paragraph essay summary

Have a language expert improve your writing

Run a free plagiarism check in 10 minutes, generate accurate citations for free.

• Knowledge Base
• Working with sources
• How to Write a Summary | Guide & Examples

How to Write a Summary | Guide & Examples

Published on November 23, 2020 by Shona McCombes . Revised on May 31, 2023.

Summarizing , or writing a summary, means giving a concise overview of a text’s main points in your own words. A summary is always much shorter than the original text.

There are five key steps that can help you to write a summary:

• Read the text
• Break it down into sections
• Identify the key points in each section
• Write the summary
• Check the summary against the article

Writing a summary does not involve critiquing or evaluating the source . You should simply provide an accurate account of the most important information and ideas (without copying any text from the original).

Table of contents

When to write a summary, step 1: read the text, step 2: break the text down into sections, step 3: identify the key points in each section, step 4: write the summary, step 5: check the summary against the article, other interesting articles, frequently asked questions about summarizing.

There are many situations in which you might have to summarize an article or other source:

• As a stand-alone assignment to show you’ve understood the material
• To keep notes that will help you remember what you’ve read
• To give an overview of other researchers’ work in a literature review

When you’re writing an academic text like an essay , research paper , or dissertation , you’ll integrate sources in a variety of ways. You might use a brief quote to support your point, or paraphrase a few sentences or paragraphs.

But it’s often appropriate to summarize a whole article or chapter if it is especially relevant to your own research, or to provide an overview of a source before you analyze or critique it.

In any case, the goal of summarizing is to give your reader a clear understanding of the original source. Follow the five steps outlined below to write a good summary.

Don't submit your assignments before you do this

The academic proofreading tool has been trained on 1000s of academic texts. Making it the most accurate and reliable proofreading tool for students. Free citation check included.

Try for free

You should read the article more than once to make sure you’ve thoroughly understood it. It’s often effective to read in three stages:

• Scan the article quickly to get a sense of its topic and overall shape.
• Read the article carefully, highlighting important points and taking notes as you read.
• Skim the article again to confirm you’ve understood the key points, and reread any particularly important or difficult passages.

There are some tricks you can use to identify the key points as you read:

• Start by reading the abstract . This already contains the author’s own summary of their work, and it tells you what to expect from the article.
• Pay attention to headings and subheadings . These should give you a good sense of what each part is about.
• Read the introduction and the conclusion together and compare them: What did the author set out to do, and what was the outcome?

To make the text more manageable and understand its sub-points, break it down into smaller sections.

If the text is a scientific paper that follows a standard empirical structure, it is probably already organized into clearly marked sections, usually including an introduction , methods , results , and discussion .

Other types of articles may not be explicitly divided into sections. But most articles and essays will be structured around a series of sub-points or themes.

Now it’s time go through each section and pick out its most important points. What does your reader need to know to understand the overall argument or conclusion of the article?

Keep in mind that a summary does not involve paraphrasing every single paragraph of the article. Your goal is to extract the essential points, leaving out anything that can be considered background information or supplementary detail.

In a scientific article, there are some easy questions you can ask to identify the key points in each part.

If the article takes a different form, you might have to think more carefully about what points are most important for the reader to understand its argument.

In that case, pay particular attention to the thesis statement —the central claim that the author wants us to accept, which usually appears in the introduction—and the topic sentences that signal the main idea of each paragraph.

Prevent plagiarism. Run a free check.

Now that you know the key points that the article aims to communicate, you need to put them in your own words.

To avoid plagiarism and show you’ve understood the article, it’s essential to properly paraphrase the author’s ideas. Do not copy and paste parts of the article, not even just a sentence or two.

The best way to do this is to put the article aside and write out your own understanding of the author’s key points.

Examples of article summaries

Let’s take a look at an example. Below, we summarize this article , which scientifically investigates the old saying “an apple a day keeps the doctor away.”

Davis et al. (2015) set out to empirically test the popular saying “an apple a day keeps the doctor away.” Apples are often used to represent a healthy lifestyle, and research has shown their nutritional properties could be beneficial for various aspects of health. The authors’ unique approach is to take the saying literally and ask: do people who eat apples use healthcare services less frequently? If there is indeed such a relationship, they suggest, promoting apple consumption could help reduce healthcare costs.

The study used publicly available cross-sectional data from the National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey. Participants were categorized as either apple eaters or non-apple eaters based on their self-reported apple consumption in an average 24-hour period. They were also categorized as either avoiding or not avoiding the use of healthcare services in the past year. The data was statistically analyzed to test whether there was an association between apple consumption and several dependent variables: physician visits, hospital stays, use of mental health services, and use of prescription medication.

Although apple eaters were slightly more likely to have avoided physician visits, this relationship was not statistically significant after adjusting for various relevant factors. No association was found between apple consumption and hospital stays or mental health service use. However, apple eaters were found to be slightly more likely to have avoided using prescription medication. Based on these results, the authors conclude that an apple a day does not keep the doctor away, but it may keep the pharmacist away. They suggest that this finding could have implications for reducing healthcare costs, considering the high annual costs of prescription medication and the inexpensiveness of apples.

However, the authors also note several limitations of the study: most importantly, that apple eaters are likely to differ from non-apple eaters in ways that may have confounded the results (for example, apple eaters may be more likely to be health-conscious). To establish any causal relationship between apple consumption and avoidance of medication, they recommend experimental research.

An article summary like the above would be appropriate for a stand-alone summary assignment. However, you’ll often want to give an even more concise summary of an article.

For example, in a literature review or meta analysis you may want to briefly summarize this study as part of a wider discussion of various sources. In this case, we can boil our summary down even further to include only the most relevant information.

Using national survey data, Davis et al. (2015) tested the assertion that “an apple a day keeps the doctor away” and did not find statistically significant evidence to support this hypothesis. While people who consumed apples were slightly less likely to use prescription medications, the study was unable to demonstrate a causal relationship between these variables.

Citing the source you’re summarizing

When including a summary as part of a larger text, it’s essential to properly cite the source you’re summarizing. The exact format depends on your citation style , but it usually includes an in-text citation and a full reference at the end of your paper.

You can easily create your citations and references in APA or MLA using our free citation generators.

APA Citation Generator MLA Citation Generator

Finally, read through the article once more to ensure that:

• You’ve accurately represented the author’s work
• You haven’t missed any essential information
• The phrasing is not too similar to any sentences in the original.

If you’re summarizing many articles as part of your own work, it may be a good idea to use a plagiarism checker to double-check that your text is completely original and properly cited. Just be sure to use one that’s safe and reliable.

If you want to know more about ChatGPT, AI tools , citation , and plagiarism , make sure to check out some of our other articles with explanations and examples.

• ChatGPT vs human editor
• ChatGPT citations
• Is ChatGPT trustworthy?
• Using ChatGPT for your studies
• What is ChatGPT?
• Chicago style
• Paraphrasing

 Plagiarism

• Types of plagiarism
• Self-plagiarism
• Avoiding plagiarism
• Academic integrity
• Consequences of plagiarism
• Common knowledge

A summary is a short overview of the main points of an article or other source, written entirely in your own words. Want to make your life super easy? Try our free text summarizer today!

A summary is always much shorter than the original text. The length of a summary can range from just a few sentences to several paragraphs; it depends on the length of the article you’re summarizing, and on the purpose of the summary.

You might have to write a summary of a source:

• As a stand-alone assignment to prove you understand the material
• For your own use, to keep notes on your reading
• To provide an overview of other researchers’ work in a literature review
• In a paper , to summarize or introduce a relevant study

To avoid plagiarism when summarizing an article or other source, follow these two rules:

• Write the summary entirely in your own words by paraphrasing the author’s ideas.
• Cite the source with an in-text citation and a full reference so your reader can easily find the original text.

An abstract concisely explains all the key points of an academic text such as a thesis , dissertation or journal article. It should summarize the whole text, not just introduce it.

An abstract is a type of summary , but summaries are also written elsewhere in academic writing . For example, you might summarize a source in a paper , in a literature review , or as a standalone assignment.

All can be done within seconds with our free text summarizer .

Cite this Scribbr article

If you want to cite this source, you can copy and paste the citation or click the “Cite this Scribbr article” button to automatically add the citation to our free Citation Generator.

McCombes, S. (2023, May 31). How to Write a Summary | Guide & Examples. Scribbr. Retrieved August 19, 2024, from https://www.scribbr.com/working-with-sources/how-to-summarize/

Is this article helpful?

Shona McCombes

Other students also liked, how to paraphrase | step-by-step guide & examples, how to quote | citing quotes in apa, mla & chicago, the basics of in-text citation | apa & mla examples, "i thought ai proofreading was useless but..".

I've been using Scribbr for years now and I know it's a service that won't disappoint. It does a good job spotting mistakes”

Summarize any | in a click.

TLDR This helps you summarize any piece of text into concise, easy to digest content so you can free yourself from information overload.

Enter an Article URL or paste your Text

Browser extensions.

Use TLDR This browser extensions to summarize any webpage in a click.

Single platform, endless summaries

Transforming information overload into manageable insights — consistently striving for clarity.

100% Automatic Article Summarization with just a click

In the sheer amount of information that bombards Internet users from all sides, hardly anyone wants to devote their valuable time to reading long texts. TLDR This's clever AI analyzes any piece of text and summarizes it automatically, in a way that makes it easy for you to read, understand and act on.

Article Metadata Extraction

TLDR This, the online article summarizer tool, not only condenses lengthy articles into shorter, digestible content, but it also automatically extracts essential metadata such as author and date information, related images, and the title. Additionally, it estimates the reading time for news articles and blog posts, ensuring you have all the necessary information consolidated in one place for efficient reading.

• Automated author-date extraction
• Related images consolidation
• Instant reading time estimation

Distraction and ad-free reading

As an efficient article summarizer tool, TLDR This meticulously eliminates ads, popups, graphics, and other online distractions, providing you with a clean, uncluttered reading experience. Moreover, it enhances your focus and comprehension by presenting the essential content in a concise and straightforward manner, thus transforming the way you consume information online.

Avoid the Clickbait Trap

TLDR This smartly selects the most relevant points from a text, filtering out weak arguments and baseless speculation. It allows for quick comprehension of the essence, without needing to sift through all paragraphs. By focusing on core substance and disregarding fluff, it enhances efficiency in consuming information, freeing more time for valuable content.

• Filters weak arguments and speculation
• Highlights most relevant points
• Saves time by eliminating fluff

Who is TLDR This for?

TLDR This is a summarizing tool designed for students, writers, teachers, institutions, journalists, and any internet user who needs to quickly understand the essence of lengthy content.

Anyone with access to the Internet

TLDR This is for anyone who just needs to get the gist of a long article. You can read this summary, then go read the original article if you want to.

TLDR This is for students studying for exams, who are overwhelmed by information overload. This tool will help them summarize information into a concise, easy to digest piece of text.

TLDR This is for anyone who writes frequently, and wants to quickly summarize their articles for easier writing and easier reading.

TLDR This is for teachers who want to summarize a long document or chapter for their students.

Institutions

TLDR This is for corporations and institutions who want to condense a piece of content into a summary that is easy to digest for their employees/students.

Journalists

TLDR This is for journalists who need to summarize a long article for their newspaper or magazine.

Featured by the world's best websites

Our platform has been recognized and utilized by top-tier websites across the globe, solidifying our reputation for excellence and reliability in the digital world.

Focus on the Value, Not the Noise.

Upload your PDF, EPUB, DOCX, ODT, or TXT file here.

PDF, EPUB, DOCX, ODT, TXT

Or import your images / photos by clicking below

(JPEG / PNG)

Please wait... or cancel

Reading speed : 0.8

Go to the main ideas in your texts, summarize them « relevantly » in 1 Click

We advice + we design + we develope.

• Text example        

Text example    

Initialisation...

Identify the important ideas and facts

To help you summarize and analyze your argumentative texts , your articles, your scientific texts, your history texts as well as your well-structured analyses work of art, Resoomer provides you with a "Summary text tool" : an educational tool that identifies and summarizes the important ideas and facts of your documents. Summarize in 1-Click, go to the main idea or skim through so that you can then interpret your texts quickly and develop your syntheses .

Who is Resoomer for ?

College students.

With Resoomer, summarize your Wikipedia pages in a matter of seconds for your productivity.

Identify the most important ideas and arguments of your texts so that you can prepare your lessons.

JOURNALISTS

If you prefer simplified information that summarizes the major events, then Resoomer is for you !

Identify and understand very fast the facts and the ideas of your texts that are part of the current news and events.

PRESS RELEASES

With the help of Resoomer, go to the main idea of your articles to write your arguments and critiques .

Save time, summarize your digital documents for a relevant and fast uptake of information.

Need to summarize your books' presentations ? Identify the arguments in a matter of seconds.

Too many documents ? Simplify your readings with Resoomer like a desktop tool.

Need to summarize your chapters ? With Resoomer, go to the heart of your ideas.

