Summarising is said to be selecting or abstracting the most important ideas and relevant details from a passage and restating the selected and abstracted ideas and relevant details in one’s own words to form a fresh passage.

Such a fresh passage is normally and usually shorter than the original passage because it contains only the most essential details in the original passage.

In other words, it means intelligent selection of the thoughts, ideas, and concepts from an original passage. The fresh passage that now contains only the essential details is called a summary.

Summarising a passage is a brief exercise. To summarise means to re-state as briefly and clearly as possible the information gathered or selected from a passage that has been read or a speech listened to.

Human communication takes place within the limited frameworks of time and space. There is hardly enough time and space for a source of a message to say all he would wish to say or write. It is the same to read or listen to all he would wish to read or listen to at a given point in time.

The simple reason for this situation is that both the sources of messages and receivers of messages are involved in many and varied human activities for which further messages or information must be shared or disseminated.

Because of this reason, human beings are likely to listen and react effectively to short, clear, and direct messages. The following are some steps you may take in your effort to write a good summary.

1. Read effectively and efficiently.y

The main key to a good summary is an understanding of the passage. You should read the passage carefully and meaningfully. You should pronounce the words correctly and understand their meanings as used in the passage.

What Is a Summary? A summary is a brief version of the material in question, in which only the essential information is offered and only in the most direct form possible. As is true with most forms of writing, the essence of a summary is to give readers a brief insight into the content without having to peruse the entire article. Summaries are among the most popular tools that people use in different situations to complete various assignments or present information effectively.

Importance of Summaries: Time Efficiency: Summaries help readers to get the overview of a document in haste, nd therefore, more can be used to enable one to master the gist of the document in question.

Demonstrating Understanding: Writing a summary is a good example of how well one can assess his or her understanding by summarising major points.

Communication Skill: This skill further strengthens your communication skills, especially from the opinion of effectively dropping irrelevant information from a talk.

Organisational Tool: Writing summaries is useful for grouping information so that a person can easily go through the important aspects throughout.

2. Understand the message

An understanding of the message in the paragraph is essential. What is the writer of the passage saying, and how and why is he saying it?

3. Analyse the message

How has the writer organised his thoughts? Is the method chronological, spatial, cause-to-effect, effect-to-cause or problem-to-solution? Apart from using these methods, writers also use certain devices to clarify or support the main ideas. Such devices are explanation, comparison/contrast/analogy, citing, specific instances or examples, illustrations, statistics, and testimony/authority.

4. Get hold of the topic sentence.

Get hold of the sentence in which the main ideas of the passage are expressed. It is the heart of a passage. It tells the reader the main focus or idea of the passage. The topic sentence may be found as the first sentence, in the middle or at the end of the passage.

5. Note and understand the supporting details.

Note and understand the points with which the writer has supported or expanded the main idea of the passage. In doing this, the writer would define, explain, illustrate, compare, contrast, amplify or emphasise, repeat or create redundancy.

6. Understand devices as signposts.

The devices, such as illustrations, examples, e, are signposts to enable you to comprehend the main idea of the passage. They should never be summarised unless they are essential or form an integral part of the main idea.

7. Understand the function of the paragraph.

Certainly, the passage you are asked to summarise was taken from a paragraph, or it is a paragraph or is made up of one or more paragraphs. What function does the paragraph serve in the passage?

• It introduces the main thought or idea.
• It develops the main idea or central thought.
• It provides a transition to the main ideas or central thought, ht or between ideas.
• It concludes the main idea or central thought.

8. Preview the passage

You should review the passage by reading fast through it quickly. Do not be distracted by the difficult words in the passage; rather, understand their contextual meanings. Look out for the central idea of the passage. Note the supporting ideas or details.

9. Formulate a mental question.

You should try to formulate some mental questions about the thoughts, ideas and concepts and how they are developed in the passage.

10. Find out the thought pattern.

You should read to find out the thought pattern and what constitutes it. Read and repeat the passage, paying greater attention to the main idea and the important details, with the aim of eventual recall in an organised manner for summary writing.

11. Recite mentally to yourself.

You are required to recite mentally to yourself. In an organised and logical manner, the main idea and important details should have been gathered from the passage. Now, summarise them as they express the thought pattern in the passage. Do this in your own words and one short paragraph.

12. Review the passage

You should review the passage to ensure that you have been able to select the main idea and important details from the passage in an organised and logical order.

Identify again the main ideas and the important details, and relate them to the thought pattern in the passage by asking why, how, where, when, and what of the ideas and important details.

You have to check to make sure that you have selected the information as needed and rightly expressed it in your words in the first draft. Try to revise the draft, remove all the unnecessary words and restructure the draft as necessary as possible. This is the summary of the passage.

13. Read to summarise

Bad reading habits and a low rate of comprehension are serious impediments to writing a good summary. Summary writing demands a careful selection of pertinent details from a passage. This calls for the understanding and interpretation of the thoughts beneath the written language.

