How to Teach Summarizing (Without Getting Paraphrasing and Copying)

Summarizing is one of the most widely researched reading comprehension strategies, consistently showing strong effects on student retention and understanding. It's also one of the most frequently assigned and least frequently taught. Students are told to summarize — write a brief summary of the chapter, summarize the article in three sentences — without ever being taught what makes a summary a summary rather than a paraphrase or a selective copy.

The result is predictable: students pull the first and last sentences from each paragraph, string them together, and call it done. Or they rewrite the entire text in slightly different words. Neither is summarizing.

What Makes Summarizing Distinctive

A summary captures the main ideas of a text without the supporting details, examples, or elaboration that make up most of the text's length. A summary is selective — it leaves out information — and it's hierarchical — it distinguishes between what's most important and what's subordinate.

Three skills are required:

1. Identifying what's important versus what's supporting detail
2. Collapsing multiple related ideas into a general statement
3. Omitting information that is not essential to the main point

The third skill is often hardest. Students who are anxious about "missing something" include everything. Students who don't understand the text well enough to identify the main ideas include everything because they can't distinguish important from unimportant.

Teaching the GIST Strategy

GIST (Generating Interactions between Schemata and Text) is a structured summarizing protocol with clear enough steps that it can be practiced until automatic:

1. Read a passage.
2. Answer: who/what is the passage about?
3. Answer: what's the most important thing the passage says about that?
4. Combine your answers into one to three sentences.
5. Check: does your summary include any details that aren't essential to the main idea? Remove them.

The checking step is where real summarizing skill develops. Students who remove the details — even when they're interesting — are learning to distinguish what the text is about from what the text includes.

Practice GIST with short paragraphs first. Students who can identify the gist of a paragraph are ready to summarize an article; students who can't yet need more paragraph-level practice.

The Delete-Substitute-Keep Framework

Kintsch and van Dijk's summarization rules are simpler than they sound:

• Delete trivial information
• Delete redundant information
• Substitute a general term for a list of specifics (instead of "apples, bananas, oranges" → "fruit")
• Keep the topic sentence when it states the main idea

Teaching these four rules explicitly and practicing them on short texts gives students a decision-making process rather than a vague directive to "write the main ideas."

The substitution rule is particularly powerful and often surprising to students: a list of specific examples in the original can be replaced by the category word in the summary. This is what collapsing looks like in practice.

Common Errors and How to Address Them

Too long: Student hasn't deleted enough. Return with the instruction: "Your summary should be no more than three sentences. Which three are most essential?"

Too short/incomplete: Student has deleted too much or missed a main idea. Return with: "Can you identify the main topic sentence in the original? Is it in your summary?"

Copied language: Student hasn't collapsed or paraphrased. Return with: "Read your summary and the original side by side. Find one sentence where you used the same words as the original. Rewrite it in words the author didn't use."

Missing the main idea: Student has summarized supporting details instead of the central point. Return with: "What is the one thing the entire passage is arguing or explaining? Is that in your summary?"

Each of these errors identifies a specific skill gap and points to a specific instructional response.

Summarizing vs. Note-Taking

Students sometimes conflate summarizing and note-taking, and the distinction is worth making explicit. A summary is a complete, coherent piece of prose that represents the entire original. Notes are fragments — often incomplete sentences, keywords, and phrases — that capture relevant information for later use but aren't designed to be read as complete statements.

Both are legitimate and both are useful. The choice depends on purpose: if students will read the product later as a stand-alone text, summarize. If they'll use the notes as reference while looking at the original or working on a project, take notes.

Your Next Step

For your next assigned reading, replace "summarize the chapter" with the GIST protocol. Give students the four steps, have them practice on one paragraph together before doing the whole assignment, and collect their summaries. Notice whether the summaries are more accurately focused on main ideas than what you'd normally receive. Usually the protocol alone produces a visible improvement.