Identify your books' or your authors' ideas quickly. Summarize the most important main points.

From now on, create quick summaries of your artists' presentation and their artworks .

INSTITUTIONS

Identify the most important passages in texts that contains a lot of words for detailed analyses .

They Tweeted

Follow @resoomer_     Tweeter

SUMMARIZE YOUR ONLINE ARTICLES IN 1-CLICK

Download the extension for your browser

Surf online and save time when reading on internet ! Resoomer summarizes your articles in 500 words so that you can go to the main idea of your text.

HOW DOES RESOOMER WORK ?

Popular articles

• Summary and synthesis: the difference?
• The text summarizer
• Summarize a text
• Summarize a document online
• Summarize an online article
• Read more and faster documents
• Argue and find arguments in a text
• Learn more": How to increase your knowledge?

  Our partners that like Resoom(er)ing their texts :  

Have a thesis expert improve your writing

Check your thesis for plagiarism in 10 minutes, generate your apa citations for free.

• Knowledge Base
• Working with sources
• How to Write a Summary | Guide & Examples

How to Write a Summary | Guide & Examples

Published on 25 September 2022 by Shona McCombes . Revised on 12 May 2023.

Summarising , or writing a summary, means giving a concise overview of a text’s main points in your own words. A summary is always much shorter than the original text.

There are five key steps that can help you to write a summary:

• Read the text
• Break it down into sections
• Identify the key points in each section
• Write the summary
• Check the summary against the article

Writing a summary does not involve critiquing or analysing the source. You should simply provide an accurate account of the most important information and ideas (without copying any text from the original).

Instantly correct all language mistakes in your text

Be assured that you'll submit flawless writing. Upload your document to correct all your mistakes.

Table of contents

When to write a summary, step 1: read the text, step 2: break the text down into sections, step 3: identify the key points in each section, step 4: write the summary, step 5: check the summary against the article, frequently asked questions.

There are many situations in which you might have to summarise an article or other source:

• As a stand-alone assignment to show you’ve understood the material
• To keep notes that will help you remember what you’ve read
• To give an overview of other researchers’ work in a literature review

When you’re writing an academic text like an essay , research paper , or dissertation , you’ll integrate sources in a variety of ways. You might use a brief quote to support your point, or paraphrase a few sentences or paragraphs.

But it’s often appropriate to summarize a whole article or chapter if it is especially relevant to your own research, or to provide an overview of a source before you analyse or critique it.

In any case, the goal of summarising is to give your reader a clear understanding of the original source. Follow the five steps outlined below to write a good summary.

The only proofreading tool specialized in correcting academic writing

The academic proofreading tool has been trained on 1000s of academic texts and by native English editors. Making it the most accurate and reliable proofreading tool for students.

Correct my document today

You should read the article more than once to make sure you’ve thoroughly understood it. It’s often effective to read in three stages:

• Scan the article quickly to get a sense of its topic and overall shape.
• Read the article carefully, highlighting important points and taking notes as you read.
• Skim the article again to confirm you’ve understood the key points, and reread any particularly important or difficult passages.

There are some tricks you can use to identify the key points as you read:

• Start by reading the abstract . This already contains the author’s own summary of their work, and it tells you what to expect from the article.
• Pay attention to headings and subheadings . These should give you a good sense of what each part is about.
• Read the introduction and the conclusion together and compare them: What did the author set out to do, and what was the outcome?

To make the text more manageable and understand its sub-points, break it down into smaller sections.

If the text is a scientific paper that follows a standard empirical structure, it is probably already organised into clearly marked sections, usually including an introduction, methods, results, and discussion.

Other types of articles may not be explicitly divided into sections. But most articles and essays will be structured around a series of sub-points or themes.

Now it’s time go through each section and pick out its most important points. What does your reader need to know to understand the overall argument or conclusion of the article?

Keep in mind that a summary does not involve paraphrasing every single paragraph of the article. Your goal is to extract the essential points, leaving out anything that can be considered background information or supplementary detail.

In a scientific article, there are some easy questions you can ask to identify the key points in each part.

If the article takes a different form, you might have to think more carefully about what points are most important for the reader to understand its argument.

In that case, pay particular attention to the thesis statement —the central claim that the author wants us to accept, which usually appears in the introduction—and the topic sentences that signal the main idea of each paragraph.

Now that you know the key points that the article aims to communicate, you need to put them in your own words.

To avoid plagiarism and show you’ve understood the article, it’s essential to properly paraphrase the author’s ideas. Do not copy and paste parts of the article, not even just a sentence or two.

The best way to do this is to put the article aside and write out your own understanding of the author’s key points.

Examples of article summaries

Let’s take a look at an example. Below, we summarise this article , which scientifically investigates the old saying ‘an apple a day keeps the doctor away’.

An article summary like the above would be appropriate for a stand-alone summary assignment. However, you’ll often want to give an even more concise summary of an article.

For example, in a literature review or research paper, you may want to briefly summarize this study as part of a wider discussion of various sources. In this case, we can boil our summary down even further to include only the most relevant information.

Citing the source you’re summarizing

When including a summary as part of a larger text, it’s essential to properly cite the source you’re summarizing. The exact format depends on your citation style , but it usually includes an in-text citation and a full reference at the end of your paper.

You can easily create your citations and references in APA or MLA using our free citation generators.

APA Citation Generator MLA Citation Generator

Finally, read through the article once more to ensure that:

• You’ve accurately represented the author’s work
• You haven’t missed any essential information
• The phrasing is not too similar to any sentences in the original.

If you’re summarising many articles as part of your own work, it may be a good idea to use a plagiarism checker to double-check that your text is completely original and properly cited. Just be sure to use one that’s safe and reliable.

A summary is a short overview of the main points of an article or other source, written entirely in your own words.

Save yourself some time with the free summariser.

A summary is always much shorter than the original text. The length of a summary can range from just a few sentences to several paragraphs; it depends on the length of the article you’re summarising, and on the purpose of the summary.

With the summariser tool you can easily adjust the length of your summary.

You might have to write a summary of a source:

• As a stand-alone assignment to prove you understand the material
• For your own use, to keep notes on your reading
• To provide an overview of other researchers’ work in a literature review
• In a paper , to summarise or introduce a relevant study

To avoid plagiarism when summarising an article or other source, follow these two rules:

• Write the summary entirely in your own words by   paraphrasing the author’s ideas.
• Reference the source with an in-text citation and a full reference so your reader can easily find the original text.

An abstract concisely explains all the key points of an academic text such as a thesis , dissertation or journal article. It should summarise the whole text, not just introduce it.

An abstract is a type of summary , but summaries are also written elsewhere in academic writing . For example, you might summarise a source in a paper , in a literature review , or as a standalone assignment.

Cite this Scribbr article

If you want to cite this source, you can copy and paste the citation or click the ‘Cite this Scribbr article’ button to automatically add the citation to our free Reference Generator.

McCombes, S. (2023, May 12). How to Write a Summary | Guide & Examples. Scribbr. Retrieved 19 August 2024, from https://www.scribbr.co.uk/working-sources/how-to-write-a-summary/

Is this article helpful?

Shona McCombes

Other students also liked, how to paraphrase | step-by-step guide & examples, how to quote | citing quotes in harvard & apa, apa referencing (7th ed.) quick guide | in-text citations & references.

Summary: Using it Wisely

What this handout is about.

Knowing how to summarize something you have read, seen, or heard is a valuable skill, one you have probably used in many writing assignments. It is important, though, to recognize when you must go beyond describing, explaining, and restating texts and offer a more complex analysis. This handout will help you distinguish between summary and analysis and avoid inappropriate summary in your academic writing.

Is summary a bad thing?

Not necessarily. But it’s important that your keep your assignment and your audience in mind as you write. If your assignment requires an argument with a thesis statement and supporting evidence—as many academic writing assignments do—then you should limit the amount of summary in your paper. You might use summary to provide background, set the stage, or illustrate supporting evidence, but keep it very brief: a few sentences should do the trick. Most of your paper should focus on your argument. (Our handout on argument will help you construct a good one.)

Writing a summary of what you know about your topic before you start drafting your actual paper can sometimes be helpful. If you are unfamiliar with the material you’re analyzing, you may need to summarize what you’ve read in order to understand your reading and get your thoughts in order. Once you figure out what you know about a subject, it’s easier to decide what you want to argue.

You may also want to try some other pre-writing activities that can help you develop your own analysis. Outlining, freewriting, and mapping make it easier to get your thoughts on the page. (Check out our handout on brainstorming for some suggested techniques.)

Why is it so tempting to stick with summary and skip analysis?

Many writers rely too heavily on summary because it is what they can most easily write. If you’re stalled by a difficult writing prompt, summarizing the plot of The Great Gatsby may be more appealing than staring at the computer for three hours and wondering what to say about F. Scott Fitzgerald’s use of color symbolism. After all, the plot is usually the easiest part of a work to understand. Something similar can happen even when what you are writing about has no plot: if you don’t really understand an author’s argument, it might seem easiest to just repeat what he or she said.

To write a more analytical paper, you may need to review the text or film you are writing about, with a focus on the elements that are relevant to your thesis. If possible, carefully consider your writing assignment before reading, viewing, or listening to the material about which you’ll be writing so that your encounter with the material will be more purposeful. (We offer a handout on reading towards writing .)

How do I know if I’m summarizing?

As you read through your essay, ask yourself the following questions:

• Am I stating something that would be obvious to a reader or viewer?
• Does my essay move through the plot, history, or author’s argument in chronological order, or in the exact same order the author used?
• Am I simply describing what happens, where it happens, or whom it happens to?

A “yes” to any of these questions may be a sign that you are summarizing. If you answer yes to the questions below, though, it is a sign that your paper may have more analysis (which is usually a good thing):

• Am I making an original argument about the text?
• Have I arranged my evidence around my own points, rather than just following the author’s or plot’s order?
• Am I explaining why or how an aspect of the text is significant?

Certain phrases are warning signs of summary. Keep an eye out for these:

• “[This essay] is about…”
• “[This book] is the story of…”
• “[This author] writes about…”
• “[This movie] is set in…”

Here’s an example of an introductory paragraph containing unnecessary summary. Sentences that summarize are in italics:

The Great Gatsby is the story of a mysterious millionaire, Jay Gatsby, who lives alone on an island in New York. F. Scott Fitzgerald wrote the book, but the narrator is Nick Carraway. Nick is Gatsby’s neighbor, and he chronicles the story of Gatsby and his circle of friends, beginning with his introduction to the strange man and ending with Gatsby’s tragic death. In the story, Nick describes his environment through various colors, including green, white, and grey. Whereas white and grey symbolize false purity and decay respectively, the color green offers a symbol of hope.

Here’s how you might change the paragraph to make it a more effective introduction:

In The Great Gatsby, F. Scott Fitzgerald provides readers with detailed descriptions of the area surrounding East Egg, New York. In fact, Nick Carraway’s narration describes the setting with as much detail as the characters in the book. Nick’s description of the colors in his environment presents the book’s themes, symbolizing significant aspects of the post-World War I era. Whereas white and grey symbolize the false purity and decay of the 1920s, the color green offers a symbol of hope.

This version of the paragraph mentions the book’s title, author, setting, and narrator so that the reader is reminded of the text. And that sounds a lot like summary—but the paragraph quickly moves on to the writer’s own main topic: the setting and its relationship to the main themes of the book. The paragraph then closes with the writer’s specific thesis about the symbolism of white, grey, and green.

How do I write more analytically?

Analysis requires breaking something—like a story, poem, play, theory, or argument—into parts so you can understand how those parts work together to make the whole. Ideally, you should begin to analyze a work as you read or view it instead of waiting until after you’re done—it may help you to jot down some notes as you read. Your notes can be about major themes or ideas you notice, as well as anything that intrigues, puzzles, excites, or irritates you. Remember, analytic writing goes beyond the obvious to discuss questions of how and why—so ask yourself those questions as you read.

The St. Martin’s Handbook (the bulleted material below is quoted from p. 38 of the fifth edition) encourages readers to take the following steps in order to analyze a text:

• Identify evidence that supports or illustrates the main point or theme as well as anything that seems to contradict it.
• Consider the relationship between the words and the visuals in the work. Are they well integrated, or are they sometimes at odds with one another? What functions do the visuals serve? To capture attention? To provide more detailed information or illustration? To appeal to readers’ emotions?
• Decide whether the sources used are trustworthy.
• Identify the work’s underlying assumptions about the subject, as well as any biases it reveals.

Once you have written a draft, some questions you might want to ask yourself about your writing are “What’s my point?” or “What am I arguing in this paper?” If you can’t answer these questions, then you haven’t gone beyond summarizing. You may also want to think about how much of your writing comes from your own ideas or arguments. If you’re only reporting someone else’s ideas, you probably aren’t offering an analysis.

What strategies can help me avoid excessive summary?

