TIP Sheet
WRITING A SUMMARY

当你告诉你的室友你记得课堂上的一次特别好的演讲时，你会总结. 当你对一篇最新的杂志文章做简短的口头报告时，你要进行总结. 有时老师会要求你用书面形式总结你读过的东西.

总结就是提取主要思想、要点和主要支持，省略其余部分. When you summarize, you do not draw any original conclusions, but report facts as they are presented by the author, 这样，不熟悉原文的读者就能从你的摘要中了解到原文的基本事实和观点.

问题是:你包含了多少细节，又省略了哪些? 虽然写得好的非虚构作品读起来就像一个无缝的整体, it is really a cascade of main points, major and minor support for those points, and examples and illustrations. And summarizing fiction presents its own challenges. That great scene at the lakeshore, 让你流泪的那件事——它是故事中的主要因素还是次要因素?

这张提示纸为总结小说或非小说类书籍提供了一个四步计划. It also offers tips for adapting this method for shorter selections.

1. Got math?
You've read the book. 它有二十八章，讲述了主人公在两个大陆三十年的生活. There was tragedy; there was triumph over tragedy. You have to write a summary in six to eight pages. 你知道从哪里开始，好吧，但你不知道从哪里开始.

Start by doing the math. Here is the math for the example above:

28 (chapters) ÷ 7 (pages) = 4 (chapters per page)

这大致告诉你每章要写多少内容:四分之一页.

For shorter selections the math is different. In general, a good summary of a chapter, poem, or passage might be about a third to a fourth as long as the original; your instructor will probably suggest a length.

2. Define "main"
非小说类章节的主要思想可能会在概述中为你陈述, chapter summary, or near the beginning of the chapter. When you look for the main ideas in fiction, you must look for events that move the story forward, or that reveal or develop character. (虽然有些小说会把一章E世博ESBALL的概述作为一种章节副标题, apply judgment in using these, 因为当作者写这些文章的时候，他或她可能有其他的目的，而不仅仅是为了总结.)

Review the chapter briefly. Imagine yourself telling your roommate what the chapter was about. Now write a single sentence containing this main idea. 这将成为四分之一页长的段落的主题句.

As his friends watched Danny sink deeper into depression and apathy, 他们彼此决定，一个惊喜的聚会会使他高兴起来，并开始精心策划.

Avoid wordy phrases like, "Chapter one was about..." or "In the first chapter..." Your topic sentences must be lean and mean and contain no fillers. And even though your method is a chapter-by-chapter attack, you do not want to give this away in your writing. Especially for shorter works, 避免从原文中借用这里一个短语，那里半句话. The resulting patchwork will almost certainly be inadequate.

继续用同样的方法复习每一章，为每一章构建一个句子.

找到一个短篇作品的主要思想可能需要更仔细地逐行阅读. In a short work, the meaning of individual words is magnified, so this is no time to depend on guessing the meaning of unfamiliar words; look them up.

有些写作风格，尤其是古文，非常适合缩略语:

If we would know what a University is, considered in its elementary ideas, 我们必须把自己带到欧洲文学的第一个也是最著名的故乡和欧洲文明的发源地, 来到明亮美丽的雅典——雅典的学校吸引着她, and then sent back again to the business of life, the youth of the Western World for a long thousand years.
--John Cardinal Newman: "Site of a University"

其他的文体是如此的简短或充满信息，使其更难以浓缩. The following excerpt from Scientific American magazine, for example, 虽然与前面的例子的行长度大致相同, might be ore difficult to "boil down" further:

大多数种族定义所依据的外在标志——比如肤色和发质——是由少数基因决定的. 但是，同一“种族”的两个人的其他基因可能非常不同. Conversely, 两个不同“种族”的人比两个同一种族的人拥有更多的基因相似性.
Michael J. Bamshad and Steve E. Olson: "Does Race Exist?"

3. Fill the framework
你现在有了一个大致的框架，以一系列主题句的形式，为你的整篇论文. Now write a paragraph for each. 运用你对段落的了解(它们只涉及一件事), for example) to determine what to include and what to omit. 如果湖边那场伟大的场景改变了E世博ESBALL的进程，或者意外地揭示了其中一个角色是一个骗子, then you should probably include it. 如果它没有改变什么，也没有告诉你关于角色的任何新的或重要的东西, but only reminded you of your own summer at Lake Tahoe, you should probably omit it. In general, also omit examples, illustrations, and figures of speech. 如果有的话，可以简单地举出例子，并把比喻翻译成文字.

If you find, at this point, that you have misunderstood or misstated the main idea of a chapter, 改写主题句，以反映你现在所理解的主要思想.

每个段落应该只包含足够的相关细节，以填满(例如)四分之一页. Some will be longer, and some will be shorter. This is okay; remember that your finished paper needs to fall in a range of six to eight pages.

 

4. Put ‘em together
当你为每一章写完一段后，你就有了一堆段落. To make them hang together, you must add the transitional words, phrases, and sentences that help readers make sense of the ideas and events. Words like even though, meanwhile, besides, and because signal important relationships between ideas and events.

要做到这一点，首先要两两重读你的段落:阅读第一段和第二段. Then read paragraph two with paragraph three. Add whatever you think would help a reader understand better. Remember that a topic sentence need not be the first sentence in a paragraph; you may want to add a transitional sentence to prepare the reader for a shift in ideas:

Until they arrived in California's Central Valley, Dust Bowl refugees clung to their expectations of land ownership and high wages; however, 他们发现，农民工营地的实际情况与此截然不同.

For a summary of a shorter work, 选择能准确反映原文意思的过渡词和短语. 最后，重读一遍，以确保你没有发表与原文不符的言论.

Frequently you will be asked to both summarize and evaluate, or summarize and compare with another work, or summarize and explain. 确保你明白你的老师想要多长时间的总结——三页总结和三页评价? One page of summary and two of comparison? Regardless, the summary, at least, will no longer be an intimidating task, 因为即使是最长的摘要也可以用这种方法来管理.