Adapted from Yvonne Bruce, Melanie Gagich and Svetlana Zhuralova

While you will be creating different types of documents in your time both at the university and for the rest of your life, it is important to recognize that summary and synthesis are two important skills that will be used. Whether your boss asks you to summarize the fourth quarter earnings reports for a meeting, or your professor asks you to do research and report back on the hibernation habits of the north American brown bear, you will be summarizing others’ work and synthesizing it into your own words and understanding every time. So, let’s take a moment and discuss these ideas in full.

Summary

What is a summary? It is a broad overview of a complex situation or topic by focusing on the main points. Think about it like a movie trailer. An effective trailer will show you some interesting sequences, clips of dialogue and give you a few of the plot points without spoiling the movie by going line by line into what happens. This is much the same with summary.

When you do research of any kind (earning reports, hibernation habits of the bear, who’s starting the drama on TikTok) you learn a lot of information. And when you explain it to someone else, you don’t recount line for line everything you’ve heard, read or watched. You give them the highlights. Summaries are much shorter than the original material.

Here are a few rules you should know before going into summary writing:

• Don’t share your opinion of the text, (unless asked by your assignment). Summary is simply reporting on the facts of the article.
• Don’t cherry pick the facts that support your claim and ignore the facts you dislike. This can lead to misinformation.
• Don’t misrepresent the facts. If your readers can’t trust you to represent the facts as accurately as you can to the best of your understanding, how can they trust anything else you write?

How Should I Organize a Summary?

Like traditional essays, summaries have an introduction, a body, and a conclusion. What that looks like will be different based on the purpose of the summary you’re writing.

Introducing a Summary

You almost always begin with an introduction of “who, what, where” so the reader realizes early they are reading a summary. This information will also be a part of the bibliography at the end of your document, but it’s necessary to put it both places.

In summary-focused writings, this introduction should accomplish a few things:

• Introduce the name of the author whose work you are summarizing.
• Introduce the title of the text being summarized.
• Introduce where this text was presented (if it’s an art installation, where is it being shown? If it’s an article, where was that article published? Not all texts will have this component–for example, when summarizing a book written by one author, the title of the book and the name of that author are sufficient information for your readers to easily locate the work you are summarizing.
• State the main ideas of the text you are summarizing—just the big-picture components.
• Give context when necessary. Is this text responding to a current event? That might be important to know. Does this author have specific qualifications that make them an expert on this topic? This might also be relevant information.

So, for example, if you were to get an assignment asking you to summarize “Surviving the Textpocalypse” article in Chapter 1.5 of this book, an introduction for that summary might look something like this:

This introduction is only a sentence long, but it answers all the important questions: “When, Where, What, Who and Why” to help orient the reader to what the summary is talking about.

Presenting the Body of a Summary

This will look a little different depending on the purpose of the summary you are writing. Regardless of how you are using summary, you will introduce the main ideas throughout your text with transitional phrasing, such as “One of [Author’s] biggest points is…,” or “[Author’s] primary concern about this solution is….”

You may want to answer a few questions in the body of the summary:

• What are the key points the author makes about each of those big-picture main ideas?
• How the main ideas are supported (although, again, be careful to avoid making your own opinion about those supporting sources known).

Since it is much more common to summarize just a single idea or point from a text in this type of summarizing (rather than all of its main points), it is important to make sure you understand the larger points of the original text. Be sure you read the whole text and know what you want your reader to get from the summary.

Let’s take a look at a possible body of the summary of the “Surviving the Textpocalypse” chapter:

You can see that in the summary of the article, we are told about the main point the author is trying to make and given a brief overview of the ethical concerns AI proposes. The article itself is significantly longer than our 4-sentence summary so far.

Concluding a Summary

Much like many other documents that are created, it is important to conclude the information as well. This not only signals to the reader that you are done with your writings, but it also provides a place to remind your reader of the most important information they need to take away from the summary.

For writing in which summary is the sole purpose, here are some ideas to include in your conclusion.

• Are there any connections or loose ends to tie up that will help your reader fully understand the points being made in this text?
• State (or restate) the things that are most important for your readers to remember after reading your summary.
• You also may want to simply paraphrase the author’s concluding section or final main idea.

For writing that has another purpose, your conclusion should discuss the summary you’ve just presented. How does it support, illustrate, or give new information about the point you are making in your writing? Connect it to your own main point for that paragraph so readers understand clearly why it deserves the space it takes up in your work. (Note that this is still not giving your opinion on the material you’ve summarized, just making connections between it and your own main points.)

