A summary is a limited and reduced exposition of the treatment of a certain topic. In general, the term refers to a written compendium of the most important points of a topic elaborated with detail and detail, although it can also be an oral summary. The task of summarizing a topic is often applied assiduously to meet the demands of formal study, at any of its levels.
The basic technique for writing a summary is to identify the main ideas of the speech to be summarized. A good criterion to do this is, in the case of a written text, identify the central concept of each paragraph, and then observe what relationships these notions keep. Thus, the very organization of the discourse (which has an intention) would be giving us the guideline of how to carry out the synthesis.
And although we have used this word (synthesis) we are going to clarify that there is an essential difference between "summary" and "synthesis". In reality, both are limited or reduced versions of a longer text, however, the synthesis is much more faithful to that text, since it is about shortening the text, deleting parts that do not belong to the "main idea" and that they are not so necessary for the complete interpretation of the writing. On the other hand, the summary is a much more personal text, which does not necessarily have to be faithful to the original writing, and we can even write it in our own words, but always maintaining coherence and meaning with the source text, because it is the same that we want to transform, through the summary, into more understandable and interpretable.
Too it may be helpful to ask yourself questions about the text in question, and from reading this, answer them. Those answers would help us identify the most important perspectives to consider for a shorter explanation. These questions can be, for example, what? (what is it about), who? (If it is novels or stories, or any other type of text where characters or people intervene), how? (the process) where? (place of the facts or events) when? (time of the facts or events) why? (reasons or causes of the fact, event, process or situation) for what? (purpose that tries to follow the realization of a process or what it is intended to achieve).
Although we have given many examples referring to written text, summaries can also be made in writing but referring to other supports such as we can summarize the plot of a film, which we can find in newspapers or magazines under the format of " reviews ”, or also the summary of a fact or event, such as a“ news ”or a“ chronicle ”in the journalistic discourse.
The most important aspect to assess the advantages of summarizing is the help it provides to affirm concepts in memory. Indeed, the act of looking for the central concepts of an exposed topic helps your understanding and memorization of these, and therefore, it is an aid to study. In addition, a summary is always the perfect aid to review when we must return to a topic that we had already left aside to pass an exam.
One of the supposed disadvantages of making summaries for some educational requirement is the supposed loss of time that it could entail. In reality, what happens is the opposite, time is won and more than enough. Indeed, synthesizing the topics to be studied guarantees that the effort would be carried out only once and in the correct way. Making summaries is advisable to avoid getting into the (bad) habit of “studying by heart”. When a text that we must study is extensive, it is much more likely that its study becomes heavy, difficult and we cannot interpret it clearly, which leads us to try to "force" a lot of text that, probably, are not all necessary and important. On the other hand, making a summary is a mental exercise that helps to correctly fix the important, main and necessary of what we have to study.
