The summary of an essay is essentially written when the main ideas are to be looked at without judging the essay in a positive or negative manner. You need to learn how to make a summary for an essay because you may be asked to reflect yours or someone else’s thoughts when they were writing the essay. All in all, the summary of an essay is a short and brief interpretation of the things that were most important to the author.

• Before you even start thinking about the summary, you need to read the essay that you are going to be summarising. Remember that this is the first step and so it is not at all necessary or even needed to highlight or take notes of anything. All you need to do is to familiarise yourself with the text.

• The second time around, when you are reading the text or essay once again, take notes and underline or highlight the main points or ideas in each paragraph. Don’t forget to look up terms or anything which seems unfamiliar to you.

• Once you have highlighted the important or main points, you need to start summarising each paragraph. You must remember from school that summaries are 1/3 of the original text and so you have to make sure you write only a couple of lines for each paragraph. Another thing that you need to be careful about is the placement. Don’t include any examples or anything of the sort and never ever write down your own thoughts and judgment on the essay.

• The first rough draft of your summary will have the thesis statement along with the points or sentences that you have gathered from the complete essay. Another great tip to remember is to focus on the message instead of the direct writing because after all, that is the purpose of the summary.

• When you have finished with the first rough draft, take a break for a couple of hours and come back to it later. Once you have done this, come back and review your summary, keep in mind that the objective is that the summary should say the same thing that the original text is, has the same order with different language or synonymous.

• Remember to revise, review and proofread you summary a couple of times before submitting it in.