Summarizing a Long Text

Step 1: Before You Read

Watch the idea first — 69 seconds. Then read on, and try it yourself in the next step.

A long text is too big to summarize in one go, and writing from memory produces whatever you happened to remember. Build it in layers instead.

Today’s story

The Year Without a Summer

An account of 1816. About 300 words.

Step 2: Read the Story

One part at a time. Press Listen, or read it yourself. The tutor reads along with you.

The tutor shows

The eruptionIn April 1815, a mountain called Tambora, on an island in what is now Indonesia, blew itself apart. It was the largest volcanic eruption anybody had recorded. The sound was heard sixteen hundred miles away.

The eruption threw an enormous quantity of ash and sulfur high into the atmosphere, far above the height at which rain forms. Because rain could not wash it out, a fine veil of particles spread slowly around the whole planet and stayed there for months, reflecting part of the sunlight back into space before it could reach the ground.

A summer that did not comeThe following year, 1816, was cold everywhere. In June, snow fell in New England. Frost killed the corn in Vermont in July and again in August. In Europe, it rained through the whole summer, and the harvest rotted in the fields.

Why summarize section by section rather than writing from memory?

Food prices rose faster than they had in living memory. In Switzerland, families ate moss and boiled nettles. Thousands of people left their farms in New England and walked west, looking for land that had not failed.

Nobody knew whyNobody at the time connected any of it to a mountain on the other side of the world. Newspapers blamed sunspots, or lightning rods, or the sins of the age. The link to Tambora was not properly worked out until well over a century later.

The year had one strange consequence that had nothing to do with food. Kept indoors by the endless rain beside a lake in Switzerland, a group of writers agreed to pass the time by each writing a ghost story. One of them was eighteen years old, and the story she began that wet summer became the novel Frankenstein.

Step 3: The Whole Story

Finish reading with the tutor, and the whole story appears here with its parts named.

Step 4: My Notebook

Finish the story first. Then write down two things you noticed.

Step 5: What You Learned

Write one sentence for each section first.
Then summarize those sentences into two or three.
Check the result against the whole text and ask what got lost.

For the grown-up

Long summaries fail because children try to do them in one pass and end up recording whatever was memorable. Layering — a sentence per section, then a summary of those sentences — replaces memory with method, and it scales to a chapter or a whole book.

For a book chapter, try one sentence per section on paper first. The final summary almost writes itself.