HOW TO SUMMARIZE

 

1.  Read your passage carefully. To ensure understanding read it again. If necessary, read it third time without writing anything.

2.  Write all important points or facts of original passage in order. It will work as framework or draft for your summary. Underline important words in the original passage and quit superfluous words.

3.  Keep your facts in order. It is suggested that put the facts in the same order in which they appear in the original passage. But it is not obligatory; you may reorder them in a way which you consider fit, if you think it improves logical sequence.

4.  Keeping aside the original passage and framework or draft in front, begin writing summary from your notes.

5.  Read framework or draft again. Note if anything is repeated. Adjust its length. Your précis should be of suggested length. Where there is no suggested length, generally about one-third (1/3) to one-fourth (1/4) of original passage is expected.

6.  Read original passage again to ensure that no important thing has been left out. Compare it with your framework or draft.

7.  Note that your précis has the same balance and proportion as original passage has. Otherwise your précis will not conform to the original passage.

8.  Make choice of words carefully. Avoid unnecessary adjectives and adverbs. Pay proper attention to important nouns and verbs which make your précis smaller and notable. Shun use of direct speech in your précis. As a rule, précis is written in indirect speech. Avoid figurative language; cross out all metaphors and similes. Redundancy and the use of ambiguous words often make précis vague.

9.  Let your précis be connected fully. All the important points should be interconnecting altogether in such a way as your précis exerts the impression of a continuous piece of prose which the original passage does.

10. Supply a title for it.  Keep it short and examine opening sentence and concluding sentence and sometimes mid-part of the passage for clue.

A SOLVED EXAMPLE

 Original Source Material: Perseverance is the very hinge of all virtues. On looking over the world, the cause of nine-tenths of the lamentable failures which occur in men’s undertakings and darken and degrade so much of their history, lies not in the want of talents, or the will to use them, but in the vacillating and desultory mode of using them, in flitting from object to object, in starting away at each little disgust, and thus applying the force which might conquer any one difficulty to a series of difficulties so large that no human force can conquer them. The smallest brook on earth by continuing to run has hollowed out for itself a considerable valley to flow in. Commend me therefore to the virtue of perseverance. Without it, all the rest are little better than fairy gold, which glitters in your purse, but when taken to market, proves to be slate or cinders.

                                                                                    (Carlyle)

Title  : Virtue of Perseverance.

Précis          : Perseverance is the noblest of all virtues. People meet with failures in life not because they lack talents but because they misapply them in conquering a host of difficulties at once rather than one by one. They are daunted by every little difficulty. Without perseverance, all the noble qualities of man run to seed.