• Read the assignment (the prompt) as soon as you get it. Make sure to reread it before you start writing. Go back to your assignment often while you write. (Check out our handout on reading assignments ).
• Formulate an argument (including a good thesis) and be sure that your final draft is structured around it, including aspects of the plot, story, history, background, etc. only as evidence for your argument. (You can refer to our handout on constructing thesis statements ).
• Read critically—imagine having a dialogue with the work you are discussing. What parts do you agree with? What parts do you disagree with? What questions do you have about the work? Does it remind you of other works you’ve seen?
• Make sure you have clear topic sentences that make arguments in support of your thesis statement. (Read our handout on paragraph development if you want to work on writing strong paragraphs).
• Use two different highlighters to mark your paper. With one color, highlight areas of summary or description. With the other, highlight areas of analysis. For many college papers, it’s a good idea to have lots of analysis and minimal summary/description.
• Ask yourself: What part of the essay would be obvious to a reader/viewer of the work being discussed? What parts (words, sentences, paragraphs) of the essay could be deleted without loss? In most cases, your paper should focus on points that are essential and that will be interesting to people who have already read or seen the work you are writing about.

But I’m writing a review! Don’t I have to summarize?

That depends. If you’re writing a critique of a piece of literature, a film, or a dramatic performance, you don’t necessarily need to give away much of the plot. The point is to let readers decide whether they want to enjoy it for themselves. If you do summarize, keep your summary brief and to the point.

Instead of telling your readers that the play, book, or film was “boring,” “interesting,” or “really good,” tell them specifically what parts of the work you’re talking about. It’s also important that you go beyond adjectives and explain how the work achieved its effect (how was it interesting?) and why you think the author/director wanted the audience to react a certain way. (We have a special handout on writing reviews that offers more tips.)

If you’re writing a review of an academic book or article, it may be important for you to summarize the main ideas and give an overview of the organization so your readers can decide whether it is relevant to their specific research interests.

If you are unsure how much (if any) summary a particular assignment requires, ask your instructor for guidance.

Works consulted

We consulted these works while writing this handout. This is not a comprehensive list of resources on the handout’s topic, and we encourage you to do your own research to find additional publications. Please do not use this list as a model for the format of your own reference list, as it may not match the citation style you are using. For guidance on formatting citations, please see the UNC Libraries citation tutorial . We revise these tips periodically and welcome feedback.

Barnet, Sylvan. 2015. A Short Guide to Writing about Art , 11th ed. Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice Hall.

Corrigan, Timothy. 2014. A Short Guide to Writing About Film , 9th ed. New York: Pearson.

Lunsford, Andrea A. 2015. The St. Martin’s Handbook , 8th ed. Boston: Bedford/St Martin’s.

Zinsser, William. 2001. On Writing Well: The Classic Guide to Writing Nonfiction , 6th ed. New York: Quill.

You may reproduce it for non-commercial use if you use the entire handout and attribute the source: The Writing Center, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill

Make a Gift

• Grammar Checker
• Paraphrasing Tool
• Critique Report
• Writing Reports
• Learn Blog Grammar Guide Community Events FAQ
• Grammar Guide

How to Write a Summary (Examples Included)

By Ashley Shaw

Have you ever recommended a book to someone and given them a quick overview? Then you’ve created a summary before!

Summarizing is a common part of everyday communication. It feels easy when you’re recounting what happened on your favorite show, but what do you do when the information gets a little more complex?

Written summaries come with their own set of challenges. You might ask yourself:

• What details are unnecessary?
• How do you put this in your own words without changing the meaning?
• How close can you get to the original without plagiarizing it?
• How long should it be?

The answers to these questions depend on the type of summary you are doing and why you are doing it.

A summary in an academic setting is different to a professional summary—and both of those are very different to summarizing a funny story you want to tell your friends.

One thing they all have in common is that you need to relay information in the clearest way possible to help your reader understand. We’ll look at some different forms of summary, and give you some tips on each.

Let’s get started!

What Is a Summary?

How do you write a summary, how do you write an academic summary, what are the four types of academic summaries, how do i write a professional summary, writing or telling a summary in personal situations, summarizing summaries.

A summary is a shorter version of a larger work. Summaries are used at some level in almost every writing task, from formal documents to personal messages.

When you write a summary, you have an audience that doesn’t know every single thing you know.

When you want them to understand your argument, topic, or stance, you may need to explain some things to catch them up.

Instead of having them read the article or hear every single detail of the story or event, you instead give them a brief overview of what they need to know.

Academic, professional, and personal summaries each require you to consider different things, but there are some key rules they all have in common.

Let’s go over a few general guides to writing a summary first.

1. A summary should always be shorter than the original work, usually considerably.

Even if your summary is the length of a full paper, you are likely summarizing a book or other significantly longer work.

2. A summary should tell the reader the highlights of what they need to know without giving them unnecessary details.

3. It should also include enough details to give a clear and honest picture.

For example, if you summarize an article that says “ The Office is the greatest television show of all time,” but don’t mention that they are specifically referring to sitcoms, then you changed the meaning of the article. That’s a problem! Similarly, if you write a summary of your job history and say you volunteered at a hospital for the last three years, but you don’t add that you only went twice in that time, it becomes a little dishonest.

4. Summaries shouldn’t contain personal opinion.

While in the longer work you are creating you might use opinion, within the summary itself, you should avoid all personal opinion. A summary is different than a review. In this moment, you aren’t saying what you think of the work you are summarizing, you are just giving your audience enough information to know what the work says or did.

Now that we have a good idea of what summaries are in general, let’s talk about some specific types of summary you will likely have to do at some point in your writing life.

An academic summary is one you will create for a class or in other academic writing. The exact elements you will need to include depend on the assignment itself.

However, when you’re asked for an academic summary, this usually this means one of five things, all of which are pretty similar:

• You need to do a presentation in which you talk about an article, book, or report.
• You write a summary paper in which the entire paper is a summary of a specific work.
• You summarize a class discussion, lesson, or reading in the form of personal notes or a discussion board post.
• You do something like an annotated bibliography where you write short summaries of multiple works in preparation of a longer assignment.
• You write quick summaries within the body of another assignment . For example, in an argumentative essay, you will likely need to have short summaries of the sources you use to explain their argument before getting into how the source helps you prove your point.

Regardless of what type of summary you are doing, though, there are a few steps you should always follow:

• Skim the work you are summarizing before you read it. Notice what stands out to you.
• Next, read it in depth . Do the same things stand out?
• Put the full text away and write in a few sentences what the main idea or point was.
• Go back and compare to make sure you didn’t forget anything.
• Expand on this to write and then edit your summary.

Each type of academic summary requires slightly different things. Let’s get down to details.

How Do I Write a Summary Paper?

Sometimes teachers assign something called a summary paper . In this, the entire thing is a summary of one article, book, story, or report.

To understand how to write this paper, let’s talk a little bit about the purpose of such an assignment.

A summary paper is usually given to help a teacher see how well a student understands a reading assignment, but also to help the student digest the reading. Sometimes, it can be difficult to understand things we read right away.

However, a good way to process the information is to put it in our own words. That is the point of a summary paper.

A summary paper is:

• A way to explain in our own words what happened in a paper, book, etc.
• A time to think about what was important in the paper, etc.
• A time to think about the meaning and purpose behind the paper, etc.

Here are some things that a summary paper is not:

• A review. Your thoughts and opinions on the thing you are summarizing don’t need to be here unless otherwise specified.
• A comparison. A comparison paper has a lot of summary in it, but it is different than a summary paper. In this, you are just saying what happened, but you aren’t saying places it could have been done differently.
• A paraphrase (though you might have a little paraphrasing in there). In the section on using summary in longer papers, I talk more about the difference between summaries, paraphrases, and quotes.

Because a summary paper is usually longer than other forms of summary, you will be able to chose more detail. However, it still needs to focus on the important events. Summary papers are usually shorter papers.

Let’s say you are writing a 3–4 page summary. You are likely summarizing a full book or an article or short story, which will be much longer than 3–4 pages.

Imagine that you are the author of the work, and your editor comes to you and says they love what you wrote, but they need it to be 3–4 pages instead.

How would you tell that story (argument, idea, etc.) in that length without losing the heart or intent behind it? That is what belongs in a summary paper.

How Do I Write Useful Academic Notes?

Sometimes, you need to write a summary for yourself in the form of notes or for your classmates in the form of a discussion post.

You might not think you need a specific approach for this. After all, only you are going to see it.

However, summarizing for yourself can sometimes be the most difficult type of summary. If you try to write down everything your teacher says, your hand will cramp and you’ll likely miss a lot.

Yet, transcribing doesn’t work because studies show that writing things down (not typing them) actually helps you remember them better.

So how do you find the balance between summarizing the lessons without leaving out important points?

There are some tips for this:

• If your professor writes it on the board, it is probably important.
• What points do your textbooks include when summarizing information? Use these as a guide.
• Write the highlight of every X amount of time, with X being the time you can go without missing anything or getting tired. This could be one point per minute, or three per five minutes, etc.

How Do I Create an Annotated Biography?

An annotated bibliography requires a very specific style of writing. Often, you will write these before a longer research paper . They will ask you to find a certain amount of articles and write a short annotation for each of them.

While an annotation is more than just a summary, it usually starts with a summary of the work. This will be about 2–3 sentences long. Because you don’t have a lot of room, you really have to think about what the most important thing the work says is.

This will basically ask you to explain the point of the article in these couple of sentences, so you should focus on the main point when expressing it.

Here is an example of a summary section within an annotation about this post:

“In this post, the author explains how to write a summary in different types of settings. She walks through academic, professional, and personal summaries. Ultimately, she claims that summaries should be short explanations that get the audience caught up on the topic without leaving out details that would change the meaning.”

Can I Write a Summary Within an Essay?

Perhaps the most common type of summary you will ever do is a short summary within a longer paper.

For example, if you have to write an argumentative essay, you will likely need to use sources to help support your argument.

However, there is a good chance that your readers won’t have read those same sources.

So, you need to give them enough detail to understand your topic without spending too much time explaining and not enough making your argument.

While this depends on exactly how you are using summary in your paper, often, a good amount of summary is the same amount you would put in an annotation.

Just a few sentences will allow the reader to get an idea of the work before moving on to specific parts of it that might help your argument.

What’s the Difference Between Summarizing, Paraphrasing, and Using Quotes?

One important thing to recognize when using summaries in academic settings is that summaries are different than paraphrases or quotes.

A summary is broader and more general. A paraphrase, on the other hand, puts specific parts into your own words. A quote uses the exact words of the original. All of them, however, need to be cited.

Let’s look at an example:

Take these words by Thomas J. Watson:

”Would you like me to give you a formula for success? It’s quite simple, really. Double your rate of failure. You are thinking of failure as the enemy of success. But it isn’t as all. You can be discouraged by failure—or you can learn from it. So go ahead and make mistakes. Make all you can. Because, remember, that’s where you will find success.”

Let’s say I was told to write a summary, a paraphrase, and a quote about this statement. This is what it might look like:

Summary: Thomas J. Watson said that the key to success is actually to fail more often. (This is broad and doesn’t go into details about what he says, but it still gives him credit.)

Paraphrase: Thomas J. Watson, on asking if people would like his formula for success, said that the secret was to fail twice as much. He claimed that when you decide to learn from your mistakes instead of being disappointed by them, and when you start making a lot of them, you will actually find more success. (This includes most of the details, but it is in my own words, while still crediting the source.)

Quote: Thomas J. Watson said, ”Would you like me to give you a formula for success? It’s quite simple, really. Double your rate of failure. You are thinking of failure as the enemy of success. But it isn’t at all. You can be discouraged by failure—or you can learn from it. So go ahead and make mistakes. Make all you can. Because, remember, that’s where you will find success.” (This is the exact words of the original with quotation marks and credit given.)

Avoiding Plagiarism

One of the hardest parts about summarizing someone else’s writing is avoiding plagiarism .

That’s why I have a few rules/tips for you when summarizing anything:

1. Always cite.

If you are talking about someone else’s work in any means, cite your source. If you are summarizing the entire work, all you probably need to do (depending on style guidelines) is say the author’s name. However, if you are summarizing a specific chapter or section, you should state that specifically. Finally, you should make sure to include it in your Work Cited or Reference page.

2. Change the wording.

Sometimes when people are summarizing or paraphrasing a work, they get too close to the original, and actually use the exact words. Unless you use quotation marks, this is plagiarism. However, a good way to avoid this is to hide the article while you are summarizing it. If you don’t have it in front of you, you are less likely to accidentally use the exact words. (However, after you are done, double check that you didn’t miss anything important or give wrong details.)

3. Use a plagiarism checker.

Of course, when you are writing any summary, especially academic summaries, it can be easy to cross the line into plagiarism. If this is a place where you struggle, then ProWritingAid can help.

Just use our Plagiarism Report . It’ll highlight any unoriginal text in your document so you can make sure you are citing everything correctly and summarizing in your own words.

