Summarizing is for Pirates

In Getting to the Point with PTIC we learned a technique to quickly and reliably identify the thesis of a text (alternatively referred to as the main idea, the claim, or the conclusion). In Mapping an Argument we learned how to identify the reasons and evidence that support the claim in an argument.°

In this article, we'll take the next logical step by learning how to summarize a text.

Why? Well, in school, you might be asked to compose a summary to show that you have thoroughly and correctly understood what a text is saying. Or you might be asked to read a summary and determine if it is accurate summation of the text it represents. In either case, summarizing is a key skill related to reading comprehension—it shows that you are an effective and perceptive reader, able to understand clearly what even complex or long texts are actually saying.

What is a Summary?

Simply put, summarizing is when you restate something in your own words while condensing or abridging it into a smaller, shorter form.

But this prompts some questions: If you have to make the original text shorter, what do you cut and what do you keep? How do you prioritize the most important information? For the answers, I find it helps to think about pirates.

Pirates, you ask? The scourge of the seas? The peg-legged, eye-patch—wearing, parrot-owning criminals of the ocean?

Yes, pirates.

Pirates, you see, are among the great prioritizers in history.° They are always after one thing above all others, usually treasure. All other concerns—justice, mercy, food, safety, family, etc.—seem to take a backseat to the unending quest to amass and protect a hoard of gold doubloons and precious gems.

When summarizing, we should take a page from pirates' book and focus on what's most important in the text rather than on small details or side concerns. For example, consider this summary of the Declaration of Independence:

In the Declaration of Independence, Thomas Jefferson and the other Founding Fathers of the United States compile a list of complaints against the king of England.

The above summary is factually accurate—the Declaration does contain a rather long list of grievances about how King George III had treated the Thirteen Colonies unfairly. But this summary misses the point of the Declaration by neglecting to mention its most important element: that it declares the colonies' independence from England. A student who reads the Declaration and misses this point can be said to have misread or misunderstood the text; similarly, someone who reads the above summary and relies on it to guide their thinking will be disappointed to find they've been misled.

Skull and Bones

The most important thing in any nonfiction text is the thesis. This is the author's bottom line, their main purpose for writing—so any summary that doesn't make the thesis of the original text clear will have missed the boat.° We can think of the thesis as the skull, or the head, of the text.

The second most important thing in any text is the set of primary reasons given in support of the thesis. We can think of the reasons as the bones that give the text its shape and structure.

All the other stuff in the text—sub-reasons, evidence, counterarguments, rebuttals, context, background, ethos-building, etc.—we can think of as the rest of the body.

We don't need to get too graphic here about all the remaining, squishier parts of the body outside of the skeleton. The point is that when we summarize, we should prioritize including the skull and the bones first and foremost.

If we do, we can rest assured that we've covered our bases adequately and won't be accused of misrepresenting or misunderstanding the text in question. Whether we include any of the additional details depends on the space we have and the context our summary is meant to serve.

Summaries of Various Sizes

Okay, we know what a summary is and we have a method to prioritize what to definitely include and what to potentially leave out. Let's look now at some practical examples of summarizing in action, examining how summaries of varying lengths require us to adjust our decision-making.

A One-Sentence Summary

Some summaries maximize how much they condense the original text, shrinking it down to, perhaps, a single sentence. In such a case, you might only have room to include the skull, or thesis, of the text, as in this example:

In the Declaration of Independence, Thomas Jefferson and the other Founding Fathers of the United States declare the independence of the Thirteen Colonies from England.

Because declaring independence is the main point of the Declaration (it's right there in the title, after all), this summary is both accurate and useful, and it proves the summarizer well understood the text, even though it is only one sentence long.

Let's look at another example. In Getting to the Point with PTIC, we used a PTIC analysis to identify the thesis of a Slate magazine article—we can use that analysis to quickly write a skull-only summary:

In "Hitting Bottom," Emily Bazelon argues that the US should outlaw corporal punishment of children in order to make it easier to protect vulnerable children from child abuse.

Actually, the second half of that sentence (after "in order to") is starting to articulate the bones of Bazelon's argument because improving the law's ability to prosecute child abusers is a key supporting reason in her argument. What this shows is that, even with a one-sentence summary, you can often include both the skull and the bones.

