Education
Best Techniques for Summarizing Academic Text

Best Techniques for Summarizing Academic Text

While creating academic content, you will have to research the work of other scholars. After developing this work, you will have to develop your ideas about the content. By developing these ideas, you should relate them to the researched work. Summarizing has become one of the vital skills for the students. Anyhow, some students find it difficult because they have to face some problems to pick the most important facts. Along with picking these facts, they have to provide details about these facts. Some students also face problems to make it short and to the point. Here, we will discuss the best techniques for summarizing the academic text.

Read the Text

Before summarizing the academic text, you will have to thoroughly understand it. Here, you should read the article in three steps. First, you should scan it. It is the best way to get a sense of the topic and its overall shape. Secondly, you should carefully read the article. While carefully reading the article, you should highlight its important points. Moreover, you should also take notes of the most important points. Thirdly, if you have understood the most important points of the article, you should skim the article. Now, you should re-read the important points of the passage. To identify the key points while reading the article, you can also follow some essential tips. For example, you should start reading the article from its abstract. You should also pay attention to the headings and sub-headings of the article.

Break the Text into Sections

If you want to make the text manageable, you will have to understand its sub-points. For this reason, you will have to break the text into smaller parts. In some cases, you will have to summarize the scientific papers. The writers have written these papers by following the standard empirical structure. It means that they have divided this paper into sections. In these sections, there comes an introduction, methods, results, etc. Here, you don’t need to divide them into sections. Anyhow, you will have to read some articles that are not divided into these sections. If an academic paper doesn’t have marked sections, you will have to divide it into sections. You should write a specific sentence in front of each paragraph. This sentence should describe the specific content of the paragraph.

Identify the Key Points in Each Section

After dividing the text into sections, you will have to go through these sections. While going through these sections, you should pick out the most important points. If you are summarizing the text, you should keep in mind a key point. You don’t need to paraphrase the whole paragraph. You just need to summarize the most important points of the article. Here, you should leave out those things that require background information or supplementary detail. The writers should also try to find those arguments that will be helpful for them to convey their points of view. Under such a situation, the writers have to pay attention to the thesis statement of the academic text. It appears in the introduction section of the article. Along with the thesis statement, he can also pay attention to the topic sentence of each paragraph.

Follow the SAAC Method

Recommended by a coursework help firm, if you want to summarize any kind of text, you can use the SAAC method. By following this method to summarize the text, you will understand the specific meaning of each word in the summary. While following this method, first of all, you will have to state the name of the article or book. Secondly, you will have to assign the name of the author. Thirdly, you will have to perform the actions that writers are performing. At last, you will have to complete the sentences of the summary with specific words and important details. While creating the summary of the text, this method will be helpful to you. By following this method, you can also include clear guidance in the content. When you will follow the SAAC cues, you can also write the complete sentences of the summary.

Write the Summary

By following the above-mentioned steps, you can easily know the key points that you can include in the text. Now, you will have to use the words to explain these key points. Here, you should try to avoid plagiarism issues. To avoid plagiarism issues, you should paraphrase the ideas of the authors. You should not follow the copy and paste technique while writing the summary. The best way to summarize the article is to put the article away. When you will write the main points by putting the article away, you can easily understand the key points of the article. To summarize the article for an academic text, you will have to cite its sources.

Check the Summary

After creating the summary of an academic text, you should thoroughly read the article. While reading the article thoroughly, you will have to make sure of some essential things. First, you have presented the work of the authors. Secondly, while presenting the work of the authors, you have not missed the important points. At last, you should make sure that you have not followed the copy and paste technique to create the summary. To overcome the plagiarism issues from the text, you can also use a plagiarism checker tool. You can also cite the sources to overcome the plagiarism issues in the text. Anyhow, you should be very careful while citing these sources. It means that these resources should be safe and reliable.

Conclusion

If you want to create content for an academic text, you will have to research scholarly articles. Here, you will have to follow the summarizing technique. The summarizing technique allows the writers to paraphrase the most important points of the text. While summarizing the text, you should keep in mind that it is much smaller than the original text. Therefore, you should not include such points that require backend information. To summarize the text, first of all, you will have to read the text. After that, you should break the text into sections. Thirdly, you will have to identify the key points for each section. At last, you will have to write the summary and check its content.