Find out more about ProWritingAid plagiarism bundles.

Along with academic summaries, you might sometimes need to write professional summaries. Often, this means writing a summary about yourself that shows why you are qualified for a position or organization.

In this section, let’s talk about two types of professional summaries: a LinkedIn summary and a summary section within a resume.

How Do I Write My LinkedIn Bio?

LinkedIn is all about professional networking. It offers you a chance to share a brief glimpse of your professional qualifications in a paragraph or two.

This can then be sent to professional connections, or even found by them without you having to reach out. This can help you get a job or build your network.

Your summary is one of the first things a future employer might see about you, and how you write yours can make you stand out from the competition.

Here are some tips on writing a LinkedIn summary :

• Before you write it, think about what you want it to do . If you are looking for a job, what kind of job? What have you done in your past that would stand out to someone hiring for that position? That is what you will want to focus on in your summary.
• Be professional . Unlike many social media platforms, LinkedIn has a reputation for being more formal. Your summary should reflect that to some extent.
• Use keywords . Your summary is searchable, so using keywords that a recruiter might be searching for can help them find you.
• Focus on the start . LinkedIn shows the first 300 characters automatically, and then offers the viewer a chance to read more. Make that start so good that everyone wants to keep reading.
• Focus on accomplishments . Think of your life like a series of albums, and this is your speciality “Greatest Hits” album. What “songs” are you putting on it?

How Do I Summarize My Experience on a Resume?

Writing a professional summary for a resume is different than any other type of summary that you may have to do.

Recruiters go through a lot of resumes every day. They don’t have time to spend ages reading yours, which means you have to wow them quickly.

To do that, you might include a section at the top of your resume that acts almost as an elevator pitch: That one thing you might say to a recruiter to get them to want to talk to you if you only had a 30-second elevator ride.

If you don’t have a lot of experience, though, you might want to skip this section entirely and focus on playing up the experience you do have.

Outside of academic and personal summaries, you use summary a lot in your day-to-day life.

Whether it is telling a good piece of trivia you just learned or a funny story that happened to you, or even setting the stage in creative writing, you summarize all the time.

How you use summary can be an important consideration in whether people want to read your work (or listen to you talk).

Here are some things to think about when telling a story:

• Pick interesting details . Too many and your point will be lost. Not enough, and you didn’t paint the scene or give them a complete idea about what happened.
• Play into the emotions . When telling a story, you want more information than the bare minimum. You want your reader to get the emotion of the story. That requires a little bit more work to accomplish.
• Focus. A summary of one story can lead to another can lead to another. Think about storytellers that you know that go off on a tangent. They never seem to finish one story without telling 100 others!

To wrap up (and to demonstrate everything I just talked about), let’s summarize this post into its most essential parts:

A summary is a great way to quickly give your audience the information they need to understand the topic you are discussing without having to know every detail.

How you write a summary is different depending on what type of summary you are doing:

• An academic summary usually gets to the heart of an article, book, or journal, and it should highlight the main points in your own words. How long it should be depends on the type of assignment it is.
• A professional summary highlights you and your professional, academic, and volunteer history. It shows people in your professional network who you are and why they should hire you, work with you, use your talents, etc.

Being able to tell a good story is another form of summary. You want to tell engaging anecdotes and facts without boring your listeners. This is a skill that is developed over time.

Take your writing to the next level:

20 Editing Tips from Professional Writers

Whether you are writing a novel, essay, article, or email, good writing is an essential part of communicating your ideas., this guide contains the 20 most important writing tips and techniques from a wide range of professional writers..

Be confident about grammar

Check every email, essay, or story for grammar mistakes. Fix them before you press send.

Ashley Shaw

Ashley Shaw is a former editor and marketer/current PhD student and teacher. When she isn't studying con artists for her dissertation, she's thinking of new ways to help college students better understand and love the writing process. You can follow her on Twitter, or, if you prefer animal accounts, follow her rabbits, Audrey Hopbun and Fredra StaHare, on Instagram.

Get started with ProWritingAid

Drop us a line or let's stay in touch via :

• How to Write a Summary

Proficient students understand that  summarizing , identifying what is most important and restating the text (or other media) in your own words, is an important tool for college success.

After all, if you really know a subject, you will be able to summarize it. If you cannot summarize a subject, even if you have memorized all the facts about it, you can be absolutely sure that you have not learned it. And, if you truly learn the subject, you will still be able to summarize it months or years from now.

Proficient students may monitor their understanding of a text by summarizing as they read. They understand that if they can write a one- or two-sentence summary of each paragraph after reading it, then that is a good sign that they have correctly understood it. If they can not summarize the main idea of the paragraph, they know that comprehension has broken down and they need to use fix-up strategies to repair understanding.

Summary Writing Format

• When writing a summary, remember that it should be in the form of a paragraph.
• A summary begins with an introductory sentence that states the text’s title, author and main point of the text as you see it.
• A summary is written in your own words.
• A summary contains only the ideas of the original text. Do not insert any of your own opinions, interpretations, deductions or comments into a summary.
• Identify in order the significant sub-claims the author uses to defend the main point.
• Copy word-for-word three separate passages from the essay that you think support and/or defend the main point of the essay as you see it.
• Cite each passage by first signaling the work and the author, put “quotation marks” around the passage you chose, and put the number of the paragraph where the passages can be found immediately after the passage.
• Using source material from the essay is important. Why? Because defending claims with source material is what you will be asked to do when writing papers for your college professors.
• Write a last sentence that “wraps” up your summary; often a simple rephrasing of the main point.

Example Summary Writing Format

In the essay Santa Ana , author Joan Didion’s main point is ( state main point ). According to Didion “… passage 1 …” (para.3). Didion also writes “… passage 2 …” (para.8). Finally, she states “… passage 3 …” (para. 12) Write a last sentence that “wraps” up your summary; often a simple rephrasing of the main point.

• Provided by : Lumen Learning. Located at : http://lumenlearning.com/ . License : CC BY: Attribution
• Authored by : Paul Powell. Provided by : Central Community College. Project : Kaleidoscope Open Course Initiative. License : CC BY: Attribution
• Authored by : Elisabeth Ellington and Ronda Dorsey Neugebauer. Provided by : Chadron State College. Project : Kaleidoscope Open Course Initiative. License : CC BY: Attribution
• Table of Contents

Instructor Resources (Access Requires Login)

• Overview of Instructor Resources

An Overview of the Writing Process

• Introduction to the Writing Process
• Introduction to Writing
• Your Role as a Learner
• What is an Essay?
• Reading to Write
• Defining the Writing Process
• Videos: Prewriting Techniques
• Thesis Statements
• Organizing an Essay
• Creating Paragraphs
• Conclusions
• Editing and Proofreading
• Matters of Grammar, Mechanics, and Style
• Peer Review Checklist
• Comparative Chart of Writing Strategies

Using Sources

• Quoting, Paraphrasing, and Avoiding Plagiarism
• Formatting the Works Cited Page (MLA)
• Citing Paraphrases and Summaries (APA)
• APA Citation Style, 6th edition: General Style Guidelines

Definition Essay

• Definitional Argument Essay
• How to Write a Definition Essay
• Critical Thinking
• Video: Thesis Explained
• Effective Thesis Statements
• Student Sample: Definition Essay

Narrative Essay

• Introduction to Narrative Essay
• Student Sample: Narrative Essay
• "Shooting an Elephant" by George Orwell
• "Sixty-nine Cents" by Gary Shteyngart
• Video: The Danger of a Single Story
• How to Write an Annotation
• Writing for Success: Narration

Illustration/Example Essay

• Introduction to Illustration/Example Essay
• "She's Your Basic L.O.L. in N.A.D" by Perri Klass
• "April & Paris" by David Sedaris
• Writing for Success: Illustration/Example
• Student Sample: Illustration/Example Essay

Compare/Contrast Essay

• Introduction to Compare/Contrast Essay
• "Disability" by Nancy Mairs
• "Friending, Ancient or Otherwise" by Alex Wright
• "A South African Storm" by Allison Howard
• Writing for Success: Compare/Contrast
• Student Sample: Compare/Contrast Essay

Cause-and-Effect Essay

• Introduction to Cause-and-Effect Essay
• "Cultural Baggage" by Barbara Ehrenreich
• "Women in Science" by K.C. Cole
• Writing for Success: Cause and Effect
• Student Sample: Cause-and-Effect Essay

Argument Essay

• Introduction to Argument Essay
• Rogerian Argument
• "The Case Against Torture," by Alisa Soloman
• "The Case for Torture" by Michael Levin
• How to Write a Summary by Paraphrasing Source Material
• Writing for Success: Argument
• Student Sample: Argument Essay
• Grammar/Mechanics Mini-lessons
• Mini-lesson: Subjects and Verbs, Irregular Verbs, Subject Verb Agreement
• Mini-lesson: Sentence Types
• Mini-lesson: Fragments I
• Mini-lesson: Run-ons and Comma Splices I
• Mini-lesson: Comma Usage
• Mini-lesson: Parallelism
• Mini-lesson: The Apostrophe
• Mini-lesson: Capital Letters
• Grammar Practice - Interactive Quizzes
• De Copia - Demonstration of the Variety of Language
• Style Exercise: Voice

Best Summarizing Tool for Academic Texts

Copy and paste your text

Number of sentences in results:

⚙️ 11 Best Summarizing Tools

• 🤔 How to Summarize an Article without Plagiarizing?
• 📝 How to Proofread Your Summary?

⭐ Best Summarizing Tool: the Benefits

🔗 references, ✅ 11 best summary generators to consider.

We’re here to offer the whole list of text summarizers in this article. Every tool has a strong algorithm so you won’t have to proofread a lot in order to make the summary look hand-written. The usage of such websites can be productive for your studying as long as you can focus on more important tasks and leave this routine work to online tools.

In this blog post, you’ll also find tips on successful summarizing and proofreading. These are basic skills that you will need for many assignments. To summarize text better, you’ll need to read it critically, spot the main idea, underline the essential points, and so on. As for proofreading, this skill is useful not only to students but also to professional writers.

To summarize a text, a paragraph or even an essay, you can find a lot of tools online. Here we’ll list some of these, including those that allow choose the percent of similarity and define the length of the text you’ll get.

If you’re asked to summarize some article or paragraph in your own words, one of these summary makers can become significant for getting fast results. Their user-friendly design and accurate algorithms play an important role in the summary development.

1. Summarize Bot

Summarize Bot is an easy-to-use and ad-free software for fast and accurate summary creation in our list. With its help, you can save your time for research by compressing texts. The summary maker shows the reading time, which it saves for you, and other useful statistics. To summarize any text, you should only send the message in Facebook or add the bot to Slack. The app works with various file types: including PDF, mp3, DOC, TXT, jpg, etc., and supports almost every language.

The only drawback is the absence of web version. If you don’t have a Facebook account and don’t want to install Slack, you won’t be able to enjoy this app’s features.

SMMRY has everything you need for a perfect summary—easy to use design, lots of features, and advanced settings (URL usage). If you look for a web service that changes the wording, this one would never disappoint you.

SMMRY allows you to summarize the text not only by copy-pasting but also with the file uploading or URL inserting. The last one is especially interesting. With this option, you don’t have to edit an article in any way. Just put the URL into the field and get the result. The tool is ad-free and doesn’t require registration.

Jasper is an AI-powered summary generator. It creates unique, plagiarism-free summaries, so it’s a perfect option for those who don’t want to change the wording on their own.

When using this tool, you can summarize a text of up to 12,000 characters (roughly 2,000-3,000 words) in more than 30 languages. Although Jasper doesn’t have a free plan, it offers a 7-day free trial to let you see whether this tool meets your needs.

4. Quillbot

Quillbot offers many tools for students and writers, and summarizer is one of them. With this tool, you can customize your summary length and choose between two modes: paragraph and key sentences. The former presents a summary as a coherent paragraph, while the latter gives you key ideas of the text in the form of bullet points.

What is great about Quillbot is that you can use it for free. However, there’s a limitation: you can only summarize a text of up to 1,200 words on a free plan. A premium plan extends this limit to 6,000 words. In addition, you don’t need to register to use Quillbot summarizer; just input your text and get the result.

5. TLDR This

TLDR This is a summary generator that can help you quickly summarize long text. You can paste your paper directly into the tool or provide it with a URL of the article you want to shorten.

With a free plan, you have unlimited attempts to summarize texts in the form of key sentences. TLDR This also provides advanced AI summaries, but you have only 10 of these on a free plan. To get more of them, you have to go premium, which starts at $4 per month.

HIX.AI summarizer is an AI-powered tool that can help you summarize texts of up to 10,000 characters. If you use Google Chrome or Microsoft Edge, HIX.AI has a convenient extension for you.

You can use the tool for free to check 1,000 words per week. Along with this, you get access to over 120 other AI-powered tools to help you with your writing tasks. These include essay checker, essay rewriter, essay topic generator, and many others. With a premium plan, which starts at $19.99 a month billed yearly, you also get access to GPT-4 and other advanced features.