Take this example, which fully fleshes out the thesis and main supporting reasons of an argument from the New York Times in one rather beefy sentence:

In his 2002 editorial "Don't Blame the Eater," David Zinczenko argues that fast food companies should provide clear nutritional information with their products in order to enable their customers to make more informed decisions and to protect themselves from legal liability due to the harm their products can cause.

A Longer Summary

Sometimes a summary has more space and is meant to go into more detail than a single sentence can contain. In this case, you should still start by establishing the skull of the text (in fact, you can often just use the one-sentence version as the first sentence of a longer summary).

But with the added room, you can let the bones breathe a little bit, maybe giving each their own sentence wherein you more fully explain them or even mention key supporting evidences for each. For example, here's an expanded summary of Bazelon's argument. Notice how it now has five sentences total: the first presents the article's thesis, the next two present one reason and a piece of supporting evidence, and the final two present another reason and evidence pair. For ease of reading, I've separated these units into distinct paragraphs:

In “Hitting Bottom: Why America Should Outlaw Spanking,” Emily Bazelon, a senior editor at Slate, argues that the corporal punishment of children should be banned in the US.

One reason she gives in support of that claim is that banning spanking will make it easier to prosecute instances of child abuse, which is legally difficult to distinguish from acceptable corporal punishment. She uses California law, which requires judges to look for bruises and broken bones of evidence of abuse, as an example of this legal difficulty.

A second reason she gives is that changing the law will eventually change attitudes about hitting children, leading to a society in which physically hurting children is "socially unacceptable." As evidence of this she cites Sweden's 1979 ban, which seems to have resulted in such changed attitudes.

You can see that, even though this summary is considerably expanded from the one-sentence version, by focusing on the skull and bones as my organizing principle, I've made it easier for myself to determine what to keep, what to cut, and how to arrange it. If you've created an argument map of the text in advance of trying to write a summary (which is exactly what I did with Bazelon's article), you've already done the work of identifying the bones/reasons and enumerating the evidence that goes with each, making writing a longer summary much easier that it would otherwise be.

An Even Longer Summary

In fact, with an argument map in hand, you should be able to compose a summary of any length and level of detail. No matter how long it gets, you still start with the skull and bones, and then you decide which additional elements are worth mentioning. For example, in this even longer summary of "Hitting Bottom," I elect to include some of the counterarguments and rebuttals that Bazelon includes (she spends, after all, nearly half her argument on these). The skull and bones are still there and are easy for a reader to find:

In “Hitting Bottom: Why America Should Outlaw Spanking,” Emily Bazelon, a senior editor at Slate, argues just that—that corporal punishment of children should be banned in the US.

While the obvious approach to this sort of argument is to show that spanking is harmful to children, Bazelon instead spends a significant portion of her article demonstrating that research results on the effects of spanking are often contradictory and that both sides of the debate can find data to support their views.

Having shown that the social science research can neither adequately confirm nor deny her position on these grounds, she offers a different set of reasons for her claim: (1) that banning spanking will give “make it easier for prosecutors to bring charges for instances of corporal punishment that they think are tantamount to child abuse” and (2) that “by making it illegal to hit [our] kids, [we] will make hurting them socially unacceptable." She describes how current laws make it difficult to prosecute child abuse when evidence of that abuse—bruises and fractures, typically—is not apparent, and she uses Sweden’s 1979 ban of corporal punishment to show that attitudes about violence toward children can indeed change when the law prompts it.

A reader who is provided with this detailed summary of Bazelon before reading her article will have a much easier time understanding her argument, which is exactly one purpose of a summary. And a student who produces such a summary will show their teacher that they are clearly and accurately comprehending what they read.

Characteristics of Effective Summaries

We now have a general procedure that can help us write summaries, but we still need some tools to use to determine whether the summaries we write are any good. Let's identify the characteristics that effective summaries have, therefore, so you can evaluate and improve your work.

To be clear, what I have in mind here are what you might call "formal" or "stand-alone" summaries—the kind you might read or write for a class and that aren't part of a larger essay or something. Such summaries are often used to assess your reading comprehension. There are other types of and uses for summarizing, and these may have slightly different characteristics, depending on their context.

