Tips and Tricks for Summarizing Text (Common Core Readiness Guide to Reading)
A few years ago, I took a course on how to summarize text. I thought that it was a useful course and helpful because it provided passages that you had to practice summarizing.
You learned how to summarize text by doing it. How to summarize text is not something that the average professional would think about, why would you?
But, the ability to summarize is important today because things are changing so fast that to keep up you have to read, process, and digest information on an ongoing basis.
“A 2012 study by McKinsey Global Institute of office workers in the US, Germany, France, and Great Britain to find out how much time they spent reading and answering emails and processing written information found that the average was 5.6 hours a day.”
This means that if you want to keep up with work demand, you have to read and process information faster. But you also have to learn how to effectively summarize reading materials in the event that you have to pass on the information to others.
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I wrote a post that included a section on how to summarize text, but I decided to expand it.
Guidelines: Summarizing Text Activities
The course offered some guidelines for you to follow when you are summarizing text. Here are a few rules to be mindful of:
- Make the summary shorter than the original.
- Leave out some of the main points, you cannot include everything.
- Write it in your own words.
- Express the author’s facts and opinions accurately, while saying it in your own words.
- Give your opinion on the work.
- Compress the same meaning in fewer words.
I would like to share the two processes with you, which are called the 5Rs and SQ3R.
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The 5Rs of Summarizing Text
The five Rs are Reduce, Reject, Reword, Reproduce, and Repackage. This matches up with the guidelines to summarize text.
- Reduce: Use fewer words than the original.
- Reject: Decide what to leave out. What is essential and non-essential information?
- Reword: Use synonyms, so make a thesaurus your friend. This is a great way to build your vocabulary.
- Reproduce: Accurately reflect author’s facts and opinions, while saying it in your own words.
- Repackage: Compress the same thought.
To use the 5Rs when summarizing content: Read the text so that you know and understand the material, highlight key points, write the shorter version in your own words using synonyms, and use connecting words, so the summary is clear and flows smoothly.
How to SummarizeHow to Take Smart NotesSummarizing, Paraphrasing, and Retelling
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SQ3R of Summarizing Text
SQ3R stands for Survey, Question, Reading, Recite and Review. Although SQ3R is used to write abstracts, the process is appropriate for summarizing text.
Survey: I have talked a lot about previewing and scanning a book before you read it. This includes looking at the table of content, the layout of the book, and the index. Look through the entire book to get the helicopter view of what the book is about. This post is not solely about summarizing a book, it could be summarizing journal and magazine articles or even an in-depth blog post. If you are summarizing text other that what’s in a book, flip through the pages, and look at headings and subheadings, to get a sense of the topic and what the author.
Question: When you read, there is a purpose for doing so. In many instances, you are reading to gather information and to further your knowledge on a topic. That means that you have specific questions, whose answers you expect to find in the text. Ask the questions that come to mind. Turn the topic of the text into a series of questions – can you answer the questions? Answering the questions you have, shows that you understand the material.
Reading: Actively read the material, take detailed notes, ask the questions, go through the information slowly, read the information on any charts and diagrams, and look at the images to see how they help the understanding of the piece of work.
Recite: If the material is important to you and you want to remember it, repeat it. Annotate the reading material, take notes, and highlight key information. After you finish a thought, decide whether to highlight it. Some of the information in this step has been said in other steps, and that’s because it is so important.
Review: Tell yourself what you have learned from the material – the self-testing state. What have you learned that relates to prior knowledge – what you already know? What are the key ideas in and how can you apply them? Did the reading material contain any surprising information?
Final Thoughts on How to Summarize Text
Over the past year, I have been doing my best to help you to succeed at work. So far, I have written about how to become a skilled reader, how to spot important information, and today I am zeroing on how to summarize text. These are not things that you would normally think about, but I am raising them to build your awareness. To remember the two techniques mentioned above also memorize the acronyms – 5Rs and SQ3R.
This is general information on how to summarize text. But you can also use it to summarize a book. However, through my articles, I have also been teaching you how to become a more effective. If you have been paying attention to the process, you'll end of with a summary of the book without going through all of the above steps. It is important to know how to do things the right way, so you can break the rules.
Essentially, what you would do is to follow the process to inspect a book. When you dip into the sections that need further exploration, you would take notes as you read. To take notes, you paraphrase what you are reading. In the end, your notes is the book summary. I hope that you find these articles helpful.
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If you do not want to gamify your reading, I invite you to Join the Performance Accelerator Plan that walks you through the process of learning key skills and more. You’ll be reading books to build skills and develop intercultural awareness. Get more reading and learning tips here.
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Read 30 Books in 30 Days Like Francis Bacon is not about speed reading. It’s about approaching every book differently and reading only the sections that align with your purpose.
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