Let’s return to Long’s “Textpocalypse” example:

You can see that the concluding sentence paraphrases Long’s last section and final main idea of her chapter.

Synthesis

You’ve heard this word. Your professors are going to tell you to do synthesis. You are going to be graded on it at some point. But … has anyone ever stopped and showed you exactly HOW to synthesize? The answer is yes. This textbook has done that in previous chapters. But it is a very common skill that we all do, whether we realize it or not, so it bears repeating.

Synthesis is combining ideas and creating a completely new idea. Much like plants take sunlight, dirt, and water and synthesize it into food we take ideas and synthesize them into new ideas.

Synthesis is a common skill we practice all the time when we converse with others on topics that we have different levels of knowledge and feeling about. When you discuss with your friends or classmates about a topic your overall understanding of the topic grows as you incorporate their ideas, experiences, and points of view into a broader understanding of the complexities of that topic.

Let’s say you believe your city doesn’t have enough movie theaters, but your friend disagrees and thinks there are enough theaters. The two of you may discuss things like how many physical building theaters there are, how many streaming services exist, the population of the city, the percentage of people who go to physical theaters, etc. And through this discussion, your friend may make a point you hadn’t thought of before. That point will now become part of your understanding of your own opinion, or belief, about the number of movie theaters in your city.

You remind your friend there are only 3 different movie theaters in your city, but your friend reminds you that that there are only 300,000 people in your city. Then you remember that people who are going to the movie theaters is in decline due to the rise of streaming. So, your new, synthesized opinion may be “While I wish we had more movie theaters in my city, our city has 3 physical buildings with multiple screens and multiple showings to serve 300,000 people. And because streaming and early release streaming services now exist, it isn’t financially responsible to have more physical movie theaters in our city.”

Synthesis is NOT summarizing or critiquing others’ opinions. Nor is it just comparing texts. Instead, you are demonstrating your full, objective, empathetic understanding of a topic from multiple perspectives. When you synthesize, you “cook” the ideas and opinions of others by thinking, talking, and writing about them, and what comes out is a dish full of many blended flavors but uniquely your recipe.

Here are some tips to creating a synthesis:

• Read the gathered information
  • You can’t possibly know what you are synthesizing if you haven’t actually read it.

• Figure out where the thematic elements go
  • This is going to change depending on the research you are doing. Thematic elements of a scientific experiment are vastly different than the thematic elements of analyzing literature. Try using a tool like a research matrix or a bubble map to help

• Take all the elements and figure out how they work together to form a new idea
  • Think about the movie example earlier or building a Lego brick Eiffel tower. You have all the information, now what do you do with it?
  • Show your work! Don’t just make a claim and call it done. Tell the reader how you got there. What authors did you use to come to this idea. What did they say that helped you understand the idea a little differently?
    • (i.e.: When I was talking to my friend about movie theaters, and he reminded me that our city doesn’t have a large population, I realized it probably wouldn’t be financially smart to open a new theater here.)

• Finally, just tell your reader what you learned from your research. You’ve done the work of putting all these ideas together, now tell us what it means!

Conclusion

Synthesis and summary are common communication techniques that you will be using regularly for as long as you continue to learn information and have discussions with others.

You’re summarizing well when you:

• use your own words
• significantly condense the original text
• provide accurate representations of the main points of the text they summarize
• avoid personal opinion.

You’re synthesizing well when you:

• use your own words
• explain how the information you have learned has changed your opinions on a topic
• provided evidence of this learning by citing your sources
• when using personal opinion, backing it up with researched information to show why you have this opinion.

Attributions

This chapter contains material from

“The Word on College Reading and Writing” by Monique Babin, Carol Burnell, Susan Pesznecker, Nicole Rosevear, Jaime Wood, OpenOregon Educational Resources, Higher Education Coordination Commission: Office of Community Colleges and Workforce Development is licensed under CC BY-NC 4.0 1st Edition

A Guide to Rhetoric, Genre, and Success in First-Year Writing (No Longer Updated) by Melanie Gagich is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License, except where otherwise noted.

5.2 Synthesizing in Your Writing by Yvonne Bruce, Melanie Gagich, and Svetlana Zhuravlova is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License, except where otherwise noted.