Accurate and Objective

The most important characteristics of any formal summary are that it is accurate and objective.

By accurate, I mean that the summary correctly represents the original text and avoids changing or misrepresenting its meaning or intention. In other words, it means that what you identify as the skull and bones of a text are actually the skull and bones.°

By objective, I mean that the summary leaves out your own personal opinion or commentary about the text and its quality.

Notice that, in all the examples given above, I never comment on whether I think the authors being summarized are right or that their arguments are strong; I merely state what their arguments are, without additional comment or opinion.

Consider this rewriting of the one-sentence summary of "Hitting Bottom":

In "Hitting Bottom," Emily Bazelon effectively argues that the US should outlaw corporal punishment of children in order to make it easier to protect vulnerable children from child abuse.

Just adding that one word (in bold) reveals my personal opinion about the strength or correctness of Bazelon's argument. While this may be okay when summarizing evidence for use in your own argumentative writing, in any formal, stand-alone summary, you want to maintain objectivity and leave your opinions out.

Coherent and Organized

A good formal summary makes the original text easier to understand by clearly identifying the skull and bones in a coherent, clear way—in fact, it may be significantly more clear than the original text.

For example, it isn't always immediately obvious when reading a text what the thesis is, how many supporting reasons there are, and how they are logically structured and related—that's why we use strategies like PTIC and argument mapping in the first place. However, these things should be immediately obvious to anyone who reads your summary of a text.

It's always a safe move to lay out the author's thesis in the first line of your summary. A typical structure for this sentence is to say that "[author/text] [verb] [thesis]." Here are some examples:

The Founding Fathers declare that the Thirteen Colonies are now independent from England.

Bazelon argues that the US should outlaw corporal punishment.

Chapter 4 explains the fundamental laws of aerodynamics.

Note that the verb you choose is crucial because it offers a clear indication of whether the text being summarized is argumentative ("declares," "argues," "claims," etc.) or informative ("explains," "discusses," "instructs," etc.). Using an inaccurate or inapt verb can result in you misrepresenting the author's purpose. For example, if you write that "Bazelon discusses whether the US should outlaw corporal punishment," you open yourself up to criticism that you haven't correctly understood the text.

The rest of your summary has some freedom in the order it presents the bones (and other important details) from the text—you don't necessarily have to follow the exact structure of the original, especially if, in changing the order, you can improve the clarity of your summary. For example, the longest Bazelon summary presented above actually flips the order that points are made in the original text, but in doing so it helps the reader see the underlying logical flow of Bazelon's argument while still being accurate about the overall point.

It can be really helpful for your reader if you use signal words and transition phrases within the body of a longer summary to clarify the relationships among ideas and to avoid making it sound like just a list of unrelated points. For example, phrases such as "one reason given to support the claim is that" or "as evidence of this" or "building on that idea" or even simple signal words like "first," "next," and "finally" go a long way to making a summary coherent and organized.

Stands Alone

If a summary is meant to stand alone, a reader should be able to understand it with no other context than that provided. The most obvious way to do this is to identify the author and title of the summarized text in the first sentence.

For example, none of the three short summaries given in the previous section can stand alone—they require that the reader already knows what is being talked about. In the case of the first two, you already have that context because we've been using the Declaration of Independence and "Hitting Bottom" as examples throughout this article. But the third one is inscrutable: Chapter 4 of what?

In addition to the title and author, you might find it necessary or useful to provide additional details such as the publication location or date, the author's background or credentials, etc. In the following example, the additional details offer important context to understand who the author is (a once very famous but now largely forgotten public figure) and when he was writing:

Mortimer Adler, founder of the Great Books Program and editor of the Encyclopedia Brittanica, argues in his 1940 essay "How to Mark a Book" that…

This next example clarifies that the text in question was published before its famous author became the US president:

In his 2006 bestseller The Audacity of Hope, Barack Obama, who was then serving as a US Senator from Illinois, lays out his ideas about…

Mostly Paraphrased

A good summary uses quotes very sparingly, opting instead to restate the text's language in words of your own.

