14 Finding Main Ideas and Summarizing

What Is Summarizing?

Have you ever told your classmate what happened in class while they were absent? If you have, you probably didn’t tell your classmate every small detail about what happened in class that day. Instead, you told her only the main, important things that she missed. This is called summarizing.

We summarize for many different purposes, both in speaking and in writing. You will often need to summarize in school to show what you’ve learned. In your job, you may need to write reports or send emails to summarize an important meeting or event. And when you’re looking for a new job, you will have to summarize your experience and skills in a short cover letter.

In this chapter, you’ll learn more about how to make a written summary of something you have read for school.

As you probably know already, a summary is a short version of an article, book, or other longer text. A summary is usually written as a paragraph, and contains only the main ideas and most important details from the text. It is very important to use your own words when you write the summary and not plagiarize (copy) from the original text.

In this chapter, we will learn step by step how to build a summary. Summarizing a longer text in a new language might seem challenging at first, but after you practice several times, summarizing will become easier and easier. 

Steps to Summarize a Text

Take a Closer Look

Let’s look at each of the steps above a little more closely. You can follow these steps carefully as you write your first summary.

1. Read the text several times to have a good understanding:

Start by previewing the text before you read it. Then, read it several times through, using reading strategies like re-reading, underlining or highlighting important information, taking notes and writing questions as you read. Use your dictionary or translator to help you with new words. It’s also helpful to talk with your classmates about the article after you read.

2. Identify the main idea of the whole text (central idea):

This is often the most difficult part for some students, and it might take some time to figure it out. Here are some things that can help you to find the central idea of the whole text:

• • Without looking at the article, ask yourself, “What is this article about?” Try to explain it to your classmate in two or three sentences. Take notes as you talk, or ask your classmate to take notes. If you have trouble answering the question, try thinking about these questions:
    • • What is the overall topic of the article?
      • What is the author trying to tell me about this topic?
      • How does the author feel about this topic?
      • You can also look again at the title and subtitles in the article for help
  • Then, write down the central idea in your own words. It should be no more than two sentences, without any specific details. This will become the first sentence of your summary paragraph.

3. Identify the other important ideas and details of the text that support the central idea:

Now you have the central idea, but to complete your summary, you need to identify the other important ideas in the text. One way to do this is to divide the article into sections and find the main idea of each section.

• • Read each section again and look for the main idea. Underline or highlight the most important points from this section.
  • If you need help finding the main idea, keep these tips in mind.
  • For each section, follow the same process that you did above for the central idea. Ask yourself, “Which is this section about?” Write down one or two sentences in your own words to explain the main idea for each section.
  • Make sure that each section’s main idea also supports the central idea of the whole article.

4. Write the central idea and important details in your own words:

Read your central idea and section main ideas again. Make sure that you used your own words and didn’t copy more than two words together from the original text. If you have trouble rewriting the sentences in your own words, here are a few tips:

• • • Use a thesaurus to find synonyms, or type “synonym for ____” into Google
    • Change the order of the words, phrases or clauses to make a new sentence structure
    • Make sure you are not looking at the original article when you are writing

5. Put all the ideas together to make a summary:

When you are happy with your central idea and main ideas, combine them all together in one paragraph.

• • Start with the central idea. Be sure to mention the title and author in this first sentence. For example: In the article “What TikTok does to your mental health,” writer Kari Paul explains why some people are concerned about the mental health effects of this popular social media app. 
  • Next, write all the section’s main ideas. Keep them in the same order as they are mentioned in the original article.
  • Read the original article one more time, and then read your summary. Do the ideas in your summary match the article? Does your summary mention all the important points? Does it make sense?
  • Now you can add some attributive author tags like “according to the author,” or “the author states that” throughout the paragraph to show who these ideas belong to.
  • You can also add some transition signals to make your writing sound more professional, and a concluding sentence that restates the central idea in new words.
  • Use these sentence starters to help you write your summary