The Classroom

Summarizing in Reading: Help Students Get To The Point

Laura Lewis

Jul 19, 2024

Have you ever read the abstract of an article, scanned the back cover of a book, or listened to someone tell a story and thought, “What’s the point?” If so, that writer or speaker could improve their summarizing skills to clarify the information they share.

In this article, we’ll examine what’s considered summarizing in reading and why it’s an important skill to teach your students to help their comprehension and communication.

What is summarizing in reading?

Summarizing is a skill readers use to share a shortened version of the most important information from a text in their own words. When students summarize, they pull out and share just the key details from a text. They’re learning how to get “just the facts” out of what they’re reading and cut away things that don’t connect to the main idea. According to research from the late educational psychologist Ann Brown, there are a few elements that make for the best summaries. They include:

Adding only information from the text.
Leaving out your opinions about the text.
Adding only the main idea and key details.
Putting ideas in your own words, not copying them directly from the text.

You might ask students to summarize a text in three main ways: orally, visually, or in writing. Examples of some ways you can encourage students to share their summaries include:

Talking with peers during small group discussions (Oral)
Filling out a graphic organizer to scaffold summarizing (Written)
Drawing images to illustrate important parts of a text (Visual)

Summarizing is a complex skill. Students develop it over time and improve by practicing with increasingly complex texts. For example, students may start to learn the foundations for summarizing in grades K-2 when they’re taught how to retell stories. As students progress through school, they learn techniques and skills that help them move from retelling stories to summing up texts more concisely.

Why is summarizing important in reading?

Summarizing helps students identify a text's main idea and key details to support it. By doing this, they learn to look for the most important information in a passage or story, such as character and place names, important events, or significant viewpoints on a topic.

Teaching summarizing also helps students remember what they read by asking them to put it in their own words. It also helps you check their comprehension. If students can share what they’ve read in their own words, they’ve understood it.

Summarizing is a skill students can use in every subject and content area—it’s not just for ELA classrooms. This skill helps students retain information and move it to long-term memory. When students are able to retain more information, it can improve their writing, strengthen their vocabulary skills, and support learning across subjects.

When does summarizing happen?

Summarizing takes place after a student reads a text. Just because students summarize after they read doesn’t mean you have to wait until the end of a text or a book to help them practice the skill. Students can summarize content like:

A paragraph
An article
A short story
A book chapter
A full-length novel

Throughout a lesson, students may summarize smaller chunks of the text and then use them to summarize the entire piece after reading it completely. Summarizing in chunks helps lessen the cognitive load on their working memory and makes it easier to comprehend information as they progress through a text.

3 reasons students struggle to summarize

Students may struggle to summarize texts because the skills needed to do it effectively are the opposite of many things we tell them to do in other ELA or literacy lessons. Here are three main reasons students may struggle to summarize what they read:

1. Summaries don’t include text connections

Making text connections is important to help students build and activate background knowledge. But, good summaries include only information found within the text. Students shouldn’t include the text-to-self, text-to-text, or text-to-world connections they make while trying to understand what they’re reading. We often teach students to find and share these connections, so it may confuse them that those observations don’t belong in a summary.

2. The most interesting details aren’t always in the summary

Extraneous details in a text are often more interesting than the main idea and key details. That’s the point. Authors add them to paint a visual picture of a character or add humor to a dry story. While extraneous details make for a more pleasurable reading experience, they’re not part of a summary. When some information is more interesting than others, it’s hard for students to determine which details are important and which aren’t.

We usually tell students to add more details and descriptions to their writing, but they clutter a summary and distract from the main idea. Students might not understand why we sometimes ask them for more details, but in summary, we tell them to provide “only the essentials.”

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3. Summaries aren’t argumentative or persuasive

One of the main goals of education is to teach students to generate new ideas and think for themselves. We encourage them to persuade their audience when they write and ask them to look for details in texts to support their opinions.

