Summaries present text information in an abridged form. They can be placed in one of two categories:
Informative summaries – objective reports on the text’s content.
Descriptive summaries – objective reports about the text.
Both techniques of summarisation can be applied on expository texts (scientific, technical, or other type of non-fictional works) or on narrative texts, which are usually but not mandatory, literary texts.
Please note that the main requisite of any summary is to present a concise and clear presentation of the main ideas that form the meaning of the written work (or of other type of resource), while eliminating the unnecessary details that are not absolutely necessary for the overall understanding.
INFORMATIVE Summaries
Informative summaries accurately convey the information contained in a text or in other type of resource. An informative summary should be objective i.e. “without personal opinions in presenting the ideas in the source text”.
Thus, informative summaries are recommended for scientific, non-fictional works or to present objective reports of factual content.
The main types of informative summaries are: outlines, abstracts, and synopses.
Outlines present the plan or the “skeleton” of a written material.
Outlines show the order and the relation between the parts of the written material.
An outline of a chapter about summarisation.
In the outline below, the titles (in magenta) and explanations (in yellow) show the principal themes in the chapter. The outline next page, being more detailed, can give clues on main ideas and approaches in the chapter.
HOW DO I SUMMARISE?
Discover (What summary and summarisation are?)
Learn (How to summarise? – Methods and tools)
Practice (Write summaries on subjects you know)
Assess your leaning (How well did you learn?)
Learning resources (Books, articles, videos clips and web sites teaching summarisation)
HOW DO I SUMMARISE?
Discover (What summary and summarisation are?)
Summary – The concept (What is it?)
Types of texts (What are they?)
Types of summaries (What are they?)
Summarisation – The process (What does it means?)
Summarising – The methods (What are they?)
Examples of summaries
Learn (How to summarise? – Methods and tools)
Summarisation of a text (How to do it?)
Reading the text
Background exploration
Text exploration
Notes revision
Writing the summary
Writing of the first draft
Revision of your work
Paraphrasing and Quoting
Practical examples (How to use methods and tools?)
Summarising fictional works (How to deal with it?)
Writing modes in fictional and non-fictional writings
Subject and dramatic structure
Narrator and characters in a literary work
Time and space indicators in a literary work
Practice (Write summaries on subjects you know)
Write summaries and abstracts for your presentations and exams
Assess your leaning (How well did you learn?)
Learning resources (Videos and web sites teaching summarisation)
Abstracts present the major point of long piece of text or an article.Abstracts help readers to decide whether or not they want to read the longer text.
An abstract of a scientific report
The abstract presented below belongs to a scientific report about issues, achievements and shortcomings in the area of automatic summarisation – creation of summaries by means computer programs called “summarising systems”. The author – Karen Sparck Jones- very briefly details in the abstract the main points and the conclusion of her forty pages report.
The original title of the report has been kept in the example below.
Automatic summarising: The state of the art
by Karen Sparck Jones
Computer Laboratory, University of Cambridge -UK
This paper in its final form will appear in Information Processing and Management, Special Issue on Automatic Summarising, 2007.
Abstract This paper reviews research on automatic summarising in the last decade.This work has grown, stimulated by technology and by evaluation programs.The paper uses several frameworks to organise the review, for summarising itself, for the factors affecting summarising, for systems, and for evaluation.
The review examines the evaluation strategies applied to summarising, the issues they raise, and the major programs. It considers the input, purpose and output factors investigated in recent automatic summarising research, and discusses the classes of strategy, extractive and non-extractive, that have been explored, illustrating the range of systems built.
The conclusions drawn are that automatic summarisation has made valuable progress, with useful applications, better evaluation, and more task understanding.But summarising systems are still poorly motivated in relation to the factors affecting them, and evaluation needs taking much further to engage with the purpose summaries are intended to serve and the contexts in which they are used.
The previous example presents you some information about software programs ability to summarise texts.
Automatic summarisation in the IT field has been developed over the past 50 years. Recently, many text summarisers are been freely delivered on the Internet, and you can you use them on-line. Most of them are designed for English language, and their summarisation consists in selection of the most important sentences in the original text. Hence, the result they give are not suitable for the summarisation tasks, as assignments in school settings require.
Automatic summarisation of text
The abstract presented in previous example has been given to “feed” a free, on-line software system for automatic summarisation. As you can see, the computer’s summary has only taken identical sentences from the original text.
The original text
Abstract This paper reviews research on automatic summarising in the last decade.
