#Effectively Summarize Your Content With These 5 Steps

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Effectively Summarize Your Content With These 5 Steps

You binge-watch a TV show on the weekend. But then, you explain the entire TV show to your friends within a few minutes. How is that possible? That’s where the art of summarizing comes into the picture.

But summarizing a movie or TV show is a lot different than summarizing the text because in text summarizing, you have to follow some specific guidelines. So, if you are unaware of those guidelines, we will help you.

Here, we will discuss the five universal steps for summarizing any content but before that, you have to be clear about summarizing in general. So, without any further ado, let’s begin this discussion.

What Is Summary Writing?

The term ‘summary writing’ refers to the process of concisely sharing something in your own words. This writing technique is a lot similar to paraphrasing. In fact, some people get confused between paraphrasing and summarizing. But there’s a slight difference between them.

Paraphrasing also refers to explaining an existing idea in your words. However, the intent of paraphrasing the text is not text conciseness. Instead, writers often paraphrase the text to clarify the meaning and avoid plagiarism.

But the major concept of summarizing is “conciseness”, so let’s have a look.

How to Write a Summary With 5 Simple Steps:

The actual summary writing phase might differ according to the nature of the content. But here are the five universal steps for writing a summary.

1. Gather the Key Concepts of Your Topic:

The first step is to read the original content and gather the primary meaning of its context. But you can’t master the sense of something while skimming it. Instead, the reading phase should be thorough. Doing so will help you in gathering the main idea quickly.

Generally, the first sentence describes the gist of a paragraph and all the other sentences play the role of supporting sentences. So, while thoroughly reading, you should highlight the phrases that describe the gist of a paragraph. This way, you can better identify the key points of a topic you want to summarize.

2. Rewrite the Extracted Key Points:

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After you’ve gathered the key concepts from a topic, your next task is to rewrite it in your words.

As we’ve already discussed, when you tell someone how great a movie is, you don’t describe it scene by scene. Instead, you extract the main points of a story and explain a 3-hour-long film within a few minutes. That’s how you summarize a movie in your words. And the same will be the case with text summarizing.

Summarizing the text is all about describing the main points in your wording. However, sometimes, the availability of several rewriting strategies makes it difficult to rewrite something. So, if you are in a similar situation, keep the following things in mind before rewriting the text.

Text Rewriting Tips:

The active nature of sentences is more popular. That is why writers from all over the globe take assistance from active voices while writing content. However, it’s an excellent practice to modify the voice during rewriting. For instance, if the original information contains active voices, you can convert those sentences to passive voices during rewriting.
Modification of sentence structure is another excellent text rewriting approach. For instance, most writers take assistance from conditional sentences while writing something. However, you can set yourself apart by converting those conditional sentences to inverted conditional sentences. A prime example of this approach is William Shakespeare.
Besides changing the voices and sentence structures, you can try the synonyms of the specific words. However, if your vocabulary is below average, you can take assistance from a thesaurus.

3. Avoid the Inclusion of Facts, Statistics and Examples:

When writing a summary, you must include every essential thing, but you should avoid a few things when summarizing the text.

As mentioned earlier, a summary is an overview of a topic, so while sharing an overview, you can’t include dates, statistics, facts and examples. That’s because such things will increase the length of the text, which will ruin the essence of a summary. Therefore, it is a good practice to avoid the aforementioned things.

As far as the famous sayings are concerned, it is a good practice to avoid them as well. But if a famous saying is essential to the topic, you can include it by enclosing it in double quotes and crediting its source.

4. Do Not Forget to Cite the Sources:

Summarizing the information doesn’t make you its original owner. Therefore, it is essential to mention the source of information. This way, you can avoid the likelihood of content plagiarism.

This step is not a summary writing step. But it is more related to the ethics of the writing industry. Therefore, as writers, we must respect the integrity of our fellow writers.

5. Try AI Summary Generators:

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Like the manual summarizing steps, suppose you don’t want to fall into the complexities of summary writing, or you have to submit a summary within a few hours. In that case, you can take assistance from a summary generator.

As the name depicts, a summary generator is a one-click text summarizer that works on advanced AI algorithms. Generally, the best summary generators work on the abstractive summarization concept.

So, such tools work by detecting the context of the input with the help of Natural Language Processing (NLP) algorithms. Later, summary generators rely on your summary’s length instructions to generate a summary according to your requirements.

Hence, modern-day summarizing tools are advanced enough to create an overview of a discussion without modifying its context.

Characteristics of Modern-Day Text Summarizers:

After observing a plethora of the latest AI text summarizers, here are some key highlights of such tools.

Most AI text summarizers are multilingual tools. So, you can generate a summary from such tools in an unfamiliar language.
Some text summarizers provide complete control. Therefore, adjusting a slider can control the summary length in such tools.
Since algorithms work at the backend of AI text summarizers, you should never finalize their output without proofreading.

Conclusion:

Summaries are essential in any form of writing because they provide the gist of a topic. In fact, most readers only read the conclusion part of a blog or article to understand the writer’s point of view about a specific topic. So, you should keep the summary as concise as possible.

But keeping the information concise doesn’t mean the exclusion of essential bits and bobs. Therefore, after identifying key content points, you should learn the art of explaining those points within a few words. And that’s where the above discussion will come in handy.

The above discussion contains a comprehensive guide on summarizing any topic. But besides the steps to summarize the text, you will find several bonuses in the above discussion. So, read the above guide to enjoy the benefits of those bonuses.

by Jeremy Ferguson

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