Using reading in your writing part 2: successful summaries

Filter with relevant information dripping out of the bottom — Summarising involves filtering

The main difference between paraphrasing and summarising is that the final text you use will be considerably shorter than the original. You will often summarise a whole paragraph into a single sentence or a few words and sometimes even a whole article or book chapter.

Think of summarising as filtering out the information that is important to your assignment whilst keeping the essense of the original in tact.

Summarising paragraphs

Look at the following paragraph (from Gallagher, 2011):

Numerous healthcare situations call for courage. Examples include: breaking bad news regarding a poor prognosis, challenging a colleague who appears incompetent, delivering care to an infectious patient, confronting an angry relative, and raising concerns about unethical practice. What is common to all of these situations is the fear that may be experienced as the practitioner considers the cost of the action and the consequences of a particular intervention or of getting it wrong. There may be fear of an extreme emotional reaction, of violence, of contamination, of negative reactions from colleagues, or of losing one’s job. Such fears may inhibit nurses and other practitioners from acting ethically. Lachman (2009) cited Albert Einstein as saying, “the world is a dangerous place, not because of those who do evil, but because of those who look on and do nothing” (p. 3). As discussed above, organisational constraints may cause nurses to feel as though they lack the courage to do the right thing or raise concerns about poor standards of care. This section discusses courage as a professional virtue and offers strategies that are likely to support courage in healthcare organisations.

To summarise this, you start by highlighting what you think are the most important parts for your assignment:

Numerous healthcare situations call for courage.Examples include: breaking bad news regarding a poor prognosis, challenging a colleague who appears incompetent, delivering care to an infectious patient, confronting an angry relative, and raising concerns about unethical practice. What is common to all of these situations is the fear that may be experienced as the practitioner considers the cost of the action and the consequences of a particular intervention or of getting it wrong. There may be fear of an extreme emotional reaction, of violence, of contamination, of negative reactions from colleagues, or of losing one’s job. Such fears may inhibit nurses and other practitioners from acting ethically. Lachman (2009) cited Albert Einstein as saying, “the world is a dangerous place, not because of those who do evil, but because of those who look on and do nothing” (p. 3). As discussed above, organisational constraints may cause nurses to feel as though they lack the courage to do the right thing or raise concerns about poor standards of care. This section discusses courage as a professional virtue and offers strategies that are likely to support courage in healthcare organisations.

You can then just concentrate on summarising (which involves paraphrasing) just those parts:

Gallagher (2011) suggests that fear of potentially negative outcomes in many common, though not routine situations, means healthcare professionals need to display considerable courage in order to act ethically, even in the face of possible reprisals.

You can see that in this example a lot of detail is missed out – but the key highlighted points are included.

Summarising whole articles

Journal article with abstract highlighted and summarised in a student essay — Summarise the
abstract (mostly)

When summarising whole articles, look first to the abstract. This is usually provided by the author and is often their own summary of the work. It should therefore contain the main take-home points and anything you take from there should not misrepresent their findings. Use the highlighting method above to pick out the important parts for your assignment.

Different people can summarise an article differently as they will focus on the element that is important to them. Your own summary of the article should focus on whichever of the main points supports the claim that you are making. We have an example of this on the Summarising tab of the Using sources in writing page is our Referencing your Work SkillsGuide.

Please note that although the abstract will help with your summarising, you should still read the article to make sure you understand fully what the abstract is claiming and check that you thinks its conclusions are valid.