Documenting Sources on the World Wide Web Summary, Paraphrase and Direct Quotation Summary Summaries condense and encapsulate another piece of writing. They tell in briefer form the main ideas of the original. A summary may be complete in itself, as is often true in academic writing, when an instructor wants evidence that we understand an assigned reading. More often, summaries are part of a larger piece of writing, used as informa-tion or as support for an opinion. Both types are common in short documented papers.
Summaries are objective, complete, and concise.
In telling your readers what someone else has said, be careful to read and interpret that idea in the context of the original, not according to what you want it to say. Being totally objecfive is not easy to do, because whatever we read is somewhat influenced by our own experience. Try to be true to the original. Being complete in your summary will help. Don't omit essential parts of the context, such as time, place, occasion, and purpose.