When you do quote from the original text, you should be very choosy about what you quote. You might, for example, directly quote the text's thesis or a reason—especially if the author's wording is particularly good—because these are key lines. As an example, see the longest summary of Bazelon above, which quotes Bazelon directly when laying out her two supporting reasons. As a counterexample, see the medium-sized summary of Bazelon, which instead opts to paraphrase the reasons using my own words.

Regardless of whether you are summarizing or paraphrasing, you should remind the reader regularly throughout your summary that the ideas being expressed are those of the original text's author. We do this by using attributive tags in almost every sentence. An attributive tag is just a short phrase—such as "he writes" or "the author explains that"—that clarifies who is speaking or whose ideas are being expressed, and they are more important than you may realize.

As an example, consider the following summary, which contains a good opening sentence but then no attributive tags:

In “Is Google Making Us Stupid?” Nicholas Carr, writing for Atlantic Monthly, discusses the possible effects the Internet might have on cognition, arguing that the Web is reducing our “capacity for concentration and contemplation.” The Internet is becoming pervasive in that it both absorbs and recreates media in its image and also reprograms external media to be like itself. Google and its efforts to systematize information gathering are a prime example of the internet’s danger. Google’s ultimate goal of creating an artificial intelligence that would make us fully connected to the world’s information might not make us better off. Of course, this may be unfounded worry, but the reading and thinking fostered by the Internet might cost us something dear as humans. We may be trading in our ability to think deeply and make real connections.

A reader could reasonably conclude that only the first sentence is a summary and that all the following sentences are the summary-writer's personal opinions.

Now read the same summary with attributive tags added (indicated by bold). Note how it is now absolutely clear that every idea expressed is actually Carr's rather the summary writer's:

In “Is Google Making Us Stupid?” Nicholas Carr, writing for Atlantic Monthly, discusses the possible effects the Internet might have on cognition, arguing that the Web is reducing our “capacity for concentration and contemplation." He demonstrates how pervasive the Internet is becoming, that it both absorbs and recreates media in its image and also reprograms external media to be like itself. He looks at Google and its efforts to systematize information gathering. Carr questions whether Google’s ultimate goal of creating an artificial intelligence that would make us fully connected to the world’s information would indeed make us better off. Though he recognizes it may be unfounded worry, he maintains that the reading and thinking fostered by the Internet might cost us something dear as humans. We may be, he wonders, trading in our ability to think deeply and make real connections.

Many student initially find the idea of putting an attributive tag into every sentence a bit excessive, but as you can see in the above example, it isn't excessive at all, and the resulting text reads smoothly and clearly with them there.

Present Tense

One last thing to notice is that all the attributive tags are given in the present tense, as if the writer is writing and arguing and explaining in the very moment that the reader is reading the summary. This is a common convention of summary writing. It's not an absolute rule (and there are times when past tense is appropriate), but it is what readers expect, so it's a good idea to practice writing your summaries in the present tense.

Summ(ariz)ing Up

Now that we've laid out the characteristics that an effective formal summary will exhibit, take one more look at our summary of Bazelon's argument. As you read, consider what the summary does to be accurate, objective, coherent, organized, stand-alone, mostly paraphrased (but clear these are Bazelon's ideas), and in the present tense:

In “Hitting Bottom: Why America Should Outlaw Spanking,” Emily Bazelon, a senior editor at Slate, argues just that—that corporal punishment of children should be banned in the US.

While the obvious approach to this sort of argument is to show that spanking is harmful to children, Bazelon instead spends a significant portion of her article demonstrating that research results on the effects of spanking are often contradictory and that both sides of the debate can find data to support their views.

Having shown that the social science research can neither adequately confirm nor deny her position on these grounds, she offers a different set of reasons for her claim: (1) that banning spanking will give “make it easier for prosecutors to bring charges for instances of corporal punishment that they think are tantamount to child abuse” and (2) that “by making it illegal to hit [our] kids, [we] will make hurting them socially unacceptable." She describes how current laws make it difficult to prosecute child abuse when evidence of that abuse—bruises and fractures, typically—is not apparent, and she uses Sweden’s 1979 ban of corporal punishment to show that attitudes about violence toward children can indeed change when the law prompts it.

Summarizing takes practice, but the method is easy to remember: skull and bones. Just think like a pirate, prioritize the information, and work from there.

You'll get it in no time, matey!