Note that you must include citation information for summaries - think of your citation as showing your reader where they can find the original or “full” version of the work that you have summarized. When you summarize, you explain the main idea(s) from someone else’s work. In other words, knowing how to effectively summarize the ideas of others helps you to bring those ideas into dialogue with your own. You can think of agreeing and disagreeing as being like saying, “Okay, but….” Being able to effectively summarize the work of other researchers will help you both to determine your own position and also clearly communicate the connections between your ideas and the ideas of others. Three main ways of responding are to generally agree, generally disagree, or both agree and disagree with another author’s perspective on a subject. Academic writing requires you to research the work of other scholars, develop your own ideas on the topic of your research, and then to think about how your ideas relate to the scholarship that you have researched.

Other words for summarize