Both techniques of summarisation can be applied on expository texts (scientific, technical, or other type of non-fictional works) or on narrative texts, which are usually but not mandatory, literary texts.
Please note that the main requisite of any summary is to present a concise and clear presentation of the main ideas that form the meaning of the written work (or of other type of resource), while eliminating the unnecessary details that are not absolutely necessary for the overall understanding.
INFORMATIVE Summaries
Informative summaries accurately convey the information contained in a text or in other type of resource. An informative summary should be objective i.e. “without personal opinions in presenting the ideas in the source text”.
Thus, informative summaries are recommended for scientific, non-fictional works or to present objective reports of factual content.
The main types of informative summaries are: outlines, abstracts, and synopses.
Outlines present the plan or the “skeleton” of a written material.
Outlines show the order and the relation between the parts of the written material.
⇓Example
Abstracts present the major point of long piece of text or an article. Abstracts help readers to decide whether or not they want to read the longer text.
⇓Example
The previous example presents you some information about software programs ability to summarise texts.
Automatic summarisation in the IT field has been developed over the past 50 years. Recently, many text summarisers are been freely delivered on the Internet, and you can you use them on-line. Most of them are designed for English language, and their summarisation consists in selection of the most important sentences in the original text. Hence, the result they give are not suitable for the summarisation tasks, as assignments in school settings require.
⇓Example
A synopsis is a brief overview of an article, story, book, film, or other works.
A synopsis is a concise, chronological description of a historical event, news event, historical event or other experiences as they develop in time.
⇓Example
DESCRIPTIVE Summaries
Descriptive summaries depict the original text (material) rather than directly presenting the information it contains. A descriptive summary should portray, in an objective way, the texts structure and main themes.
Descriptive summaries often play the role of reviews for fictional or literary works: books, movies, video clips, articles, essays etc. In this case, the descriptive summary can include statements about sense and significance of the summarised work.
⇓Example
An executive summary’s aim is to describe a project, a specific course of action, or a business proposal when an executive (your boss!) doesn’t have the time to read the original report.
⇓Example
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