How to Write a Summary

In a summary, you want to identify the main idea of the article and put this information in your own words. Prepare to write a summary by underlining and writing notes as you read. The summary should include the thesis and topic sentences of the article put into your own words. One easy way to do this is to underline the topic sentence of each paragraph and then to write that sentence in your own words on the side of the page or on another piece of paper. Afterwards, you can read all those sentences together and then re-write them into complete sentences with good transition words. You may find you need to leave out some of the unimportant details too. Your summary should be as short and concise as possible.