Summarizing

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Summarizing

WHAT IS A SUMMARY?

A summary is a short (maybe one to three sentences) recap of a longer passage of text. (A short passage, you'd simply paraphrase.)

WHY DO WE SUMMARIZE?

According to the Coastal Writers' Reference, we cite sources in our own writing for a variety of reasons depending on the work we want them to do. Luckily for us, there are different tools we can use for different jobs. Whether we directly quote, paraphrase, or summarize our sources will depend largely on how we want them to inform our readers. Sometimes we may need to show our readers the exact language used in a source and we, therefore, should quote directly. Other times, we may need to communicate the complex ideas of a source at length and should then paraphrase.

Summary is an important tool to know how to use because it allows us to communicate a lot of information quickly. Therefore, knowing how to effectively summarize is particularly helpful when working with sources that contain a large amount of data that you want to accurately convey to your readers in a limited number of words.

Think, for instance, about when a classmate missed a class and asked you what was covered. You probably gave that individual a run down of the major points of the class, highlighting those you thought were especially significant. You may not have used the exact language of your instructor, and you may have missed some of the nuances of the material, but you still aimed to communicate the gist of the class in adequate ways.

So why is summary important in academic writing? There are actually lots of reasons. A brief summary allows us to introduce:

When should we use a summary to introduce our quote or paraphrase or just a brief introduction? That depends on the size and content of the quote or paraphrase. If the content of your quote or paraphrase needs some "background" to explain it, summarize the text that you used. If your quotation is long or especially if it's a short sentence or fragment, you'll probably need to summarize.

Really, that list could go on and on. Summaries help us show our readers what we already know. They help us position ourselves as informed writers who know quite a bit about our topic and want to share that information with others as we provide our own perspective.

WHAT DOES A SUMMARY LOOK LIKE?

Here is an example of a summary (in this case, used to introduce a fragment quote and a paraphrase):

In Mark's student council speech, he explained that there was no budget for new snack machines. When asked if we could revisit this topic next year, he replied that it was "highly unlikely." This indicated that I will probably have graduated before there was a new snack machine in the school.

Did you notice how the summary set up the the quote and paraphrase, so you can understand the context of what the writer is trying to tell you? In order to understand the significance and context of what the author was referring to, she/he needed to summarize Mark's speech. Without it, the author's comment about new snack machines would seem awkward and random.

As a writer, you should be able to decide when it is appropriate to summarize without much trouble. According to the Coastal Writers' Reference:

When you want to refer to a piece of writing in a more general way, when you need to point to an argument a writer makes throughout a text, or want to introduce a piece before you move on to work with it more closely, you will summarize. When you summarize a text you provide an overview of it by giving your readers a general idea of what the text is about. Strong summaries are short and provide a sense of what is central to the text you are summing up. (40)

As this quotation suggests, summaries help us provide readers with a sense of what has happened before or what others have said without going into too many details. They are brief recaps of what has gone on or been said before.

OKAY, SO HOW DO I SUMMARIZE?

As in quoting and paraphrasing, you'll introduce your summary with a signal phrase. However, unlike quoting and paraphrasing, you won't end with a parenthetical citation; that points to a specific location in the source text. Instead, a summary is a gist of a larger swath of text, not a specific spot.

A well-composed summary will clarify when the writer's voice resumes. The summary in the example above did that with "This indicated that…" That's how the reader knows the summary is ending and the writer is returning to his or her own thoughts.

As with a paraphrase, a summary will not have quotation marks, because, despite being someone else's ideas, its wording is not exact wording from another source.

Here is a brief section of text written by danah boyd, who identifies herself as a "social media scholar" and "youth researcher & advocate" on her Twitter account (and who has made the conscious decision not to capitalize her first or last names). The following excerpt is taken from a post entitled "Social Steganography: Learning to Hide in Plain Sight" that appeared on her blog, Digital Media and Learning: The Power of Participation:

When Carmen broke up with her boyfriend, she "wasn't in the happiest state." The breakup happened while she was on a school trip and her mother was already nervous. Initially, Carmen was going to mark the breakup with lyrics from a song that she had been listening to, but then she realized that the lyrics were quite depressing and worried that if her mom read them, she'd "have a heart attack and think that something is wrong." She decided not to post the lyrics. Instead, she posted lyrics from Monty Python's "Always Look on the Bright Side of Life." This strategy was effective. Her mother wrote her a note saying that she seemed happy which made her laugh. But her closest friends knew that this song appears in the movie when the characters are about to be killed. They reached out to her immediately to see how she was really feeling.

Carmen is engaging in social steganography. She's hiding information in plain sight, creating a message that can be read in one way by those who aren't in the know and read differently by those who are. She's communicating to different audiences simultaneously, relying on specific cultural awareness to provide the right interpretive lens. While she's focused primarily on separating her mother from her friends, her message is also meaningless to broader audiences who have no idea that she had just broken up with her boyfriend. As far as they're concerned, Carmen just posted an interesting lyric.

Social steganography is one privacy tactic teens take when engaging in semi-public forums like Facebook. While adults have worked diligently to exclude people through privacy settings, many teenagers have been unable to exclude certain classes of adults — namely their parents — for quite some time. For this reason, they've had to develop new techniques to speak to their friends fully aware that their parents are overhearing. Social steganography is one of the most common techniques that teens employ. They do this because they care about privacy, they care about misinterpretation, they care about segmented communications strategies.

Here is a sample summary of this text:

In "Social Steganography: Learning to Hide in Plain Sight," danah boyd stresses the complexities of teens' uses of social media by investigating how they use statuses to both share and conceal information simultaneously to convey multiple meanings to a variety of audiences.

Notice that this summary is brief, yet captures the general sense of the article. There is no new or introduced information, but the writer is still using her/his own words and voice. Essentially the author briefly restates the main point, or thesis, of this piece.

HOW DO I AVOID MESSING UP A SUMMARY?

When you summarize, you need to keep a few things in mind:

For citation, use:

Coastal Carolina University, Department of English, First-Year Writing Program. "Summarizing." Coastal Composition Commons, 24 August 2017, https://ccc.coastal.edu/task/summarizing-2/. Accessed xx xxxxxx xxxx.