Writing to Understand a Text – Summarizing

Summarizing a text as a writer means that you first take the time to “listen” to the conversation about your topic before you enter into it by “talking back” in your own writing, before “you put in your oar” as Burke put it earlier in this chapter. First, your purpose in summarizing is to help you understand the text—what the author is saying and how and why they are saying it. As an academic writer you include summaries of texts (your sources) not only to provide basic information about the text for your readers, but also to demonstrate your understanding of what the author is saying and doing in the text. Summaries in academic writing vary, of course, depending on the discourse community and genre. For example, a summary of previously published research about a topic is called a literature review. In addition, some academic, business, and government genres require authors to open with a summary of their report called an abstract or executive summary.

The following guides you in composing summaries for text analysis in English studies and disciplines in the Humanities more broadly.

What is a Summary? A summary of a text pays attention to the author's overall conclusions, key terms, key examples, and main points. Even though you will be putting the author's argument into your own words, you need to avoid distorting or judging what he or she is saying. A summary accurately represents the text; it is complete, comprehensive, and balanced.

To compose a summary, look to your double-entry notes and the text itself, which you will have annotated, and respond to the following questions (notice that your double-entry notes help distinguish between summary and response/analysis/interpretation).

A summary includes the following elements:

Who? What is the author’s full name, credentials or relevant experience (who is this person—or people—and why should we care what they have to say)?

Where? Where was the text published—in what journal, magazine, etc. (where did the text originally appear)?

When? In what year was it published and is there anything significant about that time (this is important context information—for example, when the author writes “today,” does he or she really mean today)?

What? What is the title of the text (in quotation marks, if it’s an article/italics if it’s a book)? What genre is it? What is the text about—what kind of text is it and what’s the author’s overall point/stance on the topic?

How? How does the author support his or her point, what kinds of evidence and development strategies does he or she use? What other positions or stances does the author acknowledge?

Why? If known, what’s the larger conversation around this text—is it in response to other texts?

Determine which of this information you should include in your own summary of a text for your writing and then compose a comprehensive but concise summary of the text. Note that summary writing is not a question-answer activity, not simply listing answers to the questions above. A summary needs to be structured clearly for your readers.

A Sample Summary

The writer of the following summary drew on not only the text (an article), with their annotations written in the margins, but also what they wrote in the left-hand “record” column of their double-entry notes in their writer’s notebook, excerpted below. You can tell as you look at those notes, the writer is reading actively in order to record and to understand the text.

Notice in the following example summary, you as a reader get an overall understanding of the text—and its context—without having read the full article:

Peter Marin has written on a number of social issues and is a contributing editor to Harper’s Magazine, which is where “Helping and Hating the Homeless: The Struggle at the Margins of America” was originally published in 1987. In response to an increased national emphasis at that time on the issue of homelessness—and specifically new laws in Marin’s town of Santa Barbara—in this article Marin combines reflections on personal experience as well as historical research to analyze the issue of homelessness. Marin claims that the word homelessness “is almost meaningless” in its application and divides the homeless into two groups: “those who have had homelessness forced upon them and want nothing more than to escape it; and those who have at least in part chosen it for themselves, and now accept, or in some cases, embrace it” (307). Admitting that he for a time was a member of the latter group, Marin exposes the “darker corners” of homelessness largely ignored by the mainstream and analyzes how our visceral responses of contempt and disgust toward those who are homeless (the author’s included) dictate public policy. He asks, “What does a society owe to its members in trouble, and how is that debt to be paid?” (315). For those in the first group, castigated against their will, Marin claims society owes these homeless whatever is needed to re-integrate them. For the second group, those who are “voluntarily marginal,” Marin is less certain. He is sympathetic to the idea that there needs to be spaces for those who resist the mainstream and choose to live outside the social order.

Notice the signal phrases (e.g. Marin claims) and in-text citations (in parentheses) for the quotes and paraphrases used in this summary. Below is the bibliographic citation in MLA format. (For more on such source attribution see Chapter 4).

Marin, Peter. “Helping and Hating the Homeless: The Struggle at the Margins of America.”

Writing and Community Action, edited by Thomas Deans, Longman, 2003. pp. 305-18.

TRY THIS to understand summary writing. Read the article “Blue-Collar Brilliance” by Mike Rose published in The American Scholar in 2009. Then, read the following summary—it needs some work! Identify what needs revised and then rewrite the summary so that it accurately represents the text—to be complete, comprehensive, and balanced.

Writer Mike Rose wrote Blue-Collar Brilliance in the1950's. It is a Personal narrative. about his family and how intelligent and successful they were in their blue-collar and service jobs even without a college education. Rose writes, “Although writers and scholars have often looked at the working class, they have generally focused on the values such workers exhibit rather than on the thought their work requires—a subtle but pervasive omission.” Rose demonstrates that a lot of intelligence and a variety of literacy skills are actually required to do blue-collar and service work well. The problem is the separation of the body from the mind. Rose concludes that some people less intelligent than others for the kind of work they do is not good for our country.