Executive Summary for the Differences Manifest in Male and Female

Choose one article from the readings to summarize in under 200 words. When you use summary in your papers, you will only want to focus on what is relevant to your claim. Think, "What part of the conversation do I need to recreate for my audience so they will understand my claim?"
Summary is an important part of introduction paragraphs and academic writing in general. When you are reconstructing the “conversation,” it is necessary to accurately and succinctly describe what “they say.” In this activity, you will be tasked with writing a short summary of an article of your choice. Below is an example of an effective short summary from one of our readings. You may not choose this article to summarize.

Outsourcing the Mentally Ill to the Police

In an article titled “Outsourcing the Mentally Ill to the Police,” published in the National Review, columnist Rich Lowry (2016) recounted tragic stories of mentally ill people being killed by the police. He claimed the police have become “de-facto front line-mental health workers” that often do not have the training to properly deal with the problems that should be the purview of mental health professionals (para. 4.) To highlight the scope of the issue, he contrasted the small number of beds in psychiatric hospitals with the shockingly high number of mentally ill people in our prison system. He acknowledged that police could be better trained to avoid unnecessary killings, but he also lamented that police are put in this position in the first place due to the mental health industry’s lack of resources for the ill and their families.

Let’s note some important elements of this summary.

1. Establishes author, title, publication, year.

“In an article titled 'Outsourcing the Mentally Ill to the Police' published in the National Review, columnist Rich Lowry (2016) […]"

2. Uses attributive tags and active verbs. APA recommends using the past tense.

“Rich Lowry recounted”
“He acknowledged”

3. Conveys the author’s purpose objectively. Tells what the author did, not just what the author said.

“To highlight the scope of the issue, he contrasted the small number of beds in psychiatric hospitals with the shockingly high number of mentally ill people in our prison system.”

The summary may not cover all the points of the article, but it covers the major ones it needs to accurately convey the author’s main points, especially the ones needed to construct the conversation that you want to enter.

Here are some other tips on writing an effective summary:

Read the article multiple times before you try to summarize it: Each exposure will allow for the article's more subtle points and increase your overall comprehension.

Annotate while you read: Annotating—writing down notes, questions, and comments to yourself in the margins of the page as they arise is another effective strategy for composing focused summaries. By taking these notes, you can more easily find the parts of the article which are most relevant to your "I Say" contribution.

Only focus on the most pertinent details: You don’t need to summarize the whole paper. You should summarize only the points which are most relevant to your own argument.

Don't assume those reading your summary will have read the article too: As such, it's important to introduce the full title of the article and to name the authors as well before you jump into the summary. Don't write as if your professor is the audience. Write for a generally knowledgeable person who hasn't read what you have read. Don’t forget to place the article in the larger conversation.

Adopt an objective tone and remain neutral: A summary is meant to simply reflect the ideas and points made by the author in a more condensed space. It is important to not "interject" our own opinions, feelings, or "takes" on the concepts being summarized. The entire body of the paper represents your chance to explore your own argument, and you are perfectly free to disagree or argue with sources in this section of the paper, but the summary should remain neutral.

Use direct quotes judiciously: The purpose of a summary is to use your own words to re-state the author's argument in a condensed fashion. As such, you should only use direct quotes for ideas that you feel can’t be articulated without the exact wording of the author.

Use "active" verbs to accurately describe what the author "does": One common fate of many summaries is falling a bit flat because the writer gets stuck using the same one or two general verbs. Verbs like said, told, wrote, and stated aren't necessarily wrong, but they don't really convey any "action" or description, and because a summary needs to be concise, using active verbs is useful, as they convey more specific "direction" than the ones above.
Vary your sentence patterns: If the use of active verbs helps to make the summary more alive to readers, using a variety of sentence patterns helps the summary to "flow" well and not feel a bit clunky. For example, starting each sentence of your summary with "[Author's name or Pronoun] + [verb] will make the summary read more like a bullet-pointed list of ideas rather than a cohesive overview of the author's argument. Visit the following link from the Writing Center at UNC-Chapel Hill for some further help with varying your sentence patterns.