Page 35 - Міністерство освіти і науки України

3. It should condense the source material and be presented in the summary writer`s
own words. (Summaries that consist of directly copied portions of the original rarely
succeed).
As to the length of a summary it must be admitted that it depends on the amount of
details required in it. The normal proportion of a summary is about 1 to 10 of the
original.
To do a good job, you must first thoroughly understand the source material you are
working with. Here are the processing steps in writing a summary:
1. Skim the text, noting in your mind the subheadings. If there are no
subheadings, try to divide the text into sections. Form the plan.
2. Read the text, highlighting important information or making notes.
3. In your own words, write down the main points of each section.
4. Write down the key support points for the main topic but do not include minor
detail.
5. Integrate the points of the plan into a rough draft of the summary. Avoid such
phrases as “the author says”, “the article reports”. Instead simply say what the
author says without noting that he does so.
6. Compare the rough draft with the original and cut out non-essential points in it,
if there are any.
7. Write a neat copy with an introduction, which clearly states the title, the
author`s name, the source from which the text is taken and the subject the
summary is concerned with.

Summaries may be of two types – simple( or tradition) and comparative.
Comparative summaries require you to analyze and use information from two or more
sources rather than just one. In a comparative summary, you often need to infer and
make explicit the relationships among your sources. Unlike a traditional summary, a
comparative summary may not be an objective representation of the original sources.
Quite often the term “summary” is replaced by the synonymous words “synopsis”
(“annotation”) and “abstract”.
A synopsis (annotation) is the shortest account of the main content and conlusions of
the original text. Normally it is a very brief summary of a play or a novel placed at the
beginning or at the end of the book.
The manner of presenting the material in synopsis is very concise and it tends to be
critical. When summarizing the contents, the synopsis writer appreciates the material
from his own point of view. He uses as a rule a wide range of the so-called clichés,
which can be roughly divided into three groups:
1) those introducing the leading theme of the original paper (“The text deals
with…”, “The article is devoted to…”, “The chapter is about…”, etc).
2) those drawing the reader`s attention to the major points of the contents (“The
author emphasizes the idea of…”, “The author points out that…”, “The paper
elaborates…”, “Attention is drawn to the fact that…”, “The main finding of the

33