5 How to Summarize an Article

Summarizing teaches students how to discern the most important ideas in a text, how to ignore irrelevant information, and how to integrate the central ideas in a meaningful way. Teaching students to summarize improves their memory for what is read. Summarization strategies can be used in almost every content area.

Why use summarizing?

• It helps students learn to determine essential ideas and consolidate important details that support them.
• It enables students to focus on keywords and phrases of an assigned text that are worth noting and remembering.
• It teaches students how to take a large selection of text and reduce it to the main points for a more concise understanding.

How to use summarizing

1. Begin by reading to the text selection.
2. 1. What are the main ideas?
   2. What are the crucial details necessary for supporting the ideas?
   3. What information is irrelevant or unnecessary?
3. Find keywords or phrases to identify the main points from the text.
4.