[ Summarizing Sources ]
Summarize carefully to avoid
plagiarism
While you summarize a passage or long work, avoid looking at the original and draft a summary
that is entirely in your own words.
For an overview of related key topics on summarizing sources, visit the videos and quizzes in this tutorial.
Explore It
When you write a summary of a passage or work, you condense the information in the original and
present it in your own words, preserving the main ideas but omitting details. Your summary must accurately
represent the points of the source without borrowing any language of the original. Look at the following
passage from a magazine article about eliminating excess disposable packaging and a student’s summary of it.
Original Source
You can’t typically see it from a boat or via satellite. But floating in the middle of the Pacific Ocean is a
manmade formation, twice the size of the continental United States. And for the past 50 years, it’s been
growing fast. A sub-surface garbage patch consisting of bits of decomposing plastic debris bobs
through the water column drawn together by the ocean’s circling currents.
Fish and fowl mistake the tiny plastic bits for food. The toxins from this waste travel up the food chain
as small fish are eaten by larger ones. The result: seabirds, including hundreds of thousands of albatross
chicks, die each year. Over a third of north Pacific fish tested by scientists were found to have plastic in
their stomachs. There are five of these ever-accumulating morasses in the world’s oceans, scientists say,
and 90% of the floating debris is plastic waste.
—Sharon Kelly, “Trim Your Waste: 5 Simple Steps to Rid Your Life of Excess Packaging,”
E Magazine, vol. 23, no. 4, July/Aug. 2012, p. 44
Plagiarism: Unacceptable Summary
Kelly (2012) warns that a manmade garbage patch, made up of plastic and two times the size of the
United States, is growing in the Pacific Ocean. From this and other rapidly accumulating garbage
formations come toxins as bits of plastic waste make their way up the food chain, spreading through
fish populations and killing thousands of birds each year.
This summary is brief and covers key points of the passage and cites the author and date. But the summary
is ­plagiarism because it includes language and sentence structure from the original. The following summary
is acceptable and uses original wording.
Acceptable Summary
Kelly (2012) warns that scientists have observed rapidly growing masses of garbage lurking just below
the surface in the Pacific and other oceans, with 90% of the material comprised of plastic waste. Fish
ingest this plastic, introducing toxins to the food chain, endangering both fish and bird populations.
CREDIT: Kelly, Sharon. “Trim Your Waste: 5 Simple Steps to Rid Your Life of Excess Packaging.” E Magazine, vol. 23, no. 4, July/Aug. 2012, p. 44.
Questia, www.questia.com/article/1G1-299257531/trim-your-waste-5-simple-steps-to-rid-your-life-of.
© 2016 Cengage Learning
Summarize carefully to avoid plagiarism |
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[ Summarizing Sources ]
Learn It
When you summarize, you are attempting to capture as briefly as possible the ideas in the original passage.
Because a summary will include many fewer words than the original, you omit ­background information and
any supporting details. Your goal is to record an author’s ideas carefully and accurately. Following are some
guidelines for creating effective summary notes for both short passages and longer works such as books.
GUIDELINES FOR WRITING EFFECTIVE SUMMARIES
• Read the original source carefully, then put it aside and draft your summary.
• Try to identify the source’s thesis. First, phrase the main idea of the source as a question. Answer the
question in your own words: use your own language and organize the summary in your own way.
• If you find it necessary to include some particularly apt words from the original source, be sure to set
them off in quotation marks.
• Check your summary to be sure you represent the original passage or work’s points accurately and fairly.
• In your notes, be sure to label your note as a summary.
• Record the author’s name and a shortened title along with the summary, including the page number
where the passage appears. Include an entry for each source you summarize in your working bibliography.
• Compare your summary to the original passage to make sure you have not borrowed the original
­language or sentence structure.
Use It
Look at the original passage from the article by Sharon Kelly, above, and the summaries that follow it. Then
using the grid below as a guideline for how to set up your comparison, find and record the elements of
plagiarism in the unacceptable summary. First, list the individual instances of problematic language and
sequence/organization.
Source language
Source sequence/organization
Plagiarized summary language
Plagiarized summary sequence/organization
Next, look at the acceptable summary. How did the writer put the ideas from the source into his/her own
words in the acceptable summary?
Source language
Source sequence/organization
© 2016 Cengage Learning
Acceptable summary language
Acceptable summary sequence/organization
Summarize carefully to avoid plagiarism |
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