Student's guide to writing college papers, Fourth edition - Kate L. Turabian 2010

Creating a fair summary
Quoting, paraphrasing, and summarizing sources
Writing your paper

Use a summary to report information from a source when only its main points are relevant to your argument. Because a good summary leaves out details, it is shorter than the original. In some cases, readers expect a summary to cover all the main points, but when you summarize for a research paper, you do not have to cover everything in the source or even in the part you summarize. You can and usually should include only those points relevant to your argument, as long as you do not leave out crucial points that might change how readers understand what the source says.

Suppose, for example, that you were writing a paper on the role of creativity in research. For that paper, the following paragraph would fairly summarize the previous chapter on drafting:

Colomb and Williams (2010) emphasize that drafting is a process of discovery that can fuel a writer's creative thinking. They acknowledge that some writers have to draft carefully and stick close to their outlines, but they advise writers to draft as freely and as openly as they can. They encourage even slow and careful drafters to be open to new ideas and surprises and not to be limited by what they do before drafting. They still stress the value of steady work that follows a plan—for example, writing a little bit every day rather than all at once in a fit of desperate inspiration. But they show writers how to make the best of a plan while hoping that a better idea will come along.

This summary does not cover the entire chapter: for instance, it ignores the information on oral reports and on procrastination and writer's block. But that's OK, since that information is less relevant to issues of creativity and leaving it out does not distort what the chapter says. The following leaves out so much that it would not be a fair summary:

Colomb and Williams (2010) emphasize that drafting is a process of discovery that can fuel a writer's creative thinking. They advise writers to draft as freely as they can in order to be open to new ideas and surprises and not to be limited by the plans they make before drafting. They show writers how to go beyond their plans, hoping that a better idea will come along.

Here the writer gives a false impression of what the chapter says by leaving out something that the chapter emphasizes: the tension between our need to make and follow plans and to free our minds to make the most of new ideas.

When you summarize information for a research paper, you should give the summary a slant by focusing on that part of the information most relevant to your argument. But you cannot slant it so much that you misrepresent what the source actually says—which means that you'll have to be sure that you understand what the source says. It's another case where you'll have to exercise some judgment.

How to Create a Fair and Relevant Summary

To be sure that your summary is concise, relevant, and fair, do this:

1. Summarize only if readers can understand without knowing details. If readers may need more than just the gist of what a source says, don't summarize: quote or paraphrase.

2. Decide why the information from the source is relevant to your argument. What reason does it support? What does it add to that support?

3. Pick out the most important sentences in the source that are most relevant to a specific part of your argument. In most cases, focus on reasons. But if you will use the summary as evidence, pick out the most important reports of evidence.

4. Paraphrase those sentences; list the paraphrases in the order they occur in the original.

5. Add any other information that readers might need to understand accurately what the source says.

6. Revise to turn the list into a passage that flows.