7. Scholarcy

Scholarcy is one of the best tools for summarizing academic articles. It presents summaries in the form of flashcards, which can be downloaded as Word, PowerPoint, or Markdown files.

This tool has some outstanding features for students and researchers. For example, it creates a referenced summary, which makes it easier for you to cite the information correctly in your paper. In addition, it can find the references from the summarized article and provide you with open-access links to them. The tool can also extract tables and figures from the text and let you download them as Excel files.

Unregistered users can summarize one article per day. With a free registered account, you can make 3 summary flashcards a day. Moreover, Scholarcy offers free Chrome, Edge, and Firefox extensions that allow you to summarize short and medium-sized articles.

Frase is an AI-powered summary generator that is available for free. The tool can summarize texts of up to 600-700 words. Therefore, it’s good if you want to, say, summarize the main points of your short essay or blog post to write a conclusion. However, if you need summaries of long research articles, you should choose another option.

This summary generator allows you to adjust the level of creativity, meaning that you can generate original, plagiarism-free summaries. Frase also has lots of extra features for SEO and project management, which makes it a good option for website content creators.

9. Resoomer

Resoomer is another paraphrasing and summarizing tool that works with several languages. You’re free to use the app in English, French, German, Italian, and Spanish.

This online tool may be considered as one of the best text summarizers in IvyPanda ranking, because it allows performing many custom settings. For example, you can click to Manual and set the size of the summary (in percent or words). You can also set the number of keywords for the tool to focus on.

Among its drawbacks, we would mention that the software works only with argumentative texts and won’t reword other types correctly. Also, free version contains lots of ads and does not allow its users to import files. The premium subscription costs 4.90€ per month or 39.90€/year.

10. Summarizer

Summarizer is another good way to summarize any article you read online. This simple Chrome extension will provide you with a summary within a couple of clicks. Install the add-on, open the article or select the piece of text you want to summarize and click the button “Summarize”.

The software processes various texts in your browser, including long PDF articles. The result of summarizing has only 7% of the original article. This app is great for all who don’t want to read long publications. However, it doesn’t allow you to import file or download the result.

11. Summary Generator

The last article and essay Summary Generator in our list which can be helpful for your experience in college or university. This is free open software everyone can use.

The tool has only two buttons—one to summarize the document and the other to clear the field. With this software, you’ll get a brief summary based on your text. You don’t have to register there to get your document shortened.

Speaking about drawbacks of the website, we would mention too many ads and no options to summarize a URL or document, set up the length of the result and export it to the popular file types.

These were the best online summarizing tools to deal with the task effectively. We hope some of them became your favorite summarizers, and you’ll use them often in the future.

Not sure if a summarizer will work for your paper? Check out this short tutorial on how the text summarizing tool can come in handy for essay writing.

🤔 Techniques & Tools to Summarize without Plagiarizing

Of course, there are times when you can’t depend on online tools. For example, you may be restricted to use them in a class or maybe you have to highlight some specific paragraphs and customizing the tool’s settings would take more time and efforts than summary writing itself.

In this chapter, you’ll learn to summarize a long article, essay, research paper, report, or a book chapter with the help of helpful tips, a logical approach, and a little bit of creativity.

Here are some methods to let you create a fantastic summary.

• Know your goal. To choose the right route to your goal, you need to understand it perfectly. Why should you summarize the text? What is its style: scientific or publicistic? Who is the author? Where was the article published? There are many significant questions that can help to adapt your text better. Develop a short interview to use during the summary writing. Include all the important information on where you need to post the text and for what purpose.
• Thorough reading. To systemize your thoughts about the text, it’s significant to investigate it in detail. Read the text two or more times to grasp the basic ideas of the article and understand its goals and motives. Give yourself all the time you need to process the text. Often we need a couple of hours to extract the right results from the study or learn to paraphrase the text properly.
• Highlight the main idea. When writing a summary, you bear a responsibility for the author. Not only you have to extract the significant idea of the text but to paraphrase it correctly. It’s important not to misrepresent any of the author’s conclusions in your summary. That’s why you should find the main idea and make sure, you can paraphrase it without a loss of meaning. If possible, read a couple of professional reviews of a targeted book chapter or article. It can help you to analyze the text better.
• Mark the arguments. The process of summarizing is always easier if you have a marker to highlight important details in the text. If you don’t have a printed text, there’s always Microsoft Word to use a highlight tool on the paper. Try to mark all arguments, statistics, and facts in the text to represent them in your summary. This information will turn into key elements of the summary you’ll create, so keep attention on what you highlight exactly.
• Take care of plagiarism. Before you start writing, learn what percent of originality should you aim at. Various projects have different requirements. And they determine how many efforts you should put into writing to get a perfect summary your teacher will like. Depending on the percent of originality, build a plan for your short text. Allow yourself copy as much information as allowed to save your time.
• Build a structure. With the help of key elements, which you’ve highlighted in the text, it’s possible to create a powerful structure including all the interesting facts and arguments. Develop an outline according to a basic structure – introduction, body, and conclusion. Even if your summary is extremely short, the main idea should sound in both the first and last sentences.
• Write a draft. If you’re not a professional writer, it can be extremely difficult to develop a text with the correct word count on the first try. We advise you to develop a general text firstly – include all the information without controlling the number of sentences.
• Cut out the unnecessary parts. On this step, you should edit the draft and eliminate the unnecessary parts. Keep in mind, the number of sentences your summary must contain. Make sure the main point is fully represented in the text. You can cut out any sentence except those concluding the significant arguments.
• Wordiness – you should delete unnecessary words, which make it difficult to understand the text
• Common mistakes – mistakes made in academic papers are basically the same, so it’s helpful to have an article like this one when you’re proofreading
• Appropriate terminology – for each topic, there’s a list of the terminology you can use
• Facts and statistics – you can accidently write a wrong year or percent, make sure to avoid these mistakes
• Quotes – every quote should be written correctly and have a link to its source.

📝 How to Proofread the Summarized Text?

Now, when you know how to summarize an article, it’s time to edit your text whether it’s your own writing or a summary generator’s results.

In this chapter, you’ll see the basic ways to proofread any type of text: academic paper (essay, research paper, etc.), article, letter, book’s chapter, and so on.

• Proofread your summary. Are there times when you can’t remember an appropriate synonym? Then you should use Thesaurus and analogous services from time to time. They can expand your vocabulary a lot and help to find the right words even in the most challenging situations.
• Pay attention to easily confused words. It’s especially significant if you edit a nonfiction text – there’s a number of words people often confuse without even realizing. English Oxford Living Dictionaries have a list of these word pairs so you won’t miss any.
• Proofread one type of mistakes at a time. To edit a paper properly don’t split your attention to grammar and punctuation—this way you can miss dozens of mistakes. To get more accurate results, read the first time to edit the style, the second to eliminate grammar mistakes, and the third to proofread punctuation. Take as many times as you need to concentrate on each type.
• Take a rest from your paper. If you use an online summarizing tool, you can skip this step. But if you’ve been writing a paper for several hours and now trying to edit it without taking a break, it may be a bad idea. Why? Because without a fresh pair of eyes there’s a great possibility not to spot even obvious mistakes. Give yourself some time to slightly forget the text—go for a walk or call a friend, and then return to work as a new person.
• Hire a proofreader. If you need to get perfect results, think about hiring a professional. Skills and qualification, which they have, guarantee a perfect text without any mistakes or style issues. Once you find a proofreader, you can optimize your work perfectly. Search for specialists on freelance websites like UpWork — it’s comfortable and safe to use. Of course, there’s one flaw you should think about—hiring a pro is expensive. So, everyone should decide on their own whether they need to spend this money or not.
• Switch your paper with a friend. If you can’t afford a professional editor, there’s a less expensive option—ask a friend to look through your paper and proofread theirs in return. Make sure, you both make manual editing, not just check it with Microsoft Office or analogous software. Although there are great grammar tools, they still can’t spot many mistakes obvious to a human.
• Use grammar checking tools. We recommend you not to depend on multiple grammar tools. But the assistance it can offer is irreplaceable. Start your proofreading by scanning your text with Grammarly or an analogous tool. The service detects many types of errors including confusing words’ pairs, punctuation, misspellings, wordiness, incorrect word order, unfinished sentences, and so on. Of course, you should never correct the mistakes without thinking on every specific issue. Tools not only miss a lot of mistakes but they also can be wrong about your errors.
• Read aloud. It’s amazing how different the written text can sound when read aloud. If you practice this proofreading method, you know that many mistakes can be spotted if you actually pronounce the text. Why does it happen? People understand information better if they perceive it with the help of different senses. You can use this trick even in learning— memorize the materials with the help of reading, listening, and speaking.

These tips are developed to help students proofread their papers easily. We hope this chapter and the post itself create a helpful guide on how to summarize an article.

Here you found the best summarizing tools, which are accessible online and completely free, and learned to summarize various texts and articles on your own.

Updated: Jul 19th, 2024

• Summarizing: Academic Integrity at MIT
• 4 of the Best Online Summarizer Tools to Shorten Text: maketecheasier
• Summarizing: University of Toronto
• 5 Easy Summarizing Strategies for Students: ThoughtCo.
• Summarizing: Texas A&M University Writing Center
• Comparative Study of Text Summarization Methods: Semantic Scholar
• How to Write a Summary: UTEP
• How to Write a Summary: UW
• Free Essays
• Writing Tools
• Lit. Guides
• Donate a Paper
• Q&A by Experts
• Referencing Guides
• Free Textbooks
• Tongue Twisters
• Editorial Policy
• Job Openings
• Video Contest
• Writing Scholarship
• Discount Codes
• Brand Guidelines
• IvyPanda Shop
• Online Courses
• Terms and Conditions
• Privacy Policy
• Cookies Policy
• Copyright Principles
• DMCA Request
• Service Notice

IvyPanda's free summary generator will quickly wrap up any text without plagiarizing. Just paste your essay, article, research paper, or any other written work into the form, pick the desired length, and get a result in seconds.

Text Compactor

Free online automatic text summarization tool.

Follow these simple steps to create a summary of your text.

Click the Summarize! button.

Read your summarized text. If you would like a different summary, repeat Step 2. When you are happy with the summary, copy and paste the text into a word processor, or text to speech program , or language translation tool

© 2010-2016 Knowledge by Design, Inc.

Writing Tools

General Writing

• Paragraph Generator
• Article Rewriter
• Paraphrasing Tool
• Essay Writer
• AI Text Generator
• Sentence Expander
• Paragraph Rewriter
• Sentence Generator
• Plagiarism Remover

Assistant Writing

• Grammar Checker
• Online Proofreader
• Text & PDF Summarizer
• Spell Checker
• AI Translator
• Plagiarism Checker

Punctuation Checker

Creative Writing

• Prompt Generator
• AI Response Generator
• Hashtag Generator
• Slogan Generator
• Tweet (Thread) Generator
• Instagram Caption Generator
• Script Generator
• AI Lyrics Generator
• AI Story Generator

Find captivating Instagram captions for all moments.

Explore perfect email templates for every occasion.

Discover ideal quotes to elevate your book, speech, or essay.

Find the right words to voice your thoughts.

Learn all there is to know about ChatGPT.

Easily translate into 100+ languages.

Explore personal bios for hottest social media platforms.

Discover heartfelt love letters for your beloved.

Learn everything about AI writing and tools.

Discover the top alternatives to well-known AI tools.

Comparisons of popular AI writing tools.

Browse our curated lists of best alternatives to popular AI writers.

HIX Summarizer

Summarize articles, documents, and - surprise - even youtube videos, all in a flash.

Click to upload your file here

Supported file types: DOC/DOCX/PDF/TXT.

Max file size is 10 MB.

URL to summarize

Summary Type

• Bullet Points

Output Language

The Most Powerful Summarizer: Summarize in One Click

HIX Summarizer turns lengthy, complex content into brief summaries with a single click, streamlining your research process, saving you time, and bringing you up to speed.

BrowserGPT for YouTube Summarize YouTube Videos Instantly

Summarize right on YouTube

Extract all key points accurately

Time-stamped, interactive summaries

Summarize All Types of Information Quickly and Easily

Don’t waste time reading lengthy content, let AI do the work. Our tool will quickly process information in 3 forms, enabling you to focus on what matters.

Direct copy-paste text, paragraphs, or articles

YouTube or webpage URLs

Documents like PDF, TXT, DOC

Summarize YouTube Videos in an Instant

When you're pressed for time but still want a quick overview of what a YouTube video covers, let our summary generator do the watching for you and present just the essential details in a matter of seconds.

Summarize the Way You Like It

Imagine having an assistant that doesn't just summarize, but tailors the summary to fit your exact needs. You decide the format that works best for you - concise bulleted lists or flowing paragraphs.

Summarize Anytime, Anywhere

With the BrowserGPT, you get access to our AI summarizing tool whenever and wherever you consume content online. Just select any text on a web page - a paragraph or an article - and generate an instant summary with a click.

