


“Before 1994, diabetes in children was generally caused by a genetic disorder – only about 5 percent of childhood diabetes cases were obesity-related, or Type 2, diabetes. Because a scholarly article is rarely about one simple thing, knowing what you are arguing will help you to determine the most important ideas of the original source for your paper.īelow is an example of an ineffective, list-like summary, followed by an effective summary. Add in-text citation and check the required formatting style.Īn effective summary is a way of communicating to your reader what the source text is “about.” However, even while it is important to “put yourself in the shoes” of the original author, you also need to know what it is that you are arguing in your paper that has led you to include this other perspective.Is there important information that you have forgotten or misremembered? Is your summary very similar to the original source? Then explain how those ideas support or conflict with your own argument. Using only your notes, explain the original author’s main ideas to someone else.Include keywords and terms used by the author and think, too, about how the source ideas are relevant to the argument(s) that you are presenting in your paper. Take notes about the main idea and supporting points you think you should include in your summary.Read the passage carefully to fully understand it.Select a short passage (about one to four sentences) that supports an idea in your paper.It can be helpful to think of a summary as a brief description of someone else’s work that they, themselves, would recognize and consider to be a fair representation. They use this description because effective summarizing requires that you engage with and aim to understand someone else’s ideas or perspective, even if you disagree. In They Say/I Say, Gerald Graff and Cathy Birkenstein describe summarizing as “putting yourself in the shoes of someone else” (2014, p. Note that you must include citation information for summaries - think of your citation as showing your reader where they can find the original or “full” version of the work that you have summarized. When you summarize, you explain the main idea(s) from someone else’s work.
#To summarize how to#
In other words, knowing how to effectively summarize the ideas of others helps you to bring those ideas into dialogue with your own. You can think of agreeing and disagreeing as being like saying, “Okay, but….” Being able to effectively summarize the work of other researchers will help you both to determine your own position and also clearly communicate the connections between your ideas and the ideas of others. Three main ways of responding are to generally agree, generally disagree, or both agree and disagree with another author’s perspective on a subject. Academic writing requires you to research the work of other scholars, develop your own ideas on the topic of your research, and then to think about how your ideas relate to the scholarship that you have researched.