Yet, in summaries, students should share just information from the text in their own words. Determining when they should share their thoughts and when to focus solely on textual information could be confusing.

What are some mistakes students make when learning to summarize?

Summarizing is a complex skill. You may notice students share common challenges when learning how to do it correctly. Here are some of the mistakes students make when summarizing and how to correct them:

Sharing too much information

When students learn how to summarize, they may share too much information. They’re afraid they might miss something important if they don’t share enough. This happens because they need more practice finding the main idea and key details.

Incorporating more lessons to practice these skills individually can help. With a stronger foundation in the main idea and key details, students can make better decisions about what’s important and what isn’t in a text. For example, you may stress that repeated words and ideas help you find the main idea or topic of a piece.

Not sharing enough information

Some students have the opposite problem and don’t share enough information in their summaries. They want to be concise and cut out important details that help the summary make sense. Additional practice with key details and extraneous information helps.

Teaching a lesson on step-by-step instructions can also make this concept stick. An instruction activity can show students what happens when you leave out critical details in a process. You can then scaffold that knowledge to teach them how omitting key details in a summary affects its clarity.

Copying the text word for word

Students who are unsure how to summarize may copy a text word for word. This mistake may signal an issue with text comprehension. If students don’t understand what they read, they’re less likely to be able to put it into their own words. Decreased comprehension also makes it harder for them to find the main idea and key details.

To improve comprehension, build students’ background knowledge on the topic before and during reading.

What’s the difference?: Summarizing, retelling, paraphrasing, and synthesizing

It’s easy for students (and adults!) to confuse similar terms that all mean to shorten and sum up what they’ve read. Keep reading to discover the differences among summarizing, retelling, paraphrasing, and synthesizing:

Retelling vs. summarizing

Retellings are play-by-play accounts of everything in a story, including all the characters, major plot points, and key and extraneous details. Students typically learn how to retell a story before they learn how to summarize. They learn this skill after reading or listening to fictional stories, sometimes before learning to read independently.

Students retell stories in their own words, similar to summaries. But retellings are much longer. They’re a good introduction to help students understand the structure of a story and how to put someone else’s ideas into their own words.

Paraphrasing vs. summarizing

Paraphrasing and summarizing are the two most closely related synonyms in this section. They both involve putting someone else’s ideas into your own words. They’re also both shorter accounts of the original texts. The biggest difference between the two is usually the length of text you’re reading.

People often use the term paraphrase when summing up a single paragraph or a short passage of a larger work. Summarizing sums up a larger chunk of text, like a chapter or an entire book.

In both cases, you may use the term summarize to avoid confusion for younger students. This may help them focus on learning the skill rather than remembering the correct vocabulary words. With middle and high school students, you may introduce the term paraphrase and explore the differences between the two skills to familiarize them with the terminology.

Synthesizing vs. summarizing

Summarizing and synthesizing work together, but they’re not the same things. Summarizing provides the scaffolding students need to take an idea and build on it. It teaches students how to put someone else’s ideas into their own words.

Synthesizing goes beyond understanding what someone else is saying. It requires students to create something new. For example, students may give their own opinions on a topic, extend a story, or complete a project that merges their background knowledge with new information from the text.

Teaching summarizing in reading with Newsela

To learn summarizing, students need modeling, examples of good summaries, and tools to help them find the main ideas and key details in a text. Newsela ELA has everything you need to support them as they learn. Not only do you get access to over 15,000 pieces of high-quality content that they can read and summarize, but you also get scaffolds and features like:

Annotations that help you model how to mark key details and the main idea of a text.
Power Words to provide definitions of unknown terms and build background knowledge on a topic.
Explainer videos that cover important summarizing components like finding the main idea or learning about the 5Ws.
Our updated Standards and Skills collection that includes even more resources to help you teach students how to summarize a text.

Not a Newsela customer yet? You can sign up for your free Newsela Lite account and get access to the content and skill-building scaffolds you need to teach students how to summarize.