How to Summarize Online With HIX Summarizer?

Summarize an article, a document, or a Youtube video with HIX Summarizer is as easy as 123:

Just copy-paste your text, upload a document, or drop a URL of a webpage or Youtube video.

Specify whether you want the summary to be in paragraph or bullet point format.

Click on the 'Generate' button, and an instant, concise summary will be generated for you.

Why HIX Summarizer?

Discover Other Summarizers of HIX Writer

Explain it to a 5th grader, continue writing, linkedin summary generator, story summarizer, real estate bio generator, professional bio generator, free spell checker, sentence rephraser, what is hix summarizer.

HIX Summarizer is the best AI summarizer and summary generator. This summarizing tool is able to extract important info from a passage of text, a PDF/Doc/TXT file, or a webpage instantly. It's not only an article summarizer, it can recap a Youtube video as well.

How do I use HIX Summarizer?

You have three main options to use HIX Summarizer for summarization: simply copy and paste text; upload a PDF, Doc or TXT file; or provide a URL for a web page or YouTube video. You can choose the generated summary to be a paragraph or in bullet point form.

How can an AI summarizer help me?

If you have a long, complex article or video but don't have time to read or watch the whole thing, an AI summarizer can be a lifesaver. It quickly pulls out the most important points, turning a lengthy piece into a short, easy-to-read summary. Plus, you can use this summary as a starting point to build your own content.

Which is the best AI summarizer?

HIX Writer is one of the best AI summary generators enabling you to summarize text, Youtube videos, PDF documents and more.

Try Our Powerful, All-in-one AI Writing Copilot Today!

Enhance your writing process with HIX Writer. Whether you're crafting fact-based articles, humanizing AI text, or rewriting, summarizing, and translating your content, HIX Writer provides the tools you need.

How To Summarize A Paragraph

How to Summarize a Paragraph: Steps, Techniques, & Examples

Published on: Aug 19, 2024

Last updated on: Aug 18, 2024

People also read

Summarizing a paragraph involves creating a short version of a longer passage, focusing on its main ideas and key points.

This skill is crucial for improving your reading and writing abilities. While summarizing might seem straightforward, doing it with clarity and brevity can be challenging.

It's also important to distinguish between summarizing and paraphrasing. A paraphrase involves rewriting a passage in your own words, while a summary condenses only the main points and important details into a much shorter form.

Summarizing is essential whether you’re working on reports, essays, or just trying to grasp the core of a text. 

In this guide, we'll explore steps and techniques on how to summarize a paragraph without plagiarizing, ensuring your summaries are both clear and concise.

What is the Summary of a Paragraph? 

A summary of a paragraph is a brief restatement of the main idea and essential supporting details contained within the original text. 

It captures the core message in a concise form, typically in a few sentences or a short paragraph. 

Importance of Summarizing a Paragraph 

Summarizing a paragraph holds significant importance for various reasons:

• Helps you understand and retain the main points of a text. 
• Allows you to convey complex information clearly and efficiently.
• Allows you to grasp essential concepts quickly, which is useful for exams, assignments, and research.
• Helps in presenting information in a structured and coherent manner.
• You save time when reviewing or communicating essential points.

How to Write a Summary of a Paragraph 

Writing a summary involves refining a paragraph into its core elements while maintaining the original meaning. 

Here are the essential steps to create an effective summary:

Step #1: Read the Paragraph Thoroughly 

Start by reading the entire paragraph carefully to understand its overall meaning. 

Pay attention to the main idea and supporting details. If needed, read the paragraph several times to ensure you grasp the key points.

Step #2: Identify the Main Idea

Determine the main idea or the primary message of the paragraph. This is usually a general statement that encapsulates the central point. 

Look for topic sentences or statements that summarize the core message.

Step #3: Note the Supporting Details 

Identify the supporting details that back up the main idea. These could be examples, explanations, or evidence provided in the paragraph. 

Make brief notes on these points as they help reinforce the main idea.

Step #4: Draft the Summary 

Using your notes, write a concise version of the paragraph. Focus on including the main idea and the most important supporting details. Avoid adding new information or personal opinions. 

Your summary should be brief but informative, typically no longer than a few sentences or a short paragraph.

Step #5: Review and Revise

After drafting your summary, review it to ensure it accurately reflects the original paragraph’s content. Check for clarity, brevity, and coherence. 

Revise if necessary to improve the flow and make sure the summary is clear and to the point.

Dos and Don’ts of Summarizing a Paragraph

Summarizing a paragraph can be a straightforward task when approached correctly. To ensure your summaries are effective, follow these dos and don’ts:

How To Summarize A Paragraph - Example

To illustrate the process of summarizing a paragraph, let’s walk through an example:

Original Paragraph:

Here is how you can summarize this paragraph in your own words:

All in all, summarizing a paragraph is a valuable skill that enhances both your reading comprehension and writing efficiency. Remember the key dos and don’ts. 

By following these guidelines and practicing the R.A.T. method—Read, Annotate, Think—you’ll improve your ability to summarize effectively.

If you're wondering how to summarize a paragraph online, give our summarizer tool a try! 

For generating content online without any hassle, check out MyEssayWriter.ai - an AI essay writer | free essay writing tool !

Frequently Asked Questions

How to summarize a paragraph without plagiarizing.

To summarize a paragraph without plagiarizing, first, read and understand the main idea. Next, note the key points and rewrite them in your own words. Avoid using direct quotes from the original text and provide proper citations if needed.

How To Convert a Long Paragraph Into Summary?

To convert a long paragraph into a summary, start by reading the entire text thoroughly to understand it. Identify and highlight the main points, then write a concise version that includes only the essential details. Ensure the summary accurately reflects the original content and keep it brief.

Caleb S. (Mass Literature and Linguistics, Masters)

Caleb S. is an accomplished author with over five years of experience and a Master's degree from Oxford University. He excels in various writing forms, including articles, press releases, blog posts, and whitepapers. As a valued author at MyEssayWriter.ai, Caleb assists students and professionals by providing practical tips on research, citation, sentence structure, and style enhancement.

On This Page On This Page

Get Access to Advanced Features with our Affordable Plans

Complimentary Trial

Continue for Free

OFFER ENDS Today

Access to all Tools

No Credit Card needed

Quota: 1500 Words (6 pages)

Offer ends in: 03hr 19m 8s

For Monthly Usage

$ 9.99 /month

Up to 2500 words/month

Access to all features

AI Essay Writer

AI Essay Outliner

Go Big Monthly!

$ 14.99 /month

Up to 100,000 words/month

Access to all existing tools

50% off on custom essay orders

500 credits for plagiarism check

Top Annual Savings!

Advanced (4 Months FREE )

$ 99.99 /year

OFFER ENDS Soon

Unlimited essays

12 Months for the price of 8

Access to all upcoming tools

Get started for free

Please enter a valid Name

Please enter a valid email address

Please enter a valid Phone Number

Please enter atleast five characters

Please enter a valid Password

Show Password

Already have an account? Sign In here.

Please enter your email address

Forgot Password?

Don’t have an account? Sign Up

Verify Your Account

Enter the verification codes to confirm your identity.

Code sent to [email protected]

Send again in seconds

Code sent to +1 302 385 6690

Claim Free Essay

Your first custom essay order on our website is FREE!

• AI Content Shield
• AI KW Research
• AI Assistant
• SEO Optimizer
• AI KW Clustering
• Customer reviews
• The NLO Revolution
• Press Center
• Help Center
• Content Resources
• Facebook Group

The Key to an Interesting Summary Paragraph

Table of Contents

Article summaries are common at all academic levels. They are a way to exercise reading comprehension and writing. They teach us to organize our thoughts and emphasize key information. If you want to learn  how to write a summary paragraph , read on.

This article will explain summary paragraphs, their importance [and benefits], and give you some useful tips. Let’s begin.

What is a Summary Paragraph?

A summary paragraph is a form of writing in which the main ideas of an original text are written in a condensed manner . It is a shortened version of a longer piece of content that helps readers grasp a text’s central idea.

Many teachers assign summaries as a way to ascertain a student’s understanding of a topic and improve their writing skills. These short pieces include detailed information on key points of a source.

Writers can summarize any type of content, including articles and academic papers. Summarizing texts is an important part of reading and writing because it exercises our ability to separate the main point from other sentences.

Summary articles take many forms in the academe. For instance, in law school, case digests may well be considered summary articles. Learning to summarize content practices our ability to comprehend the text and explain its concepts in our own words.

Students should write summaries in their own words and take the time to identify and focus on key ideas. This is so we can remove any redundant and vague details. Summaries are important because they create the neural connections needed for the brain to retain and recall information.

Summary paragraphs provide readers with a quick overview of a source material’s main points and topic, and it makes for a quick read. Do note that while summaries save time, there’s also a risk of misinterpretation. It’s why it’s important that people take time to learn how to write a good summary.

Parts of a Summary Paragraph

The main key to writing a good summary is to understand each section and its purpose. This will allow writers to set their mindset and frame their words in a manner that best represents their thoughts and interpretations. The parts of a summary paragraph are:

Introductory Paragraph

The section that includes the title and author of a work. This is also a writer’s chance to hook an audience to their summary and sets the tone of the summary. 

Body Paragraph

A body paragraph contains your topic sentence and its supporting sentences. This is the section where writers present crucial information pertinent to the source material. Writers raise important points and validate these statements with supporting statements. 

Closing Summary Paragraph

The summary paragraph is the section where writers briefly go over the main points of an article . It also contains a writer’s opinion on the article’s worth.

Summary paragraphs are important because they allow writers to leave a good impression on a reader. The information in summary paragraphs tends to influence a reader’s overall impression of a topic or source.

How to Write a Summary Paragraph

Writing a summary paragraph doesn’t have to be a complex process. The quality of your summary paragraph largely depends on your mastery of the subject matter. Therefore, writing a good summary is more a matter of preparation and comprehension rather than skill.

To write a good summary paragraph, you must:

• Read the text thoroughly.
• Write an outline as you read.
• Highlight key points.
• Take note of their supporting statements.
• Use your own words when writing your summary.

You’d be surprised at how easily your words are going to flow by following these simple tips.

Again, writing a summary isn’t a matter of creativity but rather a matter of preparation and comprehension. You can only write a good summary if you have the right idea and if you’re able to express those ideas accurately.

Those who know how to write a summary paragraph also learn to discern crucial information. This is essential for people who deal with huge walls of text every day. Every detail is important, but not all are vital to an article’s main point.

Summarizing articles forces readers to make a habit of choosing the information they give their attention to. 

Abir Ghenaiet

Abir is a data analyst and researcher. Among her interests are artificial intelligence, machine learning, and natural language processing. As a humanitarian and educator, she actively supports women in tech and promotes diversity.

Explore All Text Summarizer Articles

A guide to writing effective performance review summaries.

Writing a performance review summary comes with many challenges. You need to create a concise review that accurately reflects an employee’s…

• Text Summarizer

How to Write Effective One Sentence Summaries

Summarizing a lengthy piece of writing into one solid sentence can sound very tricky. How can you capture and distill…

Effective Steps to Clearly Write Passage Summaries

Learning how to summarize a long passage of text is not only challenging but also time-consuming. But with the proper…

Book Summarizing Websites to Save You Time

Are you looking to save time? Discover some of the best text summarizing tools in this article that will help…

Steps for Summarizing Text Complete With Samples

While writing is important, so is learning how to summarize a piece of text. It is often required in different…

A Quick Guide on Writing Essays and Articles Summaries

Authors write essays to express ideas and thoughts that are mostly argumentative or narrative. They work hard on writing its…

By creating account, you agree with our terms and privacy policy .

• Characters 0
• Sentences 0
• Paragraph 0
• Reading Level N/A
• Reading Time 0
• Speaking Time 0

Text Summarizer

A text summarizer is an online tool that wraps up a text to a specified short length. It condenses a long article to main points. The need for text summarizers is increasing day by day, because of time constraints.

People are looking for shortcut methods to learn ideas in lesser time. Even text summarizers are helping them to decide whether a book, a research paper, or an article is worth reading or not. 

Oxford defines summary as:

“ a short statement that gives only the main points of something, not the details. ”

Approaches in auto summarization:

Mainly two approaches have been developed over time for summarizing a long text into a shorter one.

Extraction Summarization:

This approach entails the method to extract keywords and phrases from sentences and then joining them to produce a compact meaningful summary.

Abstractive Summarization:

In this summary generator, algorithms are developed in such a way to reproduce a long text into a shorter one by NLP. It retains its meaning but changes the structure of sentences.

How does this text summarizer work?

Trained by machine learning,  Paraphraser.io text summarizer uses the concept of abstractive summarization to summarize a book, an article, or a research paper. 

This summarize tool uses NLP to create novel sentences and generates a summary in which the main idea remains intact. It is an advanced-level tool that uses AI for its work. Therefore, the summary produced by this article summarizer tool appears to be flawless and inflow.

