Mastering the Skill of Writing Book Summaries

Writing book summaries is a task that you may be required to do quite frequently as a student. In school, this type of activity can be given to you by your teacher as an assignment.

Further on in life, having the ability to write good book summaries can help you out tremendously. In your professional life, you can use this skill to access large amounts of data and extract their essence.

What we mean is that this sort of skill is not just about writing book summaries. It helps you develop a broader ability to understand and condense large amounts of information.

In this post, we’re going to talk about some tips that you can follow to perform this activity well and improve your skills.

How to Write Better Book Summaries: Tips and Techniques

Below, we have discussed some of the effective strategies for crafting excellent book summaries.

1. Segment the book and read through it piece by piece

Normally, online articles on this topic advocate reading the text of the book thoroughly before you get started. This is a good tip, but we make it more precise.

We say that you should not just read the text. Rather, you should segment the whole book and split it up into parts before reading it. You should read each piece separately and process it before moving on to the other.

There are many benefits of doing this, for example:

If you segment the book and read it piece by piece, you are able to extract the main points easily. In other words, you can read a bit, take out the main parts in it, and then move on to the next. This helps you to not skip on any of the important stuff.
It is easier to pause and take a break when you’re reading the book bit by bit. You can leave off all the stuff that you’ve done for the previous sections and then take a break. Later, when you come back, you don’t have to worry about reading anything again and re-compiling the information.

2. Make a list of the unavoidable details

When you’re writing a summary, you are basically making a compilation of all the important details that the text contains. Now, other than these details, there are some words and sentences in there that allow the text of the summary to flow nicely.

What you have to do is basically look for all the details in the book that you cannot skip out on. While there can be a lot of extra stuff in there that you can simply chuck out, i.e., a very long description of an object easily describable in 10 words., there are some contextual details that are absolutely vital.

Consider this example. Here is a passage from an imaginary book:

As the moon ascended the hill, the three travelers could see the barren moor stretching for miles before it blended in with the sky right at the horizon. There was not a house nor a tree in sight. The mist looming far in the distance made it even harder for them to see anything that could prove to be either a motivation or a deterrent for them to proceed. When they had strained their eyes for minutes trying to find something, a flame shot out in the distance, signaling that a fire had been lit by someone they could not see.

Now, this a passage that contains a lot of flowery details and artistic touches, but when it comes to analyzing the unavoidable details, the main point can simply be put down to:

There were three travelers looking at an empty hazy moor. They could not find anything. At last, they saw a flame in the distance.

That’s it. That is the crux of the matter.

Now, in this same way, you have to read all the sections of the book and find out the main details. Once you have them all, put them together.

3. Start with writing the summary by only talking about the main points using concise words

After all of that is done, the next thing you have to do is start writing the summary itself.

The process of writing the summary at this point is very simple. You just have to list down all the main points that you had extracted earlier on. To give an example, here are some sample “points” from an imaginary book.

The man was standing in a room
It was night out, and the sky was cloudy
The man heard a knock on the door

If necessary, you can add a few words and phrases to thread them together smoothly. In this case, the summary would become:

The man was standing in a room, and it was nighttime. There were clouds in the sky, and the man heard a knock on the door.

Now, of course, the longer the book is, the more main points you will have to extract. The more points there are, the longer the summary will be.

4. Last step, check the summary and finalize it

Once you piece all the main points together and join them with the necessary words and phrases, the only thing left to do is check the summary.

Checking the summary is an important part of the process. In this part, you have to look for three main types of problems:

Grammar and spelling errors
Unnecessary details
Contextual alterations

Grammar and spelling errors are pretty straightforward. You just have to look for any “their” that you may have written as “there” or any “its” that you may have written as “it’s.”

We’re trying to be funny…there are a lot of other grammatical errors as well.

Other than that, you also have to look for unnecessary details that you may have added to the text. Checking for unnecessary details is not something you have to do in any other proofreading session. But, when you’re supposed to be writing a summary, it becomes important. Anything that you can cut out, you should cut out.

Contextual alterations are also a type of problem that you should look for in your completed summary. Modifications and changes in the context can occur when you join together a few points in the summary without adding the necessary elaboration for them. As a result, the summary can end up meaning something entirely different.

For example, here is a passage:

The man was in the building. The cat was on the roof. There were four other people on the ground. The cat jumped onto the people below and the man in the building yelled.

The main points in this passage are:

There was a man in a building
A cat on the roof
Four people on the ground
The cat jumped
It landed on the people below
The man in the building yelled

If someone was to summarize it in a sentence like this:

A man standing in the building yelled when the cat on the roof jumped on the four people on the ground.

It would look confusing. The context is not properly relayed. You have to add some sort of phrases or words in there that explain the whole setting concisely.

Alternative Way That You Can Take

You can also master the art of summarizing books by utilizing online summarizing tools. Of course, just using them is not enough. If you just use them to create a summary for a book, you won’t be able to learn anything.

When it comes to utilizing such tools, your intention should be two-fold.

You can do your task easily and quickly without spending a lot of time on it
You should also pay attention to the way the tool summarizes the text so that you can use those techniques yourself when the need arises

Nowadays, online summarizers are equipped with AI technologies and models that help them to quickly understand the provided text and make a summary of it. To get the most out of the whole learning experience that we have talked about above, you should take care to use a good tool. If your tool is good, the summary will be accurate, and you will be able to learn properly.

We personally recommend opting for AI Summarizer or you may go for AI Summarizer by Bookize. Both these have good reviews and search rankings. For a demonstration, we are going to use the AI summarizer, check out the attachment below.

Bookize's AI summarizer

And AI summarizer

Conclusion

Mastering the skill of writing good book summaries is not that difficult. All you have to do is refine the way you do it, i.e., the process., and also learn from a demonstrative summarizing tool so that you can understand what type of information has to be included in a summary.

In the post above, we have described the whole process of summarizing in easily followable steps. If you have been doing the process wrong, don’t worry. Just fix the technique.

And, while you are at it, make a habit of using an online tool on random pieces of text (or even a book if you are trying to get some help in your assignment) so that you can learn.