yego.me
💡 Stop wasting time. Read Youtube instead of watch. Download Chrome Extension

Summarizing nonfiction | Reading | Khan Academy


2m read
·Nov 10, 2024

Hello readers. Today I'm going to be talking about the skill of summary, which you might be familiar with in the form of summarizing stories. It's like a retelling, but shorter and in your own words. This is an important skill – summarizing fiction – but it's not what we're talking about today.

This kind of summarizing is used when you want to sum up the information in a non-fiction passage, like a magazine article, a book, a news story, or a scientific paper. Most scientific papers begin with a quick retelling of what the paper's about. So say you're a scientist and you discovered a cure for roboflu. Let's say robots can get the flu, first of all.

In the abstract, the summary retelling at the very beginning of your paper about your cure says, “Hey, under these conditions, we learned that this medicine cures roboflu.” Then the reader goes on to look at everything else you've written in your long scholarly paper.

So how do you do it? To make a summary, you will need your own words, the order of events or information from the text, and important details from the text. So what's not in the summary? Every last detail from the original text. I think I first read something like this in a Neil Gaiman novel.

But here's the deal: imagine you were coming to visit me and you asked me for a map of my neighborhood. Now, if I included every single detail in my map—who lives next to me, every tuft of grass under a tree—it would stop being a map and just become a one-to-one scale drawing of my neighborhood. In other words, it would be useless as a map.

A summary is a map of my neighborhood with only the important bits in it: my apartment, a metro stop, Rock Creek Park. When we make a summary of a text, we are, in effect, making a simple map of that text. It's your job to determine what details are necessary—the most needed.

Like say somewhere deep in that paper on how you discovered a cure for the roboflu, you had written, “It was raining on the cold November day our team first identified the robo-medicine.” Would that be an important enough detail to include in the summary? I'd say no. The big picture is that the team discovered the medicine, not that it was raining when it happened.

But if the cure for robot flu involved garlic and motor oil? Yes, that's an important detail because it relates back to the big picture: we discovered a medicine, and here's what's in it.

To conclude, let me summarize: a summary is a short retelling of a piece of text, with only the important details included. It's like a simple map of a place. You can learn anything.

More Articles

View All
Is Civilization on the Brink of Collapse?
At its height, the Roman Empire was home to about 30% of the world’s population, and in many ways it was the pinnacle of human advancement. Its citizens enjoyed the benefits of central heating, concrete, double glazing, banking, international trade, and u…
You Are Much More Than You Think: A Universe Within You #Shorts
In order to go to the extremes of the universe, to places we can only dream of going, we must first dive deep into something that is all inside of us. Take the big bang, for example. Now, there’s hundreds, thousands of theories as to how we came into exi…
Worked example: Maclaurin polynomial | Series | AP Calculus BC | Khan Academy
We’re told that ( f(x) ) is equal to one over the square root of ( x + 1 ), and what we want to figure out is what is the second degree Maclaurin polynomial of ( f ). And like always, pause this video and see if you could have a go at it. So, let’s remin…
Dr. Anthony Fauci on a Covid-19 vaccine & reopening schools this fall | Homeroom with Sal
Hi everyone, welcome to today’s homeroom. We have a very exciting special conversation with Dr. Fauci coming in a few seconds. But I will make my standard announcement reminding everyone that Khan Academy is a not-for-profit organization. We can only exis…
Wildfires 101 | National Geographic
[Narrator] On average, wildfires burn up to five million acres of land in the United States each year. While they can start naturally, wildfires are often caused by humans with devastating consequences. Wildfires are large, uncontrolled infernos that bu…
Top 5 WTF "Dances" in Video Games: V-LIST #5
Hey B saucers, how you doing? Michael here. First things first, did you see the story about Xbox banning a guy for having offensive language in his profile, only to learn later that he actually did live in Fort Gay, West Virginia? Well, you can read more …