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Academic Integrity

Basic Tips on Avoiding Plagiarism

Summarizing

Summarizing is putting the main idea of the original text into your own words, omitting much of the detail. When you summarize, you retain the most relevant concepts of an outside information source by giving a broader yet shortened overview.

You can summarize:

  • lectures
  • presentations
  • textbooks
  • video clips
  • workshops
  • essays
  • journal articles

Summarizing Examples

When you summarize, you use different words and state the main idea of a passage. The presentation below shows some example summaries to help you gain a better understanding of how to write an effective summary of a passage.

Summarizing and Plagiarism by Excelsior Online Writing Lab is licensed under Creative Commons Attribution-4.0 International .

(CC-BY-4.0)