Strategies for Summarizing

1.  Annotate the text, labeling or underlining important material.

2.  Identify the rhetorical context (i.e. intended audience, publication information, date) and the author's rhetorical purpose (i.e. author's motivation, author's background).

3.  Identify the structure or the organizational pattern of the text.

4.  Locate and emphasize (paraphrase) the thesis statement and topic sentences.  Invent thesis and topic sentences if none are found.

5.  List the key words or ideas of each paragraph, if possible, or describe each paragraph.  Combine shorter paragraphs or paragraphs with closely related ideas.

6.  Delete unimportant details, examples, and redundancy.

7.  Compress words in the original text into fewer words and provide general terms to cover several specific items (e.g. "past presidents" for "Ford, Carter, Reagan, Bush, and Clinton" or "large urban Eastern cities" for "New York, Boston, and Philadelphia").

8.  Write the summary by combining the ideas into sentences and (possibly) paragraphs.

9.  If you are writing a "stand-alone" summary, the resulting text should be a miniature version of the original.

10.  If you are incorporating the summary into your own essay, work it in smoothly and document it using a parenthetical citation and possibly a signal phrase.