How to Summarize a Text in English (7 Easy Steps)
Summarization of a text means to shorten it without changing its intended meaning. Many people are confused when they’re about to write a summary and have no clue where to start.
They are either unable to understand the difficult language written in the texts or have trouble staying concise in their copy.
Thus, this post will cover the steps that you can follow to successfully summarize a piece of text.
So, without further ado, let’s see how to summarize an English text in 7 easy steps.
- Read The Text Thoroughly
The most crucial part of summarizing a text is to deeply understand it. Most people will miss out on important information in their first read. This is because it is difficult for our brains to process so much information all at once.
Hence, it’s always a good idea to reread the text you intend to summarize. We recommend reading the text at least twice to catch up on all the key points and understand the big picture.
But, if you still face trouble understanding the main ideas of a text, try using a dictionary to understand the literal meanings of the words used in between the sentences. Then, you should try to understand its implied meaning; what does the author mean by using that word in the particular context?
To develop a contextual understanding, try rereading two or three lines above and below the part where the difficult word/phrase has been used. This will give you a clear idea of the situation in which the word was used. And it will make it easier for you to successfully decipher a text.
- Highlight The Key Points
As we discussed in the previous point, highlight key facts and figures that are easier to forget. Also, highlight portions that you think contribute to the understanding of the overall text.
After you are done highlighting the portions of the text, try rereading them to check if they make sense altogether. If not, then you have probably underlined some irrelevant parts that you should consider removing from your focus.
Try to use multicolored highlighters to catch the key points of a text. Such a wide range of colors can keep your attention, and you won’t miss out on anything important.
- Note The Key Points (What You Understood From The Text?)
Note down your highlighted key points from the text in your own words. Writing these points in your own words is necessary. One of the reasons why it is important is noting the points down will help you ensure that you don’t miss anything important while combining them to make a summary.
Once this is done, you can move on to the next step of the summarizing process.
- Combine The Points In A Chronological Order
After the points are noted down, you should combine them in chronological order. A chronological order means to write every point event after event.
This order will ensure that there is a logical sequencing of ideas. It will allow your readers to easily follow your copy and your document’s readability will increase.
Plus, a chronological order also structures your flow for the summary where each point gets well connected with the other.
A logical flow is necessary for an effective summary. It helps the readers to easily follow along with your work without any problems.
- Make Sure You Don’t Miss Or Repeat Anything
To keep your summary effective, make sure you don’t miss or repeat anything. The best practice that you can do is to keep one point in each sentence. This will prevent you from writing “fluff” and you will stay relevant to your main point.
Besides, the one-point per-sentence formula is beneficial to maintain the overall length of your summary. You are neither overcommitting to a point nor staying too short for it. So, you will end up with a very reasonable number of total words for your summary.
As a general rule of thumb, make your summaries at least 60% of the original text. This will cover all the details for a text, without missing or repeating anything.
- Ensure Cohesion And Coherence In Your Summary
Cohesion is the logical flow of ideas from sentence to sentence. While coherence is the overall ‘making sense’ of the document. It also means that the ideas in each paragraph of the summary should refer back to the main topic.
To make sure that your work has coherence and cohesion, read your summary from the start. Try to check for any logical flow on a detailed level. A detailed level check means to read every single sentence and make sure that they connect well.
Look for any abrupt changes in ideas. Try to add some words or phrases in between the sentences to fill the logical gap. This will ensure a smooth flow in your summary and improve your content’s readability.
- Check The Summary For Other Mistakes
Finally, you should look for errors other than the ones we discussed in the point above. Try to find and correct:
- Grammatical mistakes
- Logical mistakes (covered in points 4,5, and 6)
- Factual errors
Grammatical errors are of two types, explicit and implicit. Some are easily identifiable like the wrong use of commas, missing periods, and so on. However, there are many hidden errors (implicit errors) like, a wrong use of ‘than’ vs. ‘then’, or ‘there’ vs. ‘their.’
Furthermore, whatever you have written in your summary should be true to the points present in the original text. If that’s not the case, then your summary might have factual errors – you are writing something that the author never said!
Thus, it’s really important to proofread your work. Try checking your work like a vigilant teacher does for their students. You should look to paint it red, and only then will you be able to come up with a refined version for your summary.
An Alternative Method
While all we discussed earlier were manual methods to summarize an English text, there is an alternative method, too. This method involves using AI text summarizers that are freely available online. Such a summarizer automates all the aforementioned steps by leveraging its advanced technologies. They can automatically detect the required details for a text and quickly give you a boiled-down version with just a click.
Let’s see an AI text summarizer in action:
Such AI summarizers can be extremely beneficial for time-bounded tasks, however, we don’t mean to copy their results. We only mean to understand the entire summarizing process by comparing your summaries with the tool’s summaries.
Understand where you are lacking, and work on your weak points to improve your summaries.
Final Thoughts
In this post, we saw how you can easily summarize a text in English. We saw that understanding the text is key, and putting the key points in your own words is the way to success.
