The Oxford English Dictionary defines the act of summarizing as “to sum up; to state briefly or succinctly” and the characteristics of a summary as “containing or comprising the chief points or the sum and substance of a matter; . (now usually with implication of brevity” (XVII: 170).
When you are writing papers, it is often necessary to condense the gist of a long argument or a passage into a short version. Summarizing is a particularly important skill for science writers, who often have to refer in a sentence or two to research done by others, and it is a necessary skill for those who are writing a review of literature or an annotated bibliography. All of us use summaries at some point when we write, incorporating these allusions to other people’s ideas or findings into our own papers to support our arguments. As with paraphrases,
So let’s look at our original sample again and see how different a summary would be from a paraphrase.
Original Text:
“[C]hronological consistency of cultural artifacts, including language, cannot really be seen as a defining feature of the Tolkienian narrative, however much the author seems to have wanted to make it so -- after the fact. As T.A. Shippey has pointed out, the Shire is Edwardian England, with postal service, pipes after dinner, teatime and ‘weskits’” (Straubhaar, 110).
Summary:
Despite his intent, Tolkien’s work contains anachronisms, so even in Middle Earth his characters live like Edwardian Englishmen.
The great danger when paraphrasing or summarizing is that we will re-use the language of the original text. This is something that must be avoided, although there are some words (in this case “Edwardian” which describes the period in English history between 1901-1910 when Edward the Seventh was on the throne in England) that can be repeated because they are, so to speak, in the public domain and it would be virtually impossible to refer to them in any other way. Other examples would be DNA and other scientific terms, names of famous people or events, dates, etc. Copying other words from the original is, however, plagiarism.
The general rule for paraphrasing and summarizing is that you should not repeat more than four sequential words from the original text, although some authorities have limited the number to three sequential words. Nor can you jumble the words from the original text into a different order and consider that by changing the order in which you say something you have avoided any charges of plagiarism. This particular method of plagiarizing even has its own name: “the mosaic.”