- Identify main ideas and the most important details that support them.
- Focus on key words and phrases.
- Improve your ability to understand complicated reading passages.
Follow these tips to answer questions on the TOEFL exam:
- Short. This means you must not try to include too much information.
- Accurate. This means they correctly express the same ideas as the original source.
- Do not include most details and examples. This means you have to choose the most important points.
- Maintain the author's point of view. This means you cannot express your own opinion about the material.
A summary is a short version of something that somebody else has written or said. When you summarize something, you leave most of the content out, until you have only the main ideas and major details that are worth remembering.
Summarizing is an essential academic skill. Students do it all the time: you summarize books for professors, summarize lectures for classmates who have missed a class, summarize articles for your own notes... it's one of the core skills you can't do without.
Research shows that students who know how to summarize are also better able to remember information later. Learning to summarize is one of the best ways you can help yourself get into university...and succeed once you get there.
To put it simply:
A summary is "the general idea in brief form".
Note: summary is the noun; summarize is the verb.