How to use our text summarizer?

Our summarizing tool is the best because it is simple to use and efficient also.

• Insert the text (article, research paper, book extract) into the text area.
• Or upload your content.
• Click the “ Summarize ” Button. 
• You can also toggle other features by selecting show bullets, best line, ranked base, and summary length.

Important features of this text summarizer:

The features that give this text summarizer an advantage over others are given below.

Control summarization:

This is the best feature of this summary tool because it gives you the freedom to choose the length of your summarized text.

It depends upon the circumstances, sometimes you want to create a long summary and sometimes a shorter one is enough. This summary generator tool gives you the choice to summarize your text according to your needs.

Bullet points formation:

When you want to analyze your text, you can use our text summarizer to create bullet points. This summarizer tool can help you in creating PowerPoint slides and presentations. 

Rating of the text:

It’s a full-pack feature that gives you the whole ranking of your text. This summary maker provides the best line, best sentence, and general ranking of your text according to its optimization.

Free usage:

Our text summarizer has free usage and can be used whenever it is needed. You can instantly use it without giving any login.

Users of text summarizer:

A text summarizer helps students to condense difficult concepts by summarizing them. They get the know-how of complex articles and books. Moreover, manual summarizing can be very time-consuming. They use a text summarizer to solve their assignments in lesser time.

Journalists:

Journalists can get help from our text summarizer as they have to communicate an incident or an event. Giving thorough news is not valuable as compared to quick headliners. So, they can use this summarizing tool to inform people about daily happenings.

Writers often have to face the difficulty of creating unique content either blogs or guest posts. They can only produce exceptional content if they know the gist of the whole story.

While getting ideas from different sources, they can use our text summarizer to skim out the necessary information. This information is incorporated into what they are writing.

Supported Languages

Free Al Office Suite with PDF Editor

Edit Word, Excel, and PPT for FREE.

Read, edit, and convert PDFs with the powerful PDF toolkit.

Microsoft-like interface, easy to use.

Windows • MacOS • Linux • iOS • Android

• Articles of Word

How to Write an Introduction Paragraph: Examples and Guide

There are times when an introduction predicts what your entire essay will say—it’s essentially a reflection. If done successfully, it grabs the reader’s attention and entices them to read further into the essay. As a writer, I know the importance of a strong and engaging introduction, and with practice, I have excelled in the art of writing a good intro. Here’s how you can write a compelling introduction with examples.

The Purpose of the Introduction Paragraph

A good introduction serves as a roadmap for your essay, setting the stage for what is to come. Its primary purpose is to grab the reader’s attention, provide necessary background information, and clearly state the main argument or thesis of the essay. By doing so, it helps the reader transition from their own world into the context of your analysis, making them interested in reading further. A well-written introduction also outlines the structure of the essay, ensuring that the reader knows what to expect in the body paragraphs. This initial section is crucial for making a strong first impression, establishing the tone, and demonstrating the quality and direction of your work. A good introduction paragraph should be able to:

Engage the Reader: Capture interest with an intriguing opening sentence or a compelling story.

Provide Context: Offer background information needed to understand the topic.

State the Thesis: Clearly present your main argument or thesis statement.

Outline the Structure: Briefly mention the main points or sections covered in the essay.

Establish Relevance: Explain why the topic is important and worth discussing.

Set the Tone: Establish the style and tone of your writing.

Write an Introduction Paragraph

An introduction paragraph sets the tone for your entire essay, shaping your reader's expectations and mood. It's like the gateway to your ideas - a good one hooks the reader, compelling them to continue, while a weak introduction might make them lose interest before they've even begun. That's why learning how to start an introduction paragraph for an essay is crucial for students and writers alike.

With tools like WPS Office at your fingertips, you're not just getting a word processor, but an AI assistant to guide you through the entire journey of crafting that perfect opening. In fact, I'll be using WPS Office for this tutorial to demonstrate its features. So, let's dive in and explore how to write an essay introduction step by step:

The hook is the opening sentence or a few sentences of an essay designed to grab the reader's attention and entice them to keep reading. It serves to engage the reader by presenting something intriguing, surprising, or relevant to the essay's topic.

The main purpose of the hook is to spark the reader's interest and make them want to read more. It's the first impression the reader gets, so it needs to be compelling and relevant to the essay's subject.

1.Start with a Surprising Fact or Statistic: Begin with an interesting or shocking fact that relates to your topic. This immediately grabs the reader's attention.

Bad Example: "Drunk driving is a serious issue."

Good Example: "Every year, over 1.25 million people die in car accidents, many of which are caused by drunk driving."

2.Use a Quote: Introduce your essay with a relevant quote that encapsulates your main point.

Bad Example: "Drunk driving is defined as driving while impaired by alcohol."

Good Example: “At eighteen, Michelle had a lifetime of promise in front of her. Attending college on a track scholarship, she was earning good grades and making lots of friends. Then one night her life was forever altered…”

3.Pose a Rhetorical Question: Ask a question that provokes thought and engages the reader.

Bad Example: "Have you ever driven a car?"

Good Example: "What if every time you got behind the wheel, you risked not only your life but the lives of others?"

4.Tell an Anecdote or Story: Share a brief, compelling story that relates to your topic.

Bad Example: "I once heard a story about a drunk driver."

Good Example: "At eighteen, Michelle had a lifetime of promise in front of her. Attending college on a track scholarship, she was earning good grades and making lots of friends. Then one night her life was forever altered..."

If you need ideas to help you improve on the hook for your introduction, consider providing WPS AI with a prompt such as:

"Write an introduction on the topic 'Risks of Driving Intoxicated' and provide four individual hooks: one with a surprising fact, one using a quote, one with rhetorical questions, and one through telling an anecdote."

WPS AI will produce a catchy hook statement that you can use for your introduction, such as:

Background Information

Background information provides the reader with the necessary context to understand the essay's topic. This may include historical, geographical, or social context, definitions of key terms, or an outline of the debate surrounding the topic.

The background helps to bridge the gap between the hook and the thesis statement. It gives the reader the context they need to understand the main argument of the essay and why it's important.

1.Provide Context: Explain the broader context of your topic to show its significance.

Bad Example: "Drunk driving is bad."

Good Example: "Michelle's story is not isolated. Each year, over 1.25 million people die in car accidents, many of which are caused by drunk driving."

2.Introduce Key Terms and Concepts: Define any terms or concepts that are crucial to understanding your thesis.

Bad Example: "Drunk driving is when you drink alcohol and drive."

Good Example: "Drunk driving, legally defined as operating a vehicle with a blood alcohol content (BAC) of 0.08% or higher, is a preventable cause of many fatalities."

3.Set Up the Problem: Briefly discuss the scope of the issue or debate you will be addressing.

Bad Example: "People drive drunk sometimes."

Good Example: "Despite strict laws, drunk driving continues to be a significant problem worldwide, leading to devastating consequences for victims and their families."

To give an effective and detailed background information in your introduction consider proving WPS AI with a prompt like this:

“This serves as the background to my introduction: 'People frequently choose to drive under the influence of alcohol.' Please enhance it to address the problem and discuss its scope."

WPS AI will produce a detailed background passage for your introduction, give as:

Thesis Statement

The thesis statement is a concise summary of the main point or claim of the essay. It usually appears at the end of the introduction and states the essay's central argument or position.

The thesis statement guides the direction of the essay by informing the reader what the essay will argue or discuss. It sets the tone and focus of the entire paper.

1.Be Clear and Specific: Clearly state your main point and how you will support it.

Bad Example: "This essay will talk about drunk driving."

Good Example: "Drunk driving laws need to include stricter penalties for those convicted of driving under the influence of alcohol to reduce accidents and save lives."

2.Make an Argument: Present a claim that requires evidence and can be debated.

Bad Example: "Drunk driving is bad and should be stopped."

Good Example: "Implementing harsher penalties for drunk driving will deter offenders and significantly decrease the number of alcohol-related accidents."

3.Outline Your Main Points: Indicate the main points you will cover in your essay to support your thesis.

Bad Example: "I will discuss the problems with drunk driving."

Good Example: "Stricter penalties are necessary because they act as a deterrent, they can prevent repeat offenses, and they provide justice for victims."

You can take help from WPS AI to extract the thesis statement of your essay using the WPS AI chat box.

Step 1: Click on the WPS AI widget at the top corner of the WPS Writer interface.

Step 2: The WPS AI pane will open on the right side of the screen. Type in your prompt to extract the thesis statement of your essay and then paste the essay.

Here is a prompt example that you can use:

"Extract the thesis statement from the following essay:"

Step 3: WPS AI will provide the thesis statement. To refine it further, engage with the WPS AI chatbot by asking more questions or queries.

The summary or road map briefly outlines how the essay will be structured. It provides a preview of the main points that will be covered, giving the reader a sense of the direction of the argument.

1.Summarize Main Points: Briefly mention the key arguments or points you will discuss in your essay.

Bad Example: "I will talk about drunk driving laws, penalties, and justice."

Good Example: "This essay will first examine the current state of drunk driving laws, then explore the impact of stricter penalties on reducing incidents, and finally discuss how these penalties can bring justice to victims."

2.Be Concise: Keep it short and to the point, providing a clear outline without going into too much detail.

Bad Example: "I will write about drunk driving and why it is bad."

Good Example: "By examining the effectiveness of current laws, the potential benefits of stricter penalties, and the importance of justice for victims, this essay argues that harsher punishments for drunk driving are essential."

“Write a concise summary for the introduction of an essay on the topic "Risks of Driving Intoxicated." The summary should briefly mention the key points that will be covered in the essay, without going into too much detail."

The summary should briefly outline the main points covered in the essay, emphasizing the societal impact, legal ramifications, and personal consequences of driving under the influence. Ensure clarity and coherence, setting the stage for a comprehensive exploration of the topic in the subsequent sections.

Examples of Different Essays

Essays come in various forms, each serving a unique purpose and following specific structures. Understanding these different types can help you write an essay introduction more effectively. Let's explore three common types of essays: Argumentative, Expository, and Literary. Each example below demonstrates the key elements of its respective essay type, including the hook, background information, and thesis statement.

Argumentary

An argumentative essay aims to present a position on a topic and support it with evidence.

An expository essay explains a topic in a clear and concise manner without arguing a specific position.

A literary essay analyzes and interprets a work of literature, focusing on elements such as theme, character, or style.

More Examples of Different Topics

Let's take a look at some sample introductions of essays in different disciplines. This will further help you in writing an effective essay introduction.

Example #1 Medicine

Example #2 literature, example #3 social sciences, example #4 engineering, example #5 business & marketing, using wps ai to perfect your introduction.

With WPS Office, you have access to a comprehensive suite of tools designed to support your academic writing needs. Its AI-powered features enhance your writing process, from initial drafting to final proofreading. Specifically, WPS Office AI will help perfect your introduction, ensuring it captures attention and sets the stage for your paper. Plus, WPS Office is available for free, making it an accessible and indispensable resource for students and academics alike.

1.Check the Grammar and Syntax

Your introduction sets the tone for your entire essay, so it's crucial that it's grammatically correct and free from syntax errors. WPS AI careful checks for any grammatical mistakes and syntax issues, ensuring that your introduction is polished and professional. It provides suggestions for corrections, helping you present a clear and error-free first impression.

2.Rewrite Your Statement for Clarity

WPS AI can improve the clarity and coherence of your introduction by rewriting complex or awkwardly phrased sentences. It identifies areas where your writing may be ambiguous or convoluted and offers alternative phrasing that enhances readability. This feature ensures that your introduction is clear, concise, and compelling.

3.Automatically Expand Content

When you need to elaborate on a point or expand your introduction, WPS AI can automatically generate additional content. This feature helps you add relevant information that aligns with your essay's theme and tone. It’s particularly useful for developing a strong hook, providing context, or setting up your thesis statement.

4.Give an Outline for Your Paper

Writing a strong introduction often involves giving your readers a brief outline of what to expect in your essay. WPS AI can assist in structuring your introduction to include a concise overview of your main points, providing a roadmap for your readers. This feature ensures that your introduction effectively sets the stage for the rest of your essay. Here is an example of an outline generated using WPS AI Writer for an essay:

If you find this outline suitable for your essay, simply scroll down and click on "Insert" to use the outline for your essay.

1. What is the structure of an essay?

An essay is divided into three main parts:

Introduction: This section introduces the topic and presents the main idea (thesis). It provides some background information and outlines what the essay will discuss.

Body: The body forms the essay's core, where you develop arguments to support your thesis. It is organized into several paragraphs, each presenting a distinct point backed by evidence.

Conclusion: The conclusion summarizes the main points covered in the essay and strengthens the thesis statement. It wraps up the discussion and may offer final insights or suggestions.

2. Why do I need a thesis statement?

A thesis statement plays a crucial role in academic essays and research papers by presenting the central argument or idea to be explored and developed. Here are several key reasons why a thesis statement is essential:

It provides clear direction and focus for your writing.

