Summary Writing
Summary writing involves the process of becoming familiar with an author's perspective through a written text and then explaining that perspective in one's own writing. The purpose of a summary is to condense a long text into only the most important points.
When writing a summary, it's always important to credit the original author with the opinion or information in the summary. Failing to name the author as originally writing the ideas of the summary is plagiarism.
When teaching summary writing to students, it's important to stress citing the original source and to provide examples of well-written summaries for students to use as examples.
These 5 steps to writing a summary should help students writing summaries and help guide teachers in preparing students for summary writing.