Know what the summary is for before you start. A summary to help you decide whether to read a paper, one to prepare a lecture and one to guide first-year students through a reading are three different documents. Decide who will read it and what they need to do with it, then choose the length and audience to match. A summary that tries to serve everyone serves no one well.
Lead with the central argument. The most useful sentence in any summary says what the whole document is about and what it concludes. Readers who remember nothing else should remember that. Everything that follows (the sections, the evidence and the terms) supports that one idea, and a reader who has it first will understand the details far better.
Follow the document’s own structure. Summarise each part in the order the author presents it, so that readers can move between the summary and the original. For a research article that usually means the question, the method, the results and what the authors make of them. For a report or guideline it means the recommendations and the reasoning behind each one. Re-ordering the content, however neatly, makes the summary harder to check.
Separate what the author found from what the author thinks. Results, claims and interpretation are not the same thing, and a good summary keeps them apart: “the trial found a 12% reduction” is a finding, while “this should change practice” is the authors’ view. Keeping the two distinct is the first step in critical reading, and it’s the habit you most want students to pick up.
Keep the numbers exact and in context. Quote key figures exactly as the document gives them, with their units and what they measure, and never round or combine them into something the authors didn’t report. A number without its context (“a 30% increase”) invites misreading. Say what increased, compared with what, and over what period.
Include the limitations and what’s left out. Every study and report has boundaries: the sample, the setting, the time frame, the questions it didn’t ask. A summary that drops them makes the evidence look stronger than it is. Report the limitations the authors acknowledge, and notice what the document doesn’t cover before you rely on it.
Use your own words, but keep the key terms. Paraphrasing shows that you’ve understood the material. Copying sentences only shows that you’ve found them. Keep the discipline’s technical terms, though, and define them, because students need to learn the vocabulary of the field as well as the ideas.
Turn the summary into active learning. A summary students only read is quickly forgotten. Ask them to read the original with the summary beside it and find something it left out, to answer the discussion questions in a tutorial, or to write their own summary first and compare it with this one. Writing a summary is itself one of the best ways to learn from a reading.
Never let a summary replace the source. Summaries help readers find their way into a document, decide what to read closely and revise afterwards. They can’t capture all of an argument’s subtlety or evidence. Check the summary against the original before you rely on it or share it, especially any figures, recommendations or quotations. Treat AI-generated summaries as a strong first draft, not an authority, and make sure students cite the original, never the summary.