25 Purpose, Subtopics, and Main Ideas in Summaries
Summarizing an Article
When you summarize an article, you should imagine your audience is someone who has not read the original article. You are giving them a brief look at what the big points are in the article.
Effective readers/writers are able to identify and write 4 elements in a summary of an article. These elements are fundamental to the quality of the summary:
- A General Topic or Main Idea: This is what the whole article is about. You will express this in the first sentence of your summary. This sentence should include the author’s intention or purpose expressed in a comprehensive argument. The first sentence also must include citation: the title and author of the text you are summarizing. The citation usually goes right at the start of the sentence. (See the next chapter in this PB for examples.)
- Subtopics: These are sections of the article that address specific topics within the author’s larger topic or main idea.
- Main Ideas: These are sentences that express key information within each subtopic. Your task is to separate main ideas from secondary details. Key information may be dispersed in a paragraph or perhaps beyond a paragraph. Once you identify the main ideas, you must paraphrase them well, and attribute those ideas to the author of the text.
- Only Relevant Supporting Details: Supporting details complement the main ideas. For example, they answer questions such as how, what, when, where, why, how much, or how many. Your instructor will tell you how long a particular summary should be. A one-paragraph summary won’t include supporting details, but a one-page summary will. You will need to make careful decisions about what to include based on the length. Whatever you include should be “true to the original”. In other words, you need to represent the original article well.
By identifying subtopics, main ideas, relevant supporting details, and the relationships among them (“connect the dots”), you will be in a much better place to say what the general topic of the reading is.
Secondary Details
Effective summarizers can leave aside, or ignore secondary details. Readings usually contain “filler ideas” that make up a large body of secondary details, which are important to understand the article but unimportant when summarizing the article.
Subtopics
Subtopics are large “areas” of the text where the author of an article addresses distinctive topics rather extensively. Usually, subtopics are dispersed in a few paragraphs. For example, “from paragraphs 4 through 7, the author presents a subtopic that deals with _____”. It may be possible too that a subtopic is discussed by the author in non-sequential paragraphs; for example, in paragraphs 4 and 5, and then in paragraphs 12 and 16.
