Department of English

Faculty of Arts, Chulalongkorn University

Summary

• Begins with an opening sentence which includes the source text's
• title
• author
• publication information (book or magazine where the article was printed + date when the article was published)
• main idea
• Uses the present tense to talk about the article
• Includes
• all the major points
• Excludes
• unnecessary details
• redundancies
• information not in the source text
• your opinion
• Uses superordinate (an umbrella or more general) terms to replace lists where appropriate
• Keeps ideas in the order they appear in the source text
• Uses appropriate transitions and author tags
• Uses your own words (rather than the article author's words and sentences)
• Is appropriately brief (usually one-fourth or one-fifth of the source text)
• Ends with the author's concluding idea.

Definitions

• summary (Cambridge Dictionaries Online)       
  a ​short, ​clear ​description that gives the ​main ​facts or ​ideas about something:
  At the end of the ​news, they often give you a summary of the ​main ​stories.
  In summary, they ​decided against the ​proposal.
• summary (Merriam-Webster)
  : using few words to give the most important information about something
  1: comprehensive; especially: covering the main points succinctly
• summary (Oxford Dictionaries)
  A brief statement or account of the main points of something:
  a summary of Chapter Three
  

Vocabulary

title

author

publication information

topic

main idea

topic sentence

transitions

connecting words

conjunctions

author tags

• Author Tags and Reporting Verbs, Baylor University
  

reporting verbs

• Reporting Verbs, University of Warwick
• Verbs for Reporting, University of Adelaide
• Verbs for Referring to Sources, University of Toronto
  

superordinate term

• superordinates, Finnish Virtual University
• superordinate (Collins Dictionary)
  adjective (ˌsuːpərˈɔːdɪnɪt)
  of higher status or condition
  noun (ˌsuːpərˈɔːdɪnɪt)
  a person or thing that is superordinate
  a word the meaning of which includes the meaning of another word or words; 'red' is a superordinate of 'scarlet', 'vermilion', and 'crimson'
• superordinate (Oxford Dictionaries)
  1 A thing that represents a superior order or category within a system of classification:
  a pair of compatibles must have a common superordinate
  1.1 Linguistics A word whose meaning includes the meaning of one or more other words:
  ‘bird’ is the superordinate of ‘canary’
• superordinate (Macmillan Dictionary)
  a word that includes the meaning of more specific words. For example, ‘vehicle’ is the superordinate of words such as ‘car’ and ‘truck’.

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Last updated December 1, 2015