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