Academic writing involves various techniques that help people navigate the world of academia easily. Among those, one of the most popular is summarizing.
Summarizing, as the name indicates, is the art of creating a summary of something. But why do people use this strategy in the academic world? What’s the point of crafting a summary in academic writing? If these questions represent your queries, this blog post is for you.
In this discussion, we will elaborate on the purpose of summarizing from the perspective of academic writing. We’ll analyze this topic from various angles to help you understand the aim of summarizing thoroughly.
But before getting into the main topic, we’ll specify its core concept briefly. This way, you can understand the entire discussion more effectively. So, without any further ado, let’s delve in here. Shall we?
An Overview of the Whole Summary Crafting Concept
The term ‘summary crafting’ refers to creating a concise and to-the-point version of an existing piece of information. It is similar to how you describe the details of an event or a movie to your friends, colleagues, peers, or family members.
However, in the case of academic writing, people apply this technique in the following way:
- First, they gain a complete understanding of the source they intend to summarize. This step generally involves completely reading the original version, identifying its key points and main arguments, and eliminating the fluff.
- Then, they explain the key details using their own words. While doing so, they follow the same logical order of information and stay as concise and direct as possible, which helps satisfy the essence of summarizing.
- Finally, they check whether the summarized form has the same meaning. If not, they redo the whole thing.
- Sometimes, redoing the whole process still doesn’t bring effective results. In such situations, people nowadays use a Text summarizer. With this tool, they don’t have to identify the main ideas or do anything manually. Instead, they just need to process the text, and the utility automatically takes care of the rest, all thanks to its AI-powered technologies and contextual understanding capabilities.
Why Do People Create a Summary in Academic Writing?
By now, you may have understood what summary writing is and how to conduct it. If so, you’ll be better able to comprehend the rest of this discussion. So, here is why academicians from all over the globe create a summary:
1. To Condense the Information
Nowadays, people prefer to read short texts. This has become the norm, especially after attention spans have decreased due to short forms of content like Reels and Shorts.
So, in order to maintain the engagement and readability factors in textual content, academicians craft a summary. Doing so helps them convey the essential bits and pieces without overwhelming the readers.
2. To Clarify Understanding
Sometimes, a piece of information is challenging to understand due to the material’s complexity and extensive length. So, in such situations, academic writers resort to the art of summarizing.
Creating a summary forces academicians to think deeply about the subject at hand. So, by doing this, they easily clarify their understanding of any topic. Doing so also helps them present the main ideas accurately and clearly, regardless of their complexity.
3. To Support Research
Academics often have to reference and recall key information from various resources during the research phase of content creation. This process becomes more overwhelming when there are many sources at hand. Fortunately, summaries can make this entire process more manageable.
A summary of a resource can help academicians quickly grasp the gist of an entire source. This way, they can quickly gain the crucial details and traverse to the next resource. So, summaries help optimize the research phases.
4. To Extract Key Points for Presentations
People who belong to academia often have to create PPTs on different topics. However, since the details in PPTs are concise and to the point, this requirement makes it difficult for academicians to prepare material for presentations. So, they take assistance from summarizing.
Creating a summary allows academics to extract the most important details of a topic and prepare material for PPTs. This ultimately helps them preserve the essence of presentations while providing all the necessary information.
5. To Facilitate Learning and Polish Writing Skills
People craft a summary by reading a source and presenting their understanding using their own words. But is it possible to do all of this if someone doesn’t possess the knowledge of a source or the required writing skills? No!
For this reason, whenever academicians have to showcase their learning of a topic or polish their writing skills, they use the summarizing approach. Summarizing an article helps them practice identifying key points while refining how they express ideas clearly and concisely. Through this process, they demonstrate their retention of material, their command of vocabulary, and their overall writing skills.
Wrapping Up
To conclude everything shared here, we just want to say that crafting a summary in academic writing serves multiple purposes. From condensing large texts to supporting research arguments, it helps showcase an understanding of the material, enhances readability, and guarantees academic integrity. So, by mastering the art of summarization, students and researchers can better communicate ideas, contribute to scholarly discourse, and support arguments.
