Are you a content writer or an academic looking for the best ways to summarize your text?

Sometimes you need to provide a gist of your blog article or add some concluding remarks at the end of the content.  Likewise, your teacher may ask you to make a summary of your assignments.

Shortening a long text is daunting especially when the specter of deadlines lurks on your mind. Because it devours much of your valuable time and depletes your energy.

To add insult to injury, you may end up creating incorrect abstracts even after much straining.

If you are the one who takes pains while condensing your content, then read this article because I am going to tell you the right ways to do it.

First of all, let’s understand some basic concepts.

What is a summary?

The summary basically defines a terse account of any text. In other words, it is an abstract of a text that briefly explains the whole article.

It is important to note that a summary is always written from an original text. It means you cannot write a summary of some article that does not exist in the first place.

Therefore, a summary should contain all of the essential facts of the original content. The whole exercise becomes useless if it is void of any vital idea. Therefore, adequate care should be taken while briefing a lengthy article.

How to summarize your text manually?

Manual summary making involves the use of hand to write a short text of your own without any physical aid. Instead, you have to think critically along with your writing and language skills to produce such a short text.

You can find different criteria for writing a summary manually. I found the following: the best one. Objectively all methods are the same. The only difference is the use of words.

While starting out keep your text concise, clear, and correct. These are the three C’s of summary writing. These points are the bare minimum criteria of a good gist of your content.

Let’s discuss each one by one.

Clear:

Clarity is the most important feature of excellent writing. In classic writing style, clarity matters the most. Your summary should clearly outlay the ideas in short form.

The basic intent of a summary is to explain a hard worded text in simple words to give value to the readers.

Therefore, if you are shortening a text and you find that you have made it more complicated or your text has become obscure then you need to revamp your text and add clarity to it.

Shakespeare once said, “Brevity is the soul of wit.” That means you need the briefer you write the more powerful it becomes. Hence your summary should exert clear meanings of the whole text.

Concise:

While there isn’t an objective definition of summarizing a text but you try to make it shorter according to the need. People can even cut a 20 pages article to a few hundred words. It is possible to trim your text but it depends upon the need.

It is indeed difficult to do this with practice it can happen. Even Mark Twain’s remarks about conciseness attest to the difficulty behind it. He once said:

“I didn’t have time to write a short letter, so I wrote a long one instead.”

Correct:

Your manual summary should not be bereft of any pertinent point otherwise there is no point in indulging in this process. Because a reader needs a summary to get himself familiar with the original article.

If you add some ideas that are not present in the real text or you miss something important, then you are actually confusing the reader.

Therefore you should need filter out the vital points and jot them down in a continuous passage.

How to summarize your text automatically?

If you do not possess a good command of the language or can’t identify the linguistic peculiarities then you can use a summarizing tool for this task.

Likewise, you may find no time to sit and think to do manual summarization so you should move towards automatic means.

A summarizing tool is an online tool that trims your text to a shorter one in no time. These tools are in fashion nowadays due to extreme speed and accuracy.

A typical text summarizer can be found on Google. You can add the text you want to summarize in the tool and it provides an abstract.

Machine Learning has made text summarization hassle-free by using artificial intelligence. This text summarization involves various intricate computing methods to give an accurate experience.

Typically it can adopt two methods:

Extraction based summary technique:

In this technique, the algorithms first understand the whole text and then find the most important words in the passage.

Vital words are those which impact the meaning of the text. So these words are extracted and then joined together to form a short passage. These short passages together produce a summary.

Abstractive summary technique:

As abstraction entails the meanings of a text so this technique adopts an abstractive technique to understand the contextual meanings of a text before generating a summary.

This is a novel technique that describes the sophisticated algorithms to make an abstract of a text.

In this technique, the tool first understands the meanings of your text and then provides similar words to form sentences just like humans. This method is much more accurate than the extractive one.

Conclusion:

Good writers have essential critical thinking skills therefore they also create a summary. But in some cases, you have less time to think and write creatively. In that case, you can use summarization tools.

You can adopt any of the above-mentioned techniques to get along with this task. It will make your life much easier.

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