Scheme for Understanding and Writing Summaries

By David K. Farkas

Intercom August 2020

INTRODUCTION

Summary writing may at first seem a straightforward task requiring no more than basic textbook knowledge and an acquaintance with familiar models. In fact, summaries are complex and vary along many dimensions. They are written to fulfill multiple purposes and to meet diverse constraints.

Because summary writing is a complex task, technical communicators should be able to draw upon a comprehensive understanding of summaries and a wide range of design strategies when they plan and write a summary. This scheme applies across genres to summaries of all kinds, from research article abstracts, to the longer executive summaries that precede reports, proposals, business plans, and other organizational and business documents, to the brief summaries that appear before articles in news magazines, both in print and on the Web. These and other before-the-body summaries are separate components that are visually bounded from the body of the text through such means as box borders, a distinctive font, and extra spacing. But the scheme applies as well to the reviews that, especially in instructional documents, are visually bounded components that follow the body of the text.

Furthermore, the scheme applies to the unbounded summaries we embed within the body of a document: Unbounded summaries are regularly embedded within the introduction of a document, where they preview the main ideas, and they are often embedded within the conclusion of a document, where they review the main ideas. Indeed, unbounded summaries can be embedded anywhere in the body of the text, and they can either summarize some or all of the preceding content (signaled by such phrases as “Summing up what has been said so far”) or preview some or all of the upcoming content.

Here is a capsule presentation of the scheme:

1. Purpose: What is the purpose or purposes of the summary?

1. Specification constraint: Must the summary be written according to a gatekeeper’s specification, or is it unspecified?

1. Reduction: What is the ratio, in word count or by some other measure, of the summary to the summarized text? How was the reduction accomplished?

1. Phrasing: Is the summary written with informative or descriptive phrasing or a mixture of both?

1. Proportion and Exclusion: Is each part of the summarized text reduced by the same amount? Is any important content excluded from the summary? What are the reasons for improportion or exclusion?

1. Structure: How is the summary organized in relation to the text? How closely does the sequence of ideas in the summary map the sequence in the text?

1. Placement: Is there a single summary that appears before the body of the text (the default), a review that appears after the body of the text, or multiple summaries distributed within the body of the text or in the margins? Is the summary a free-standing module that excludes references to the text?

1. Addition: Is the content of a before-the-body summary strictly (miniature) of the full text, summaries very often differ from the full text along numerous dimensions. Indeed, present-day summaries appear to be increasingly less microcosmic.

PURPOSE

Summaries serve various purposes, and the chosen purpose or purposes will govern many design decisions. One purpose is filtering. Often, readers read a summary, decide whether or not the topic is relevant to their needs, and, if so, decide whether to read the full text or whether the summary itself is sufficiently informative. In other instances (for example, abstracts of journal articles that are only available to online journal subscribers), a summary must suffice for some readers because the text is unavailable. When readers read both the summary and the text, the previewing function of the summary can improve the reader’s comprehension and retention of the text.

When summaries map the structure of the text, readers can use the summary to find the section containing specific information they are interested in. Some summaries are specifically designed to support selective reading within a text. Readers can comfortably bypass sections of the text that interest them less on the basis of what they have learned about the content of those sections from reading the summary. Reviews very often appear in textbooks and training materials as an after-the-body component. Their purpose is to improve retention.

REDUCTION

The length of a summary in relation to the text largely determines how much information the summary conveys. Therefore, reduction, meaning the degree of reduction, strongly influences the uses of a summary. For example, a reader with only a moderate interest in a topic may well be able to satisfy their information needs by reading a 250-word summary, but this is less likely if there is only a 100-word summary. On the other hand, when summaries are long, a reader confronted with numerous summaries may choose to read fewer of them.

In many situations, summary writers make their own decisions about how long a summary should be, but still more often the summary’s length is specified by guidelines. But whether the limit has been imposed by a guideline or represents the author’s best judgment, limiting the length of a summary is a necessary and often challenging task.