It summarizes your main argument for the reader.

It maintains clarity and coherence throughout the essay.

It serves as the foundational basis for structuring the entire essay.

3. How long should the introduction paragraph be?

The introduction paragraph for a research paper typically spans one to two paragraphs. As a general rule, the entire introduction section—which includes the opening paragraph, literature review, and research questions—should constitute approximately 10% to 15% of the paper's total length. This structure allows for a comprehensive yet concise setup of your research topic, providing readers with the necessary context before delving into the main body of your work.

Beyond the Hook: Building a Strong Introduction Paragraph

Writing an introduction is perhaps the most thought-provoking and critical task in crafting any assignment. With the myriad features offered by WPS Office, you can effortlessly create a phenomenal essay introduction. WPS AI enhances this process with tools that ensure clarity, coherence, and creativity. Whether it's organizing your thoughts or refining your language, WPS Office empowers you to craft introductions that captivate readers from the start. Download WPS Office today and experience firsthand how it transforms your writing process into a seamless and impactful journey.

• 1. What is PowerPoint: Introduction, Guide and Tips
• 2. Microsoft 365 Copilot: Introduction and tips for using it
• 3. How to Use Transitions to Start a Paragraph [Tips with Examples]
• 4. Free AI Paragraph Writing Tool Generator - No Sign Up
• 5. Microsoft Word 365 Product Review: Introduction & Alternatives
• 6. HWP Viewers Review: Introduction, Features, How to Use [2024]

15 years of office industry experience, tech lover and copywriter. Follow me for product reviews, comparisons, and recommendations for new apps and software.

Interact Blog

Learn list building with quizzes

Explore our powerful tools that boost conversions.

AI Quiz Maker

Create quizzes tailored to your business with AI.

• Integrations

Free AI Tools

Try out our AI tools for quizzes, chatbots, and more.

Quiz Gallery

Explore diverse quizzes for various industries and use cases.

Browse curated collection of high-performing quizzes.

Learn about our mission, values, and team.

Blog & Articles

Expert insights on quiz marketing & lead gen strategies.

Referral Program

Earn passive income by referring your audience to Interact.

The Works of Edgar Allan Poe — Volume 5 Informative Summary

This volume of Edgar Allan Poe’s works, compiled by David Widger and revised by Richard Tonsing, offers a glimpse into the creative genius of one of America’s most celebrated authors. The volume includes a diverse range of Poe’s writing, from his iconic poetry to insightful philosophical essays and captivating short stories.

The collection features some of Poe’s most well-known poems, including “The Raven,” “The Bells,” and “Annabel Lee,” each showcasing his mastery of rhythm, rhyme, and vivid imagery. Poe’s poems often explore themes of love, loss, death, and the macabre, often infused with a melancholic tone and a sense of the supernatural.

Key findings:

• Poe’s fascination with the macabre:  Throughout his work, Poe frequently explores themes of death, decay, and the supernatural. This is evident in his poems, like “The Raven” and “Annabel Lee,” as well as his short stories, like “The Tell-Tale Heart” and “The Fall of the House of Usher.”
• Poe’s philosophical depth:  Poe was not only a gifted writer but also a keen observer of human nature. His philosophical essays, like “The Poetic Principle” and “Philosophy of Furniture,” delve into the nature of beauty, truth, and the human soul, revealing his nuanced and often unconventional thinking.
• The Poetic Principle:  Poe’s essay “The Poetic Principle” explores the nature of poetry, arguing that its primary purpose is to evoke beauty and elevate the soul. He emphasizes the importance of rhythm, rhyme, and imagery, and suggests that true poetry is not concerned with morality or truth but with creating a sense of awe and wonder.
• The Philosophy of Furniture:  In this essay, Poe criticizes the ostentatious and tasteless decorating practices prevalent in American homes. He argues that true beauty lies in simplicity, harmony, and a sense of repose, not in the mere display of wealth and extravagant items.
• Poe’s Style:  Poe’s poems often feature distinctive elements like internal rhyme, alliteration, and a focus on sound devices, which create a unique and memorable rhythm. His short stories are marked by their dark and atmospheric settings, suspenseful narratives, and exploration of the psychological depths of his characters.

Historical context:

Poe’s writings reflect the social and cultural landscape of 19th-century America. He wrote during a time of great social and political upheaval, marked by the rise of industrialization, the expansion of democracy, and the growing influence of Romanticism in the arts. These themes are evident in some of his stories and poems, where he explores issues like isolation, alienation, and the search for meaning in a rapidly changing world.

• Poe was an assistant editor of the  Evening Mirror :  Poe held this position while writing “The Raven,” his most famous poem.
• Poe’s fascination with the cholera epidemic:  The cholera epidemic of 1832, which ravaged New York City, is referenced in Poe’s short story, “The Man of the Crowd.”
• Poe’s interest in the works of William Shakespeare:  Shakespeare’s works are referenced in multiple pieces, including “To One in Paradise” and “The Haunted Palace.”
• Poe’s knowledge of classical literature:  Poe’s writings are filled with allusions to Greek mythology, Roman history, and classical literature, demonstrating his extensive education.
• Poe’s experience with the military:  Poe’s military background is evident in some of his works, such as “The Conqueror Worm” and “The Haunted Palace.”
• Poe’s experience with loss:  The death of Poe’s wife, Virginia Clemm, had a profound impact on his life and work. The poem “Annabel Lee” is believed to be an expression of his grief and love for her.
• Poe’s interest in the occult and the supernatural:  Poe’s fascination with the supernatural is often present in his works, which frequently feature mysterious characters, haunted settings, and explorations of the human subconscious.
• Poe’s interest in Eastern cultures:  The poem “Tamerlane” references Samarkand, a city in Central Asia, and incorporates elements of Persian and Eastern cultures.
• Poe’s interest in science:  Poe had a strong interest in science, particularly in the emerging fields of electricity and astronomy, which are referenced in his work.
• Poe’s work as a literary critic:  Poe was a highly respected and influential literary critic, and his writings on poetry and fiction were widely read and debated.
• Poe’s struggle with poverty and addiction:  Poe’s personal life was often marred by financial difficulties and addiction to alcohol and opium. This is reflected in some of his stories and poems.
• Poe’s complex relationship with his mother-in-law, Maria Clemm:  Poe’s mother-in-law, Maria Clemm, was a source of both support and conflict in his life.
• Poe’s interest in wine:  His essay, “Some Words with a Mummy,” includes a vivid scene where Poe, as a character, enjoys a variety of wines and discusses his appreciation for them.
• Poe’s interest in classical languages:  Poe’s education included classical languages like Greek and Latin, which are present in his work.
• Poe’s interest in the works of Voltaire:  Poe’s essay “Some Words with a Mummy” contains a reference to Voltaire’s observations on Persepolis.
• Poe’s use of literary allusions:  Poe frequently uses literary allusions in his work, referencing writers like Milton, Shakespeare, and others.

Statistics:

• Poe was 40 years old when he died:  His death on October 7, 1849, occurred at a young age.
• Poe published his first volume of poetry at the age of 24:  His first collection, “Tamerlane and Other Poems,” was published in 1827.
• Poe wrote 2 volumes of poetry before the age of 30:  His second collection, “Al Aaraaf, Tamerlane, and Other Poems,” was published in 1829.
• Poe wrote and published “The Raven” in 1845:  This poem was an instant success and is considered one of the most famous poems in American literature.
• Poe’s short story “The Man of the Crowd” was published in 1840:  The story takes place in London and reflects Poe’s interest in the city and its diverse population.
• Poe published his works in several journals:  Poe’s work appeared in various publications like the  Southern Literary Messenger ,  Graham’s Magazine , and the  Broadway Journal .
• Poe’s writings have been translated into over 40 languages:  His work has had a global impact and continues to be studied and enjoyed by readers worldwide.
• Poe’s short story “Never Bet the Devil Your Head” is set in a bridge:  The story is a macabre tale featuring a man who repeatedly makes bets with the Devil.
• Poe’s drama “Politian” is set in Rome:  The play focuses on themes of love, betrayal, and revenge.
• Poe’s poem “Ulalume” is set in October:  The poem features a haunting and dream-like journey through a mysterious landscape.
• “The Raven” has over 200 known translations:  It is one of the most translated poems in the world.
• Poe wrote over 70 short stories:  His short fiction remains popular and is often adapted into film and television.
• Poe wrote several essays on various subjects, including literary criticism, philosophy, and aesthetics:  His essays provide insights into his thinking on these topics.
• Poetic Principle:  The core philosophy of poetry, as articulated by Edgar Allan Poe, emphasizing beauty, elevation of the soul, and the importance of form and sound.
• Metaphysical Poetry:  A style of poetry that explores complex philosophical and theological themes, often characterized by intricate metaphors and intellectual puzzles.
• Romanticism:  A literary and artistic movement that emphasized emotion, imagination, and individualism, and valued nature, intuition, and the supernatural.
• Catalepsy:  A condition characterized by a trance-like state, rigidity of the limbs, and loss of consciousness, similar to a coma.
• Phonetic:  Relating to sounds or the system of sounds in a language.
• Hieroglyphics:  A system of writing using pictures or symbols to represent words or ideas.
• Asphaltum:  A naturally occurring black, sticky substance, used in ancient Egypt for embalming and other purposes.
• Galvanism:  The use of electricity to stimulate muscles or nerves, named after the Italian scientist Luigi Galvani.
• Kabbala:  A system of mystical interpretation of Jewish scripture, often involving esoteric symbols and numerology.
• Pæan:  A song of praise or triumph, often sung in ancient Greece to celebrate victory or healing.
• “The Raven”:  A classic example of Poe’s use of dark imagery, suspense, and sound devices, exploring themes of loss, grief, and the supernatural. The poem’s memorable rhythm and repeated refrain create a sense of haunting melancholy.
• “The Bells”:  A poem that uses a series of bells to evoke different moods and emotions, highlighting Poe’s skill with sound devices and wordplay.
• “Annabel Lee”:  A poignant ballad that explores the themes of love, loss, and death, capturing the deep sorrow of a man mourning his beloved.
• “To Helen”:  A sonnet that celebrates the beauty of a woman, comparing her to ancient Greek and Roman ideals.
• “The Haunted Palace”:  A poem that uses the imagery of a crumbling palace to symbolize the decline of a great civilization, exploring themes of decay and the ephemerality of power.
• “The Conqueror Worm”:  A poem that uses the imagery of a play to represent the cycle of life and death, with the “Conqueror Worm” representing the inevitability of mortality.
• “Never Bet the Devil Your Head”:  A cautionary tale about a man who repeatedly makes foolish bets with the Devil, leading to his downfall.
• “The Man of the Crowd”:  A story about an anonymous man who seeks solace in the anonymity of a large crowd, highlighting Poe’s fascination with the human condition and the city.
• “Some Words with a Mummy”:  A humorous and thought-provoking short story that plays with the idea of immortality and the nature of time.
• “Politian”:  A drama exploring themes of love, revenge, and the consequences of rash actions.

Conclusion:

Edgar Allan Poe’s work in this volume is a testament to his literary genius and enduring influence. His poems, stories, and essays are characterized by their dark and atmospheric settings, intense emotions, exploration of the human psyche, and a fascination with the macabre and supernatural. While Poe was known for his melancholy and introspective nature, his work also reveals a deep intellect and a keen interest in science, philosophy, and the human condition. The collection is a valuable resource for understanding the life and work of one of America’s most celebrated authors.

Related Posts...

The Lair of the White Worm Informative Summary

Overview: This Gothic novel by Bram Stoker follows the journey of Adam Salton, an Australian rancher, as he travels to England to meet his long-lost grand-uncle and inherit his estate,…

Narrative Summary of The Lair of the White Worm

Overview:  I find myself transported to the heart of Mercia, England, where I become entangled in a web of ancient legends, historical mysteries, and the unsettling presence of a monstrous…

A Thin Ghost and Others Informative Summary

Overview: “A Thin Ghost and Others” presents a collection of five chilling ghost stories by M.R. James, a master of the genre. The stories are set in various locations and…

More Posts by Jessmyn Solana...

The Lair of the White Worm Trivia Quiz Questions and Answers

What ancient structure, associated with the Caswall family, is the setting for much of the novel’s action? Correct Answer: Castra Regis Correct Answer Explanation: Castra Regis is an ancient castle,…

The Lair of the White Worm Quiz Questions and Answers

How do you feel about the portrayal of ancient legends and folklore in the story? What’s your favorite gothic element in The Lair of the White Worm? What makes you…

A Thin Ghost and Others Trivia Quiz Questions and Answers

In the story “The Residence at Whitminster”, what was the name of the young boy who tragically died? Correct Answer: Frank Correct Answer Explanation: In “The Residence at Whitminster”, the…

Make a quiz for your business with AI

Use our AI quiz maker to create a beautiful quiz for your brand in a minute.

Allegory Of The Cave Summary Essays