First, the idea
A summary is a short version of a text in your own words: the main idea plus the details that matter most, and nothing else. It is not a paraphrase — a paraphrase rewords a text at close to its full length. And it is not a retelling — a retelling keeps everything, in order. A summary chooses.
A summary is the text folded like a map: small enough to carry, true enough to navigate by. The shape and the main roads stay in; the street-level detail goes.
What stays is what Quizzes 1 and 2 taught you to find: the main idea, and the major details that carry it. What goes: minor details, examples, color. And the words must be yours — if you keep a phrase of the author's, it goes in quotation marks.
A summary fails in four ways: too broad (a map of the whole country when you asked for one neighborhood), too narrow (one street), the smuggled opinion (the mapmaker drew their own house bigger than city hall), and no compression — accurate, but nearly as long as the original. A summary that doesn't shrink hasn't summarized.
Worked example — thinking out loud
In October 2021, New York City's three public library systems — the New York, Brooklyn, and Queens libraries — stopped charging late fines and erased the fines people already owed. The systems had studied the question and found that fines didn't actually get books back faster. What they did do was keep people away: hundreds of thousands of card holders, most of them in the city's lower-income neighborhoods, were blocked from borrowing over fines they couldn't pay. Books still have due dates, and a borrower who never returns an item is billed for replacing it. But the penalty for being late — and poor — is gone.
Fold it in steps. First, the main idea: the libraries ended late fines because fines blocked poorer borrowers without getting books back faster. Second, the major details: all three systems did it; old fines were erased; due dates and replacement charges remain. Third, write it small, in your own words: In 2021, New York City's public libraries stopped charging late fines and forgave old ones, after finding that fines kept lower-income borrowers away without speeding up returns. Items still have due dates, and lost books are still billed. About a third the length, and a stranger could navigate the original from it.
Fourth, test it against the four failures, one at a time, with a summary that fails only one way each time.
Too broad: New York City's libraries changed a policy in 2021. True, and it would sit on top of a hundred other stories. A stranger could not find the original from it.
Too narrow: The libraries erased the old fines. One street. The reason for the change is gone, and so is the fact that new fines are gone too.
The smuggled opinion: The libraries are finally treating poor people fairly. Finally and fairly are the mapmaker's own house drawn onto the map. The passage never says either word.
No compression: In October 2021, the three public library systems of New York City, meaning the New York, Brooklyn, and Queens libraries, stopped charging late fines and erased the fines people already owed, after studying the question and finding that fines did not get books back faster… and so on, for another sixty words. Every fact is right. It is nearly as long as the original, so it has not chosen, and a summary that has not chosen has not summarized.
Part A · The skill by itself
1. Read the paragraph. Which is the best summary?
After a third winter of broken heat, the tenants of 148 Grove Street stopped complaining one by one and started acting together. They chose a captain for every floor. Each captain logged the cold nights in a shared notebook — dates, temperatures, apartment numbers. In February they sent the landlord a single letter with forty-one signatures and the notebook attached. The boiler was replaced within a month.
2. Here is a paragraph and a summary of it. What is the summary's flaw?
Nobody taught Amadou the register. He watched. He watched the way Mr. Park counted change out loud, the way he greeted the regulars by their orders — "Coffee-light-and-sweet is here" — the way he never let a kid leave short a quarter for the bus. When Mr. Park retired, the store didn't change, because Amadou had been studying more than the register.
Summary: A store clerk named Amadou took over a corner store when the owner, Mr. Park, retired.
3. Two summaries of the same two sentences. Which is acceptable as a summary in your own words?
The Green Guerillas tossed "seed bombs" — ornaments and balloons packed with soil and seeds — over the fences of lots they couldn't enter. The idea spread block by block.
Summary X: Gardeners threw seed-filled balloons into locked lots, and the practice spread across the city.
Summary Y: The Green Guerillas tossed seed bombs — ornaments and balloons packed with soil and seeds — over the fences of lots they couldn't enter, and it spread.
4. You turn a 300-word article into four sentences of your own that keep its main points. What have you written?
Part B · The skill in the wild
This passage also appears in Quiz 1. Meeting it twice is deliberate: there you found its ideas; here you fold them.
In the 1970s, New York City was nearly broke, and whole blocks showed it. Buildings burned or stood empty; the lots where they had been filled with rubble and old mattresses. Officially, the land belonged to the city. In practice, it belonged to no one — until neighbors started climbing the fences with shovels.
The first famous garden began in 1973 at the corner of Bowery and Houston, where a group calling itself the Green Guerillas cleared a rubble lot by hand and planted vegetables and trees. They tossed "seed bombs" — ornaments and balloons packed with soil and seeds — over the fences of lots they couldn't enter. The idea spread block by block, and by 1978 so many gardens existed that the city created a program, GreenThumb, to lease lots to the gardeners for a dollar.
The gardens were never only about food. They were meeting halls without walls: birthday parties, domino tables, casitas built by Puerto Rican gardeners, cool shade in August. When the city moved to auction more than a hundred garden lots to developers in 1999, gardeners and their neighbors fought back — in court, at hearings, in the street — and at the last hour the gardens were bought and saved. Today more than five hundred community gardens grow on land that was once given up for dead: proof of what neighbors can do with a fence, a shovel, and each other.
5. Which is the best summary of the whole passage?
6. Which is the best summary of the final paragraph alone?
7. A student drafts this four-sentence summary. One sentence should be cut. Which one?
(1) Starting in the 1970s, New Yorkers turned abandoned lots into community gardens. (2) The seed bombs were made from ornaments and balloons. (3) The city eventually leased lots to gardeners for a dollar, and in 1999 gardeners fought off an attempt to sell the land. (4) More than five hundred gardens survive today.