Summaries can be very beneficial selections of information when used the right way. The Key Points explain how to.
Key Points:
Purpose of Summaries:
- Shows what the document is all about
- Helps the user to decide whether to read all of it, parts of it, or none of it
- Provides a framework for understanding the details of the longer document that follows
What Users Expect from a Summary:
- Accuracy
- Completeness
- Readability
- Conciseness
- Nontechnical Style
- Guidelines for Summarizing Information
- Read the entire original
- Reread the original, underlining the essential material
- Edit the underlined information
- Rewrite in your own words
- Edit your own version
- Check your version against the original
- Rewrite your edited version
- Document your source
A Situation Requiring a Summary:
Forms of Summarized Information:
- Closing Summary
- In conclusion
- Looks at the major findings
- Information Abstract ("Summary")
- Precedes the report
- Condenses the document
- Descriptive Abstract ("Abstract")
- Helps people decide whether to read the document
- Executive Abstract
- Persuasive emphasis to guide the primary audiences
Ethical Considerations in Summarizing Information:
- A condensed version of a complicated issue or event may provide a useful overview, but this superficial treatment can rarely communicate the issue's full complexity -- that is, the complete story
- Whoever summarizes a lengthy piece makes decisions about what to leave out and what to leave it, what to emphasize and what to ignore. During the selection process, the original message could very well be distorted
- In a summary of someone else's writing, the tone or "voice" of the original author disappears -- along with that writer's way of seeing. In some cases, this can be a form of plagiarism
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