Reading strategies: Summarise

Finished reading? Good. Now, what do you think the author wanted to convey with this text? Can you summarise the most important things from the text? Mmm.

To summarise and pick out the most essential things from a text is often harder than you think. As an active reader, you sometimes take a break, and summarise what you have just read. This reading strategy is especially useful for opinion pieces and for texts with a lot of facts. The whole point of summarising a text is that it forces you to really understand the text — if you don’t, you can’t summarise it. So, it’s the process itself, to summarise, that is the strategy.

Just copying or reading a summary that someone else has prepared, doesn’t give you the same results. Try this: Read or listen to a text. It could be an opinion piece, a couple of pages from a textbook in chemistry, or a news article. What is most important in the text? What is the main idea that the writer really wants you to understand?

Go back and read the text again, as many times as needed, so that you can answer that question. Then write a few sentences that you think sum this up this main idea. If it is an opinion piece: what arguments are made for the writer’s position? Write those down as well. You don’t have to summarise the introduction, nor any examples, nor repetitions, if there are any of those in the text.

Those are things that help you understand the text the first time you read it, but they aren’t necessary when you summarise the main idea of the text. Remember: don’t just copy the sentences as they are written in the original text. Instead, form your own sentences. Because it’s only then that you really process the meaning of what you have just read. Do you think you’ve captured the essence now?

Good. Then let’s go one more round. Read your summary and write down an even shorter summary. Make shorter and clearer sentences. For each sentence, ask yourself: “Was this exactly what the author meant, or only approximately?” If they are only approximate, then try to rewrite your sentences until they are exact.

That will make your summary both short and precise. If it’s an opinion piece that you have summarised, then now you’ve distilled an opinion and a couple of arguments. Maybe you have managed to get it all into a single sentence. And this is important. Now that you have identified and understood the opinion and the arguments… ...you can also review, test, and question them.

Then you know whether you have good reasons to agree with what the author wants you to agree with, or not. If you have read a factual text, you may have written down a header, and a few bullet points. Maybe you have found some important expressions such as: Causes, Leads to, Affects, or Consists of. It’s not only in factual texts and opinion pieces that you benefit from summarising. When you read fiction, it can also be useful to take a break and summarise what you’ve read.

Pause, and ask yourself: What has just happened? Who did what, and - most of all - why? When you summarise the most important bits, you’ll also reflect on what the author wants to say. That makes the story more interesting and it comes to life. To summarise a text, is to pick out what’s most important... ...to filter out what’s less important… ...to connect the central thoughts to each other: to consolidate them… ..to shorten a long text into a few concise sentences.

The process itself, to summarise, helps you better understand, and recall what’s most important, the message, the main idea of the text.