Mastering the Art of Summarization and Elevating Your Writing Skills

A summary is defined as the shortened form of a text. For example, if some content is 1,000 words, then a summary would consist of 400 words but convey the same meaning.

In this post, we will see the tips and techniques you can apply to mastering summarization. We will see how you can summarize content and elevate your writing skills through it. So, without further ado, let’s get started!

What Is A Summarizing?

Summarizing means shortening the length of a text while conveying the main points that it contains. It is a writing technique often used by professional writers to make their writing impactful. Their writing is attractive to the masses as it’s easily understandable and comprehendible for the people. Summarizing can help you elevate your writing by teaching you the ways to be concise, clear, and readable for the audience. In addition, summarization can help create short-form content. This includes creating metadata, excerpts, emails, infographics, and so on.

Such content requires the art of summarization as it needs to be delivered straight to the point, without wasting any time.

Thus, summarization is a crucial art that you should look to master.

How To Become A Master Of Summarization?

#1 Learn To Always Analyze The Text In Detail

It is important to analyze your texts in detail before beginning to summarize them. This means that you have to focus_on everything that a person is trying to convey in their texts.

Reading through the document and highlighting any important facts or figures is a way to focus. Afterward, critically analyze the part you have highlighted and decide which main points you have to include in your summary.

Here we want to stress that highlighting does not mean you copy phrases or sentences from the original text. It only means to keep track of the important points, and then you can use your own words to display them in your summary.

Finally, you have to decide your word limit for your summary and write accordingly, for example, ‘60% length of the original text’, ‘50% length’, and so on. This will give you an exact idea of what to keep and what to skip in your summary.

#2 Make Sure To List Down The Key Points In Your Own Words

After you have focused and critically analyzed the text for relevant points, try jotting them down in order.

Your aim should be to focus on the events as they unfolded or the logical sequence of the writer’s storytelling. Understand the flow of the text and jot down the points accordingly. This will immensely help you keep cohesion and coherence in your summary, and your audiences will immediately get your points.

Let’s briefly define these two terms. Coherence means the overall ‘making sense’ of a document that there’s a good flow of ideas from one part to another. While cohesion means ‘making sense’ from one sentence to another. We can say that cohesion is the minute details of a document, while coherence is the logical ‘big-picture’.

Coherence and cohesion can significantly elevate your writing skills, and you can feel it. People will start connecting with your content. They will quickly understand what you mean, and you can deliver whatever you want to them. Do you feel the power of this ability?

#3 Write The Summary Considering Your Audience

It is important to consider your audience before trying to write your summary. If your setting is academic then you are permitted to enter some technical information. Otherwise, avoid adding any irrelevant or difficult information in your summary. This will automatically summarize your text and the result will be accurate to the main idea for the document.

Secondly, you should use connecting words to smoothly flow your points in your summary. Connecting words include words like, “Therefore, Hence, Thus, Consequently, Additionally” and so on. This ensures a smooth transition from one topic sentence of a paragraph to another and the reader will appreciate the better readability.

The final tip is to vary your sentence structure. Don’t be robotic to stick to a particular sentence length. Try to give some variations in your sentences to make your writing style more natural and human. This also means that you should not overuse connecting words as it also leaves a bad impression on your writing.

#4 Make Use Of Online Tools

We appreciate you working hard to write your summaries, but manual work isn’t the way to smart work anymore. Utilizing automated tools can give you an edge over your contemporaries as your productivity to generate content will increase significantly.

Just paste the text you want summarized, and an online text summarizer tool will do the job for you. Such tools automate and simplify writing processes by leveraging their advanced AI technologies.

Let us show you what we mean:

However, be careful that sometimes these tools write a lot of fluff that can ruin the writing process for you and degrade your writing quality. Hence, it’s always good to proofread and recheck your generated summaries from AI tools.

What Are The Advantages Of Summarization?

- Summarizing Can Reduce Redundancy In Your Content

Summarizing can help you clear out all the unnecessary arguments or points from a text. This improves clarity in your work, which makes the content very engaging for people.

Redundancy is of many types, and it’s really frustrating to find and remove each one of them. There might be a redundancy of pronouns, nouns, or phrases throughout a text, or just one talking point/argument being reiterated multiple times throughout the document.

For instance, “Sally decided it was time to take the bus ride. Sally was not sure what else to do. The following example has the proper noun, Sally, repeated unnecessarily throughout the text.

An example of repeated points/arguments would be “Sally was confused about taking the bus or waiting for the taxi. Her confusion was between choosing the right mode of transportation.” The following example is a very malpractice amongst writers. Don’t write a point that is repeating. If you have already established something before, just leave it and go to the next point.

Content without redundancies will make the audience understand your copy. By removing redundancies you can deliver all the points to the people, bridging the gap between them and you.

- Makes Your Writing Impactful

By summarizing your points, you can make sure to deliver the key points that truly matter. Your audiences won’t be engaged with you forever, so utilize your ‘dwell’ time as much as you can.

Summarizing can also help to create an impactful message. It means to people that you are no time waster and that you mean business. It can make your writing look professional, and let you convey your messages to the audience in less time.

Summarization is also extremely powerful in content marketing where you have to keep things concise and precise. Thus, summarizing can make your writing valuable as you will be able to deliver a lot of key points in way less time.

- Improves Your General Writing Skills

In general, summarizing can improve your overall writing skills. You can get an idea of how things are put together to form a concise document. You can utilize those skills to adjust your overall writing style to be ‘to the point’.

Conciseness brings clarity to writing, which makes it highly readable for the audience. A highly readable document allows easy access for people to knowledge and the points that you want them delivered. It is like having a friendly chat with your friend; you make them understand each point with ease without worrying about misinterpretation or miscommunication.

Now imagine scaling that up to masses of hundreds and thousands of people. If your writing can have this ability, you can easily establish yourself as an accomplished writer.

Summarizing can bring that ability to your writing. People can recognize your speech and genuinely care for what you have to offer. This uniqueness in your writing only comes with a habit of summarizing and using your own way of words.

Final Words

Summarizing is a vital skill to become a masterful writer. You need to learn this art if you want to establish yourself as a successful writer.

In this post, we discussed how you can apply summarizing techniques to elevate your writing skills. We also discussed the advantages of writing concisely and to the point for effective content delivery.

Till then, it’s a goodbye!

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