Bridgewater State College
Study Guides and Resources for the Communications and Literacy Skills Test
Writing Subtest Study Guide - Summary:  Approaches  and Strategies
The Strategy Workshop on Test Prep provides some background into the practice of summary writing. Keep in mind that summary is primarily a test of your reading ability. You will need to hone your skill in finding the author’s main idea, the key points, and the tone of the essay.

Six Steps to Drafting a Summary:

  1. Look at the title. It is your best gage of the essay’s main ideas.
  2. Write a one or two word summary of each paragraph’s main idea in the margin next to that paragraph.
  3. Prioritize the main ideas, some ideas are more important than others.
  4. Re-write the main ideas in your own words.
  5. Compose the summary in the third person (no I, me, mine, we, our, you, your)
  6. Polish and refine the summary by removing unnecessary sentences and redundancies, cleaning up the grammar, and double-checking your spelling.

Caution: do not include your own opinions.

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