Unlocking Academic Success: Strategies for Summarizing Complex Texts

Summarization refers to the process of condensing long-form content pieces into short ones without losing the actual meaning.  It is an important academic writing skill that students use to write conclusions, introductions, abstracts, or summaries of their academic work.

That’s why every student needs to have effective summarizing skills to compress or summarize their essays, research papers, and other types of assignments. However, the majority of students are unable to effectively do summarization, especially when they have to deal with complex texts.

If you are also a student who is unfamiliar with the effective process of summarization, don’t worry. We compiled this post to comprehensively explain strategies summarizing process. Furthermore, in the end, we’ll discuss a precise and fast way of summarizing academic work.

Strategies for Summarizing Complex Academic Texts

1. Simplify and Understand Your Complex Text

The first strategy that you should apply is to simplify your complex text so that you can understand it easily. To simplify your text, we suggest:

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• Breaking it into short paragraphs.
• Paraphrasing it to replace difficult words with simple ones.
• Breaking long-form sentences into short ones.

After simplifying the complex text, now is the time to understand it. You need to comprehensively apprehend the theme, intent, and tone of your writing.

Strategies to Effectively Understand Writing

Below are some useful strategies that will help you understand the writing:

• Read all the text with great attention.
• You should read the abstract, introduction, and conclusion of the writing. These parts will let you understand the complete journey of your academic work.
• In this case, if you can’t understand a text piece, you should read it again and again until you are clear about its main message.

2. Find and Highlight all the Main Points of Your Text

Now is the time to find and highlight all the key points of your text. Key points are the most important around which the core message of your writing revolves. After finding the important points, you need to highlight them.

Tips to Highlight Key Points of Your Text

Below are the useful strategies to highlight the key points after finding them:

• You can write key points as a word, phrase, or short sentence at the top of their paragraphs.
• Underline the main points or bold them.
• Write all the picked keywords in a separate list.

For Example:

For your better understanding, we highlighted the main points of the below-written text.

Our Sample Para:

“Technology is driving society into an unparalleled period of innovation and connectedness as it continues to alter human capabilities and knowledge. The field of technological advancement is broad and diverse.”

Key Points:

“Technological Advancement.”

3. Write a Summary Around the Main Points

It is the most important step in summarizing. Here, you need to explain all the main points in your own words and prepare the first draft of your text.

Useful Strategies to Explain the Key Points

Here are some beneficial guidelines that will help you effectively write the first draft of your text:

• Avoid using the original words of the text as they are but use your language.
• You should use simple and clear wording to explain the key points.
• You should explain all the main points of your text.
• Do not add your personal bias or experience but remain to the point.
• Explain all the points briefly and don’t go wordy.

4. Revise the Summary

In the end, you should proofread/revise the summary. This step is a beneficial strategy before finalizing your text summary. To revise your summary effectively, follow the below steps:

• Check and remove additional details in your summary.
• Ensure that there are no typos or grammatical issues in the summary
• Make sure that your summary contains all the key points.

And so on…

Use an Online Text Summarizing Tool

The above all the manual strategies help summarize your complex texts. But we can’t assure preciseness or accuracy, because as a human you may make mistakes in the manual summarization. Besides this, the above summarizing process requires a lot of time and hassle also.

Let’s introduce you to an advanced and precise summarizing process i.e. using an online text summarizer. You can easily summarize text of any type (simple or complex) with an AI summarizer without any hassle.

For Example:

We summarized a complex text with an AI Summarizer. The tool took no time to provide us with a high-quality summary of the text.

Image Showing the Summarizing by a tool:

Conclusion

Summarizing is an essential to have skill for students. This is because it helps in writing multiple aspects of academic assignments. In this post, we comprehensively explained useful strategies for summarizing complex texts. Using these strategies will prove helpful to write effective summaries for your texts.