Analysing the effectiveness of a summary

Summaries may have different purposes and a great variety of audiences such as academic and non academic. According to Reid (1994), summaries are brief descriptions “of the main ideas or actions” (as cited in Pintos, 2008, p. 15).
Summaries must be well balanced and include an introduction, a body and a conclusion. As well as this, it is worth mentioning that the three main sections must contain a topic sentence followed by a supporting sentence, generally introduced by a linking word or phrase, and a concluding sentence, which gives a finished feeling to the paragraph.
As Kinsella (n.d.) states, there are a number of steps to bear in mind when writing an academic summary:
1. Read the selection carefully, more than once.

2. Highlight the most important points, leaving out secondary and minor details.

3. Make a brief outline of the essential information.

4. Identify the main idea, and write it first.

5. Include only the most important points; omit unnecessary details

6. Don’t repeat ideas or alter the author’s meaning.

7. Use your own wording, except for key content words related to the main topic.

8. Don’t include your own ideas or comments.

9. Mention the source, the specific genre, and the author at the beginning.

10. Present the ideas in the order in which they were discussed in the selection.

11. Introduce the author’s keys points by using citation expressions (e.g., according to…).

12. Include enough information so that someone who has not read the selection would get an accurate understanding of the major points.

However, summarising may become a challenging task for students who have not have been trained in this field. Below is a summary written by a student and it will be analysed by underlining the topic sentence, circling the connectors, deciding how effective they are for the reader and finally some questions will be posed to prove the effectiveness or ineffectiveness of the summary.
In her book “The Process of Paragraph Writing", Reid (1994) describes the main
characteristics of a summary. The author claims that the general purpose of a summary
is to give a limited amount of information to a specific audience.
However, summary writing is not an easy task. In order to write an accurate summary,
you not only have to extract the main ideas but you also have to be capable of expressing these main ideas, trying to avoid repeating the exact phrases of the original material. Moreover, good summaries are clear and balanced. That is to say, the reader should not find difficulties in understanding the main ideas of the material.
As it is can be seen, the summary contains no supporting sentence immediately after the topic sentence. A supporting sentence should enhance, clarify and support the main idea mentioned in the topic sentence.
As for the structure of the summary, it is really difficult to identify the body and the conclusion in the manner it has been presented.
• The introduction is represented by the topic sentence but the student fails to support it; he/she may well have succeeded if he/she had provided more details related to the topic sentence.
• The students later shifts to the linking word “however”, which is used to contrast ideas although in fact he/she is not contrasting his/her idea to any other one mentioned before.
• The use of “not only… but also” is properly used since he/she is giving additional information connected with his/her previous sentence.
• The conclusion is not properly introduced since the student used an inappropriate discourse marker. The discourse marker “moreover”, used to give additional information, can never close a piece of writing. This connector and sentence misleads the reader as he/she expects to receive additional information rather than the closing of the writing. The student may have made use of other discourse markers, such as all in all, in conclusion, etc. to conclude his/her summary.
• Last but not least, the student used the linking phrase “that is to say”, which is used to give more details or clarify something mentioned before. There is no clear connection between his/her previous sentence of clarity and balance and the fact of finding difficulties in understanding the main ideas of the material.
This clearly shows the ineffectiveness of the summary due to wrong organisation and misuse of discourse markers. As some ideas remain dangling and confusing, some questions might be posed:
• What are the main characteristics mentioned in the student’s summary?
• What kind of different audiences could be mentioned?
• What is meant by “clear and balanced”?

The three topic sentences below were extracted from three paragraphs in Unit 3: Academic Writing by Pintos, 2008, p. 7. The aim of these sentences is to persuade a specific audience to read the rest of the text.

• Academic writing is a type of writing which involves constructing knowledge rather than translating it.
• Constructing knowledge entails bearing in mind some basic characteristics.
• Foreign language students must learn some techniques in the target language in order to participate in discourse communities.

Not only is summarising a cognitive practice but also a detailed textual analysis. During the summarising procedure the text is shortened, which implies a mental process, and the reduction is simultaneously presented as a new text. Hence, summarising needs to be carefully practised and exercised to prove effective.


References

Kinsella, K. (n.d.). Steps in creating an Academic Summary. Retrieved September 28th, 2009, from http://www.srvhs.srvusd.k12.ca.us/Staff/teachers/rtong /Handouts/Academic%20Summary%20-%20How%20to%20Create.doc

Pintos, V. (2008). Unit 3: Academic Writing. Universidad CAECE: Buenos Aires, Argentina.