Writing a Summary of Nonfiction

Readers can write a summary of a text to let someone else know the main ideas

Summarizing a text helps you to understand it—as you figure out the most important ideas, your brain is engaged in understanding the text

It depends!

•The length of a summary depends on the length of the original text

•A summary should always be shorter than the original text

Here are four basic rules for writing a summary of nonfiction:

-Include the important ideas from the text

-Put ideas in your own words

-Leave out little details and repeated information

-Use the text structure of the text

  This is easy to say, but sometimes hard to do! As you read, it’s important to think about what ideas are most important to the author

  There are some words that you can’t change when you paraphrase. These key words are the important words from the passage.

  Authors also might repeat ideas. When the same idea is restated, we only need to include it once in a summary.

  The text structure of a text refers to how the text is organized:

-Description

-Cause and Effect

-Chronological Order

-Problem/Solution

-Compare and Contrast