Tips for Creating good Essays: Summarizing

When it comes to summarizing in an essay, the best papers will focus on providing as informative and useful content as possible. Of course, your own writing ability will come into it - which isn’t necessarily so easy to improve in a short space of time - but there are things that you can do to help make any work that you write be as powerful as possible.

Understand what the aims of the essay are

It may sound obvious that you should understand the aims of the essay, but it is easy to get distracted from the precise purpose of what you’re writing about - always bear in mind what your essay is trying to answer, argue about or prove. By maintaining a keen understanding of the direction of your essay, it can help when it comes to creating rich and effective content.

Focus on the arguments that are most relevant within the essay

Once you understand what the aims of the essay are, you want to focus on the main arguments of the essay. The main discussion points of an essay will obviously help you to argue your case more thoroughly. You can still include minor arguments in your essay, but be aware that they will not contribute as much to the aims and purposes compared to more powerful arguments.

Include relevant information and exclude unnecessary opinions

This may sound obvious, but only include relevant information. If you are including unnecessary opinions, facts or anything else that is not relevant to your essay, then you can weaken your argument as opposed to strengthen. Be sure that every word that you include has a purpose and helps to back up any arguments you are making.

It is not always easy to sift through the information and work out what is relevant and what is not if you have only just written work. Therefore, it can be advisable to give it a few hours or even a day or two before coming back to the essay and re-reading it. This should help to give you a fresh perspective on what you have written and enable you to make better judgements as to whether or not the information that you have included is relevant not.

Do not be afraid to be ruthless with your work, if something is not relevant then there really is no point keeping it in. It is better to put that little bit of extra effort in to maximise the depth of your essay, and minimise the inclusion of any unnecessary content.

 
 
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