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Reading & Comprehension

Summarizing After Reading: Say It Short in Your Words

Moderate or mixed evidence 5 min read Level: Beginner Reviewed October 30, 2026

Summarizing means closing the text and writing the main ideas in your own words. See how to do it well, where it fails and how to check your work.

Evidence rating: Moderate or mixed evidence. Summarizing was rated low utility in a large review because results depend heavily on how well students are trained to do it (Dunlosky et al., 2013). Studies of summary rules show that students can learn to write better summaries (Brown & Day, 1983). Writing from memory, without looking at the text, has stronger support as a form of retrieval practice (Karpicke & Blunt, 2011). How we rate evidence

What it is

Summarizing is writing a short version of what you read, in your own words. A good summary keeps the main ideas and drops the examples, repeated points and small details. A chapter of 3,000 words might become five sentences or a short list.

How you summarize matters a lot. If you copy sentences from the text while looking at it, you are mostly transcribing. If you close the book and write what you remember, you are also practicing recall. That second version is closer to retrieval practice, which has strong support. In one well-known study, students who wrote down what they remembered from a science text did better on a later test than students who made concept maps while looking at it (Karpicke & Blunt, 2011).

Research on summarizing alone is mixed. A major review found that its benefits depend on the student's skill, the text and the test (Dunlosky et al., 2013). Younger students and beginners often write summaries that are too long or too close to the original wording. The good news is that summary writing can be taught. Brown and Day (1983) described simple rules, such as delete trivial details, replace lists with one general word and write a sentence that states the main idea.

This guide treats summarizing as a skill to practice, not a trick that works by itself.

When to use it

  • You just finished a chapter, article or lecture and want to check what you took in.
  • You need to write a response or report and must understand the main argument first.
  • You are studying for an exam in a subject with long reading, such as history or literature.
  • You tend to read passively and want a quick check that you followed the text.

How to apply it

  1. Read the text once. Do not summarize while reading for the first time.
  2. Close the book or turn the page face down. Set a timer for five minutes.
  3. Write the main idea in one sentence. If you cannot, that is useful information: you did not understand the main point.
  4. Add three to five supporting points in your own words. Skip the examples unless they are needed to explain a point.
  5. Open the text and compare. Mark anything important you missed and any place where you were wrong.
  6. Fix your summary using a different color so you can see what changed.
  7. Wait a day or two, then try to rewrite or recite the summary from memory.

Step-by-step examples

Example: a 4-page article on climate and farming

  1. You read the article once, taking no notes.
  2. You close it and write: Warmer weather is changing which crops can grow in some regions, and farmers have to adapt.
  3. You list three points: some areas get shorter growing seasons, pests spread to new places, and farmers try new crop types.
  4. You open the article and see you missed the point about water supply, which was a major section. You add it in red.
  5. Your final summary is five lines, about 60 words.

Example: a chapter from a novel for English class

  1. You finish chapter 7. Close the book and write three sentences: what happened, who changed and what question the chapter raises.
  2. Check the chapter for facts you got wrong, such as the order of events.
  3. Cut your summary to one sentence: In chapter 7, the main character lies to protect a friend and starts to doubt herself.
  4. Before the next class, read only your one-sentence summaries from chapters 1 to 7 to see the story's shape.

Advantages

  • Quickly shows whether you understood the main point.
  • Can be done anywhere, with paper or a phone.
  • Builds writing skill because you must choose and compress ideas.
  • Leaves you with short notes that are faster to review than the full text.

Limitations

  • Summaries written with the text open can become copying and may give little benefit.
  • Beginners often need practice before their summaries are accurate.
  • A summary captures main ideas. It may not help with questions on exact facts, dates or formulas.
  • It takes time, and for short readings a few recall questions may be quicker.

Common mistakes

  • Copying sentences from the text instead of using your own words.
  • Writing a summary as long as the original chapter.
  • Summarizing without checking against the source, so errors stay in your notes.
  • Summarizing while reading for the first time, before you know what matters.
  • Writing it once and never looking at it again.

Recommended next steps

Part of the path Read More Effectively (step 4 of 5). Next in this path: Active Recall: Study by Pulling Information Out of Memory.

References

  1. Dunlosky, J., Rawson, K. A., Marsh, E. J., Nathan, M. J., & Willingham, D. T. (2013). Improving students' learning with effective learning techniques: Promising directions from cognitive and educational psychology. Psychological Science in the Public Interest, 14(1), 4-58.
  2. Brown, A. L., & Day, J. D. (1983). Macrorules for summarizing texts: The development of expertise. Journal of Verbal Learning and Verbal Behavior, 22(1), 1-14.
  3. Karpicke, J. D., & Blunt, J. R. (2011). Retrieval practice produces more learning than elaborative studying with concept mapping. Science, 331(6018), 772-775.

This guide is general educational information. Study methods work differently for different people, and no method guarantees better grades or results.

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