many teachers use is Somebody, Wanted, But, So, Then. Here it is applied to the sample story on the narrative essay page.
Somebody: a fifteen-year-old who never learned to swim
Wanted: to stop hiding and finally learn
But: the only open class was full of seven-year-olds, and the writer panicked when asked to float
So: the writer accepted help from a seven-year-old classmate and her foam noodle
Then: the writer floated, learned to swim by the end of summer, and realized that fear of embarrassment had cost far more than embarrassment itself
Summary: In "The Shallow End," a fifteen-year-old who never learned to swim joins a beginner class of young children, panics during a back float, and finally succeeds with a borrowed foam noodle, learning that the fear of looking foolish costs more than looking foolish.
Summary vs. paraphrase vs. analysis
| Type | What it does | Length |
|---|---|---|
| Summary | Restates only the main ideas of a whole text, in your words | Much shorter than the original |
| Paraphrase | Restates one passage in full, in your words | About the same length as the passage |
| Analysis | Explains how or why a text works, or judges it | Any length; includes your own ideas |
Summaries and plagiarism
A summary still reports someone else's ideas, so it needs credit. Name the author in your sentences, and when you summarize a source inside an essay, add a citation (see MLA in-text citations or APA in-text citations). If you keep a distinctive phrase from the original, put it in quotation marks. Swapping a few words while keeping the original sentence structure is not a summary, and it can count as plagiarism. Read more on how to avoid plagiarism.
Common mistakes
- Starting with a minor detail instead of the main idea.
- Including your opinion ("This was a great article").
- Retelling every event or example in order, which makes the summary almost as long as the original.
- Copying sentences and changing a word or two.
- Forgetting the title and author.
- Switching between past and present tense.
- Adding information that was not in the original.
Check yourself
1. What should the first sentence of a summary include?
Answer: The title, author and main idea. Opening with the title, author and main idea tells the reader at once what the text is and what it says.
2. Which of these belongs in a summary?
Answer: The text's main supporting points. A summary keeps the main points and drops opinions and most examples.
3. Which tense is usually used to summarize a text?
Answer: Present tense, as in "Park explains". The present tense is the usual convention for discussing what a text says.
4. How is a summary different from a paraphrase?
Answer: A summary covers only the main ideas and is much shorter.. A paraphrase restates a passage in full; a summary condenses a whole text to its main ideas.
Pick an answer to start.