In creating a summary, the writer selects the most important ideas in the text. The threshold for “important” is a function of the length and the information density of both the text and the summary. For example: The threshold for inclusion will be much higher (ideas must be more important) for a 200-word vs. a 500-word summary—especially so if the summarized text is a dense 50-page engineering document versus a more casually written 20-page project update. Importance, furthermore, should be generally understood to mean the most important (superordinate) ideas in the summarized text in preference to what the summarizer judges to be important to the reader.

Reduction in all its forms comes at a price. Less of the content of the summarized text is communicated, there is more potential for misunderstanding, and inadequacies in the writing style may arise. Specifically, two big problems that may occur are decreased readability and alterations of meaning arising from the elimination of hedging words

INFORMATIVE VS. DESCRIPTIVE PHRASING

The distinction between informative and descriptive phrasing was introduced as a stylistic technique for reduction, which it is. A summary that tells you what you will learn by reading the text is very different from a summary that provides immediately useful information.

When a specification does not call for either informative or descriptive (indicative) phrasing, authors should take note of this extra flexibility. A good strategy is to favor informative phrasing in the interest of communicating more information to the audience, but to strategically switch to descriptive phrasing when greater reduction is necessary to summarize especially complex parts of the text (especially if they are of lesser importance) and in other instances when ideas in the text resist informative phrasing.

PLACEMENT

As we have seen, bounded summaries can appear before or after the body of the text, and unbounded summaries can appear within an introduction, within a conclusion, or anywhere else within the body of a text. Here, we look at three other placement options: multiple within-text summaries, marginal summaries, and free-standing summaries.

Multiple Within-Text Summaries

Multiple summaries may be placed before chapters, sections, or other divisions within a text. This and similar multiple-summary designs serve the purpose of supporting selective reading. That is, for each of the events described on the website, the reader is invited to read just the summary, the text, or both. To support selective reading effectively, the reduction in length must be mild (longish summaries). This is to ensure that a reader who has chosen to read only the summaries on several of the webpages has accumulated enough information to be able to productively read the full text of a later section.

Marginal Summaries

Multiple summaries may be placed alongside the text in wide page margins. This practice is rare today but was more prevalent in past centuries. These days, wide page margins usually contain relevant factoids and definitions.

Free-Standing Summaries

Finally, a great many summaries are written so that they can be read independently, and so the free-standing summary becomes an additional category, an overlapping category, within the Placement descriptor. Research journals often specify in their author guidelines that abstracts must be free standing. Thus, the guidelines—in addition to specifying informative phrasing—prohibit in-text citations to items in the article’s reference list. If an item in the reference list must be mentioned in the abstract, an abbreviated reference, not a citation, is provided.

AUTHORSHIP

Most summaries are written by the author of the summarized text or by an associate. However, one can write a summary of another author’s text. Therefore, we distinguish between an authorial and a non-authorial summary. Non-authorial summaries are generally embedded in the document of the writer who wrote the summary and, generally, are blends of summary and interpretive commentary.

STYLE

Style refers to a wide range of linguistic techniques, especially those at the word and sentence level, and includes both techniques that directly affect ease of reading and those that help establish stance. Style has previously been discussed as a means of reduction and in regard to the distinction between informative vs. descriptive phrasing.

In some instances, however, authors intend a different style. Non-specialist synopses may employ techniques that add to word count but result in a more readable and “livelier” style than does the text. Promotional abstracts employ a lively, informal style and often include a range of devices (pronouns referring to the reader, rhetorical questions, and references to shared knowledge) designed to promote engagement.

CONCLUSION

Summaries take many forms, serve numerous purposes, and often present significant challenges to writers, editors, and publications managers. The scheme of descriptors presented advances our understanding of summaries and summarization and, serving as a design heuristic, can directly assist in the better design and writing of summaries.