This work has grown, stimulated by technology and by evaluation programs. The paper uses several frameworks to organise the review, for summarising itself, for the factors affecting summarising, for systems, and for evaluation.The review examines the evaluation strategies applied to summarising, the issues they raise, and the major programs. It considers the input, purpose and output factors investigated in recent automatic summarising research, and discusses the classes of strategy, extractive and non-extractive, that have been explored, illustrating the range of systems built.
The conclusions drawn are that automatic summarisation has made valuable progress, with useful applications, better evaluation, and more task understanding.
But summarising systems are still poorly motivated in relation to the factors affecting them, and evaluation needs taking much further to engage with the purpose summaries are intended to serve and the contexts in which they are used.
The summary developed by the computer
Abstract This paper reviews research on automatic summarising in the last decade.
This work has grown, stimulated by technology and by evaluation programs.
The conclusions drawn are that automatic summarisation has made valuable progress, with useful applications, better evaluation, and more task understanding.
But summarising systems are still poorly motivated in relation to the factors affecting them, and evaluation needs taking much further to engage with the purpose summaries are intended to serve and the contexts in which they are used.
A synopsis is a brief overview of an article, story, book, film, or other works.
A synopsis is a concise, chronological description of a historical event, news event, historical event or other experiences as they develop in time.
A synopsis of World War II – as an historical event in XX century
World War II began in 1939, when Germany, led by Adolf Hitler, invaded Poland. Britain and France responded by declaring war on Germany.
But in 1940 Germany rapidly conquered Denmark, Norway, Belgium, the Netherlands, and France. Italy, an ally of Germany at that time, took Greece and North Africa in 1941.
In 1941 Germany invaded the Soviet Union. Despite the Germans’ initial quick progress into the Russian heartland, the countrys immensity, its brutal winters and the nation’s determination would eventually be more than the German army could overcome. After losing the battles of Stalingrad and Kursk in 1943, Germans were slowly forced out of the Soviet territory. During 1944 and 1945, Russians pursued their march across eastern Europe, invading the countries in this region and Germany itself.
In June 1944, British and American forces launched the D-Day Normandy invasion, landing in German-occupied France. Several months after, the German army was forced to retreat from France and Paris was liberated.
By early 1945, Allied forces (British, Americans and Soviets) were closing in on Germany from the east and west. The Soviets were the first to reach Berlin, and Germany surrendered in May 1945, shortly after the suicide of Adolf Hitler.
In Pacific, the war began in 1941, when Japan attacked the U.S. Navy base at Pearl Harbour, Hawaii. By this time, Japan had already been at war with China for several years and had conquered the Chinese territory of Manchuria.
Japan continued war by a massive campaign of expansion throughout China and the Southeast Asia–Pacific region. After fighting several years against Japan, in early 1945, Allied forces were closing in on the Japanese home islands.
In August 1945 United States dropped two atomic bombs on the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Following the huge devastation, Japan surrendered unconditionally and World War II was finished.
DESCRIPTIVE Summaries
Descriptive summaries depict the original text (material) rather than directly presenting the information it contains. A descriptive summary should portray, in an objective way, the texts structure and main themes.
Descriptive summaries often play the role of reviews for fictional or literary works: books, movies, video clips, articles, essays etc. In this case, the descriptive summary can include statements about sense and significance of the summarised work.
A descriptive summary of “A Modest Proposal”, a short writing of fewer than 2000 words by Jonathan Swift. The summary has 132 words and the statement about the sense of this literary work is marked in blue.
A descriptive summary of the essay “A Modest Proposal” (132 words)
“A Modest Proposal is preventing the Children of poor People in Ireland, from being a Burden to their Parents or Country and for making them beneficial to the Public”, is a satirical essay written in the 18th century by author Jonathan Swift.
The essay, curtly named “A Modest Proposal”, is one of the most savage and ironical pamphlet ever written. The speaking character in the essay, called the “Proposer”, is an unknown personage who, “innocently” and “modestly” proposes to combat poverty in (18th century) Ireland “by using the children of Irish poor people as food for wealthy citizens”. The essay imitates the style of a scientific social-survey, being organised as a classical rhetoric work defending an idea or principle.
“A Modest Proposal” satire shows Swift’s outrage at the cruelties and stupidities of his contemporary society. In a broader sense, the pamphlet combats the tendency of modern human to “social cannibalism: the murder of humans in the name of bettering the lives of others”.
An executive summary’s aim is to describe a project, a specific course of action, or a business proposal when an executive (your boss!) doesn’t have the time to read the original report.
An employee may be asked to submit a 10 page summary of a 100 pages long technical (or business) proposal.
In order to achieve this kind of assignment in stipulated time, the employee should have extensive summarisation skills.
