Important points of a summary

Important points of a summary

When looking to make a summary, it is very important to make sure that it meets certain important points. In this way, you can be sure that it fulfills its objective in an appropriate manner. The most important points of a summary are the following:

• It should be informative: The abstract should reflect the most important ideas of the document used as a source, offering the reader as much information as possible with respect to it in an extension no greater than 25% of the original text.
• It must be descriptive: The writing must describe the most important points of the original topic in a coherent and organized way.
• It must be original: The summaries must be made in the own words of the person who writes them. It is not recommended to use phrases copied verbatim from the content that is taken as a source.

If the summary does not have these points, it will not be properly structured. Consequently, it will not fulfill its objective properly.

Recommendations for a summary

When making a summary, there are some recommendations that can be of great help to achieve a much more coherent, synthesized, and professional result. Among these are:

• Follow an order: If you want your summary to make sense, the ideas you put into it must follow a logical order. Otherwise, the text will be very difficult to understand. In general, it is recommended that the writing be structured from general to specific.
• Avoid using literal fragments of the original text: Summaries should be written in their own words, using key points or ideas taken from the original text, and classified as main or secondary.
• Do not write in the first person: The first person is used to express an opinion. However, the summaries seek to explain a topic in a synthesized way, not to give an opinion on it. Therefore, it is recommended to elaborate on them using the third person.
• Avoid past tense verbs: Past tense verbs are often used to narrate a text. However, during a summary, it seeks to explain it. Because of this, it is necessary to use only verbs in the present tense.
• Do not use the adjective subordinates: This kind of preposition does not add valuable content to the summary and can increase its length more than desired. At the same time, it is relatively easy to replace them with adjectives.

For example, instead of “The mechanics will check the cars that are broken down”, you can say: “The mechanics will check the broken cars”.

• Do not copy textual citations: Although the original text includes textual citations, these should not be included in the abstract. You should only capture the main idea of ​​the quote and structure it with your own words.
• Avoid listing: Lists should be replaced by general ideas that encompass the elements to be named. Instead of “Mary bought apples, pineapples, strawberries…”, you can say: “Mary bought fruit.”

Summary Types

Summaries can be classified into different categories based on the kind of information you want to synthesize.

In this way, it is possible to structure them in a more efficient, coherent, and easy-to-understand way according to the source used. Some of the main summary types are:

1. Summary of books.
2. Thesis abstract.
3. job summary.

book summary

Book summaries, also known as bibliographic summaries, are used, as the name implies, to synthesize a literary work.

These can be used for different purposes, be it to analyze the content of a book for work or educational purposes, to offer it as synopsis to potential readers, or to create files in a library, among others.

Summary

This type of summary is used to briefly summarize the methodology, conceptual framework, results, and conclusions of a thesis.

It is a very useful writing when presenting this kind of work, since it allows the evaluators to have a first approximation to the content that will be found within the thesis.

Through this, it will be important to highlight the strengths of the work presented, thus being a great opportunity to make a good impression on readers.

Job Summary

A job summary (also called “Resume”) is a document in which a person’s work experiences are synthesized when applying for a job position.

While it may have many similarities to a resume, it does have its own unique features. Job summaries are usually short. Generally no more than one page.

In addition, they are aimed at highlighting the virtues, skills, and experience of a person, which make them suitable to occupy a specific job position.

Make a good summary of 100 words

If you want to know how to make a 100-word summary properly, it is very important that you organize the desired information in the most efficient way possible.

• To do this, you must read the base document repeatedly to make sure you understand the topic and extract the most important points from it.
• Once you have managed to separate the main ideas from the text, you will need to synthesize them as much as possible, making sure that they do not lose their coherence.

In this way, you can proceed to structure your summary in an organized manner, discarding those elements that do not contribute to the content and that prolong it more than necessary. Thus, you will know how to make a summary of 100 words in the most appropriate way.

How to make a good summary integrating different sources of information?

Making a summary using information from different sources is not complicated.

To achieve this, it is necessary to study and analyze in detail the different texts from which it is planned to obtain the data with which the writing will be structured.

In this way, the main and secondary ideas of each of the sources will be identified and extracted.

At this point, it is advisable to use different sheets of paper identified with the titles of the original works to capture the ideas in a more organized way.

Once the main points of each text have been identified, they are read carefully and ordered according to their relevance.

After this, it will be possible to start writing the summary, uniting the previously synthesized ideas in coherent, organized paragraphs that are related to each other.

Summary at the university level

The summary is a widely used tool at the university level with the intention of capturing the greatest amount of information in the fewest number of words possible.

It is a very useful study method when reviewing complicated concepts, standing out for its precision, brevity and conciseness.A summary at the university level does not differ too much from other variants of this technique, since the procedure to follow for its structuring is, in principle, the same.

However, these should be much more concise and professional. In addition, your writing must be optimized to the maximum to guarantee its effectiveness, coherence, and ease of reading.

summary example

After knowing the most significant characteristics regarding summaries, you will surely be prepared to elaborate on these study tools on your own.

However, it can be very useful to have an example that can be used as a guide to understanding how to make a summary in the best possible way. Therefore, below we present a summary of the work of Miguel Cervantes, “Don Quixote de la Mancha”.

“Don Quixote de la Mancha is one of the most recognized novels in Spanish narrative, being a work by Miguel Cervantes.

The novel tells the story of a gentleman passionate about tales of chivalry, Alonso Quijano. His obsession with these works causes him to lose his sanity and begin to think of himself as a gentleman, calling himself Don Quixote de la Mancha.

Thus, he goes out in search of adventures in the company of his assistant and squire, Sancho Panza. Together they travel through the lands of La Mancha, Aragón, and Catalonia facing both real and imaginary villains”.

As you can see, the summary presented above summarizes the main ideas of the novel in a series of short, concise, and easy-to-read paragraphs. This is the main objective of this study technique.