What is summarising?
time to complete: 5 minutes
Summarising means presenting the original idea in a shorter, more concise form. It is an important skill to master for your academic success.
Summary = concise form of the content
Things to remember:
- You don’t need to give all ideas or explanations.
- Don’t include any ideas not expressed in the original source text.
- The length of a summary can vary - you can use it to give a one-sentence synopsis of an article or to provide much more detail, depending on your writing needs.
- When you summarise the entire text = global summary.
- When you summarise part of a text = selective summary.
- You must acknowledge the author(s) with an in-text citation.
Adapted from McCormack & Slaght (2012)