Writing Summaries

In our first semester, one of the initial assignments set for us was a technical writing project centred around summaries. Given a long-form news article by the lecturer, the requirement was to produce a Descriptive Summary and an Informative Summary of the piece. We needed to do this while adhering to a rigorous word count – just 50 for the Descriptive Summary and no more than 200 for the Informative version. Condensing an article of almost 5,000 words down to such an extent, presented a daunting challenge.

A Descriptive Summary intends to give the reader an idea as to what the piece pertains. Written almost like the blurb on a book, it should let the reader know whether the subject is one which will appeal to them or not, so that they can choose whether or not to read it.

An Informative Summary, on the other hand, provides the audience with the essential details of what the original contains. It extracts the key points and should be capable of acting as an article in its’ own right, albeit with nowhere near the level of detail of the source.

After the immediate concerns over the scope of what we needed to do, I was pleasantly surprised to find myself enjoying the process of producing these summaries immensely. I began by working on the Informative Summary. I did this because I felt doing so would give me a greater understanding of the article and pay dividends when it was time to write the Descriptive summation. I painstakingly went through the column, breaking it down into bullet points and removing what I considered to be verbose language in favour of more simplistic phrasing. Next, I went through the bulleted list and removed all but the vital facts necessary to create the complete narrative of the story. From there, it was a gradual process of editing and re-editing to reduce the word count to the desired level.

Once the Informative Summary was complete, I found writing the Descriptive style much more manageable than I believe I would have if I’d attempted to do so before reducing the piece to its’ significant themes. Were I to continue producing summaries, this workflow would undoubtedly be one I would follow.

I have always been a person who struggles with conciseness in my writing. One of the reasons I haven’t used Twitter extensively, for example, is because I felt overly restricted by the character limits, believing it impossible to have meaningful conversations in such a manner. However, working on this assignment helped me to hone my writing abilities in this area. I think my skills at focusing on the essential ideas I wish to impart are better because of the work done on these summaries. These techniques are important for all aspects of technical writing and instructional design, so this exercise was invaluable.

Once I have completed the MA, I intend to create more of these summations as portfolio pieces. There is an abundance of long-form journalism sources (such as The Guardian’s long reads) from which to draw material. I hope that continuing to work on these skills will strengthen them greatly.