summary

Using other people's words and ideas

This set of tasks and quizzes is designed to help you with some of the skills associated with writing a summary. As part of the process you will be asked to write summaries and paraphrases and you will then be given a model to compare your work with. You do not have to follow the model exactly.

Expressing your own ideas in your own words

You need to demonstrate to your reader that you have a clear understanding of what you are writing about.

Drawing upon other people's words and ideas to contextualise and support your ideas

You need to do this to:

demonstrate that your work is firmly connected to a clear and defined academic context
to provide a theoretical framework for your work
to support your position or research findings
to prove to your reader that you have read widely about your subject area

Normally you refer to what other people have written either by using the original authors' exact words as a direct quotation, or by re-writing their ideas in your own words i.e. you paraphrase the original text, or, if you re-write it more concisely, you summarize it.

In all cases you must acknowledge the original sources. This is because:

readers need to be aware of the sources of your information
you need to give credit to the writers and scholars whose ideas and words you have borrowed. If you use the ideas and language of other people without acknowledgment, you are being dishonest. In the worst case, your work might become worthless: it would not be considered as your work and you would get no credit for it.

Example 1

Here is an introduction (on the left side) from an article about learning to write academic English. The writer uses citations to establish a framework for the article.

Read the text on the left and the commentary (on the right side) to see how the writer uses other peoples' ideas.

Second language students and teachers have long acknowledged that learning to write in a second language is a complex and sometimes tedious process. In addition to linguistic concerns, there a difficulties associated with organisational frameworks and conventions. Written texts represent a convergence of different stylistic, cultural, religious, ethical and social notions...	assertion (statement of idea) to be discussed in the article. In the writer's own words.
Oliver (1971) indicated that in Chinese writing, the need for explication is not self-evident but the need to maintain harmony is, and text is written with a different purpose from that in many English speaking countries, that is, to "adjust people to people" (p98) rather than explicitly state a point of view.	reference to a piece of published research which supports the assertion. This is in the form of a summary in the writer's own words and also includes a direct quotation of Oliver's original words.
Yum (1987) makes similar observations regarding contemporary Korean writing and states that persuasion and explicit description are rarely employed. Indonesian and Vietnamese writing conventions also reflect their Confucian cultural heritage and the classical Chinese writing tradition (Nguyen, 1987; Prentice, 1987). According to Hinds (1976), 1983) and Tsujimura (1987), vagueness and ambiguity are valued highly in Japanese texts because they allow for the communication of minds rather than the communication of words. On the other hand, in Anglo_American rhetorical frameworks, vagueness and ambiguity are viewed negatively, explicit argumentation is considered more effective, and concrete support for most points is expected (Hinds, 1983; Winkler & McCuen , 1984)	references to eight more pieces of published research, which further support the writer's assertion, and establish the context for more discussion in the article,. This has all been done in the form of summaries in the writer's own words.

[Text adapted from: Hinkel, E. 1994. Native and nonnative speakers' pragmatic interpretations of English texts. TESOL Quarterly 28/2: 353-376, pp 353-4 . Bold and coloured text added.]

There are three ways to write about the ideas of others

quotation	using the words of others (must have a reference, be in quotation marks "..." and you cannot change the original words).
paraphrase	putting the ideas of others into your own words. This does not have to be shorter than the original text (must have a reference).
summary	taking a text and using the basic ideas in the text to create a shorter text in your own words (must have a reference).

If you want to know more about the language used to introduce citations/sources click here

Quotations

Paraphrasing

Summary