You must, therefore, be concerned with reading to get the main ideas, select important details, follow directions, predict outcomes, differentiate between facts and opinions, follow the written plan and intent of the writer, and understand charts, tables, maps and graphs and grasp the sequence of events.

Hence, the summary passages are essential in carrying out the majority of the official or assignment tasks.

For a student wishing to cram, a researcher seeking a concise overview of huge studies to relay to managers, or a professional summarising an argument for presentation in a report or meeting, summarising is critical.

However, this skill is rarely given due attention, and most learners have problems with summarising the material without having to ditch the main points from the original text.

In this comprehensive guide on solving summary passages, you will master the special details and specific approaches to solving these areas quickly and effectively.

14. Directions for Summarising Texts: A How-To Guide

Initial Thorough Reading: Building a Foundation. The process starts with the first reading of the text to get a general idea of the writer’s worldview. This can be a challenging step, depending on how detailed the material you are summarising is, because it sets the parameters of your summary.

Creating a Draft Summary: structuring your ideas. After reading through, finding key points and paraphrasing content, create your summary in the form of a draft. This draft should be organised in a coherent manner that will clearly outline the main ideas.

Drafting Your Summary: Introduction: The first thing to note when writing a passage is to begin with a sentence that sets out the theme/tenor of the passage. This leads us to the summary of the article and the general context that surrounds it.

Body: Recap all important data in the order that makes sense or in the order in which they were gained. They should mirror the original text closely, but also be shorter than the original text.

Conclusion: To conclude, write a sentence that recreates the position staked in the introduction or offers the final reflection.

 Example Structure: Opening Sentence: Come up with a statement of what the passage is all about or the central message of the passage.

Body Sentences: Summarise it and make sure that all the presented facts are linked and follow each other in a logical order.

Closing Sentence: In a few words, write the conclusion of this text or the message of this text, in case it is an article.

15. Reviewing and Revising Your Summary: Refining content

The last step can be marked as the evaluation of the whole summary, where you can read and correct the summary.

 Review Process: Comparison with Original Text: Make sure to align the summary with the main text to ensure all the pointers are raised and well articulated.

Clarity and Coherence: Treat your summary as a text: focus on making it understandable and ensuring that the notions are linked organically.

Remove Redundancies: Omit all redundant information. Eliminate any recessive or extraneous data.

Grammar and Style: Correct and make sure that this summary is correct about grammar and other standard writing procedures.

 Revision Tips: Read Aloud: Consider reading out your summary because sometimes, what might have been typed and written can sound ugly when read out loud due to some things like awkward breaks.

Seek Feedback: Get a friend to look at your summary and give their opinion as to whether everything that was about the article is included well.

Iterative Refinement: Provide more than one draft of the summary; make several edits and rewrites if necessary to get an adequate and succinct summary of the text.

Maintaining Conciseness and Focus: The key to effective summarizing: Both the brevity and the concentration of the final text are very important in the process of creating the summary. Do one’s best to make it relatively easy to understand the author’s primary points and arguments.

 Strategies for Maintaining Concision: Focus on Essentials: Reformulate only those points which are useful in understanding the primary message of the text.

Avoid Over-Detailing: In general, over-detailed summaries should not be created and should only contain basic general information.

Clear Language: Act plainly and straightforwardly when passing out information.

 Common Pitfalls: Over-Simplification: Do not oversimplify, ze as this leads to significant oversights of the component details of such phenomena or processes.

Personal Opinions: That is, avoid including one’s attitudes and points of view in the process of summarising. Do not wander away from the ideas presented by the author.

Neglecting Structure: Preserve the structure of the source, including the coherence if the text will present only an extract of the source.

16. Practising Regularly: Building Proficiency

Just as in the case of other skills, summarising skills cannot be improved based on a once-in-a-while activity. Thus, it is evident that this process must be practised often to improve your distillation ability with time.

 Practice Methods: Summarise Various Texts: Nowadays, it is vital to assess skills in different types of text comprehension and combine them with summarising in articles, reports, or books. This will help you master various forms of materials that you are going to encounter.

Time Yourself: When summarising texts, working with time limits will help to become faster and more designed.

Review and Reflect: This being the case, after the practice session, take time and go through your summaries with the view to coming up with the right techniques for the next practice session.

Practice Exercises: News Articles: It is useful to read news articles and summarise them in order not to lose essential events and their meaning.

Academic Papers: Summarise academic papers to present the main point and conclusion.

Fiction: Please, explain the depiction of characters’ changes or evolution of the story in novels or short stories.

Therefore, by mastering the skills of solving summary passages, one is endowed with the skills that improve on efficient dissemination of important information.

If you are to read and practice the guidelines laid down in this guide, you will be in a position to plan and implement an effective approach to summarising texts.

So, summarising is identifying the main concepts, restating them in one’s own words, as well as being simple and succinct. Just like with anything else, with time and dedication, one can come up with good summaries that are, in fact, short and informed. Read the similar post on this page.