Not to be confused with paraphrasing, which is merely changing a sentence or two into something that’s about the same word content, summarizing is the process of condensing a resource material into fewer number of words. For example, you can summarize a paragraph into one or two sentences only or bring down ten pages worth of material into just one or two paragraphs. Summarizing gives you much leeway in terms of how to condense learning materials depending on your need or goal. Summarizing is one of the best learning strategies or techniques because it forces you to:
● Spend quality time with the material you want to condense;
● Deeply think about and study the material you want to condense and to segregate the important parts from those that aren’t; and
● Rephrase or rewrite the main ideas or points you qualified as important in your own words.
All these things you’re forced to do to summarize learning materials enhance your ability to learn them because:
● Spending time with your learning materials have a significant contribution to your learning them;
● Processing the relative importance of the points covered in your learning materials trains you to think critically and analyze; and
● Rephrasing or rewriting the materials you studied improves your ability to retain and understand them.
In particular, rephrasing or rewriting the learning materials in your own words can help accelerate your learning because it forces you to:
● Break down your learning materials further into simpler and more understandable bits;
● Focus your attention on what really matters; and
● Filter out the unnecessary information, points, ideas and examples inorder to condense them.
These three activities are important especially in today’s information overloaded world, which continues to be even more overloaded by the day. As too much chefs can spoil the broth, too much information can make us go crazy! Summarizing, therefore, helps us to not just identify and learn the relevant points and ideas but also to keep our sanity!
HOW TO SUMMARIZE
Summarizing involves 3 key steps:
● Retention of key or important points or ideas;
● Omission of those that aren’t; and
● Condense the material by trimming away less important stuff like narratives, descriptions, details and examples.
The degree of condensation varies between summaries, which depends on the amount of available information and the purpose for the summary, e.g., information abstract, study guide, future reference or mental exercise for remembering or retaining the key lessons of what you just read. Some summaries condense material to about 25% of the original content while others do so to as low as 5% of the original! As a general guideline, the greater the content of the learning material, the more you should condense it. Why? Condensing a material of 10 pages down to 20% means summarizing it to just 2 pages, which is practical but doing the same (20%) to a 100-page material means cutting it down to a “mere” 20 pages, which is too much for a summary! Keep in mind that the secret to summarizing as a good learning strategy is its brevity and condensation of ideas into the important ones only.
An important part of summarizing is being able to ask good questions, which include:
● Why am I summarizing this material?
● What are this material’s key points and ideas?
● What is the material’s main point?
● Which of these points and ideas can be discarded or omitted?
● Which of these data, examples and descriptions can be further condensed for retention and which need to be thrown away?
PRACTICAL TIPS FOR USING SUMMARIES TO ACCELERATE LEARNING
As mentioned earlier, we live in a world that’s already – and continues to be – overloaded with information, which requires that we be able to quickly and effectively sift what’s important or relevant from those that aren’t. Here are some ways to help you cut through the much of the information fat of the learning materials you encounter for faster and better learning:
● If there are available summaries for the learning material, read them prior to reading the whole material. Aside from the possibility of discovering that such summary may be all that you need, you’ll also have a better idea of which ideas and key points to consider within the material. In fact, you may be in a better position to understand individual points and ideas in the material if you already saw the whole picture via the summary.
● Utilize summary “shortcuts” such as paragraph or section headings, first sentences of a paragraph or the last sentence or two of the same, from which you can summarize the whole paragraph or section.
