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Summarizing in Reading: Help Students Get To The Point
Laura Lewis
July 18, 2025
Have you ever read the abstract of an article, scanned the back cover of a book, or listened to someone tell a story and thought, “What’s the point?” If so, that writer or speaker could improve their summarizing skills to clarify the information they share.
Today, we’ll examine what’s considered summarizing in reading and why it’s an important skill to teach your students to help their comprehension and communication.
Summarizing is about identifying the main idea or the “gist” of a text and restating it in your own words. When students learn how to summarize, they combine the skills of pulling out key details and cutting out information that doesn’t connect to the main idea.
Students can summarize the content of a variety of different texts and media, including:
Conciseness: The best summaries are short, often between one sentence and one paragraph, depending on the length of the original text. The longer the original text, the longer the summary, but it’s typically no more than one-third the length of the original.
Rewording: Students must rephrase the original content in their own words. Using new vocabulary words and different sentence structures helps avoid plagiarism and demonstrates whether they truly understand the text.
Opinion-Free: Summaries should only include information from the original texts, not students’ opinions, interpretations, or comments about the content or the author’s purpose.
Strong focus: The primary goal of a summary is to identify and convey the most crucial information. They should only include the main idea and key details, excluding extraneous examples and unnecessary information.
Proper attribution: Summaries should acknowledge the source and/or author, usually in the first sentence.
[Why is summarizing important in reading?](id-why)
Summarizing helps students identify a text's main idea and key details to support it. By doing this, they learn to identify the most important information in a passage or story, such as character and place names, key events, or significant viewpoints on a topic.
Other benefits students get from learning how to summarize include:
Deeper content understanding: Summarizing in reading helps students actively engage with the material. This encourages them to look for the most important information in a text and grapple with implied—rather than explicit—meanings.
Enhanced memory and retention: When students rephrase information in a summary, they move it into long-term memory. That makes it easier for them to recall the information for future use.
Improved communication: Summarizing helps students organize their thoughts and communicate complex information more clearly and effectively.
Cross-curricular skills: Summarizing is a skill that applies across all subjects. When students learn how to do it in reading, they’re setting themselves up for success in social studies, science, and beyond.
[Frequently asked questions about summarizing in reading](id-faq)
Still have questions about what your students need to know to summarize? We’ve got answers!
Is writing the only way to share a summary?
There are three main ways you can ask students to share a summary: Orally, visually, or in writing. Examples of some ways you can encourage students to share their summaries include:
Oral: Talking with peers during small group discussions
Visual: Drawing images to illustrate important parts of a text
Different presentation or delivery options allow students in every grade band to practice summarizing skills. For example, students may learn the foundations of summarizing in grades K-2 when they’re taught how to retell stories. But their written communication skills may not be advanced enough for a traditional summary. Visual or oral summary options help them practice the skill without additional barriers.
These alternative summary options may also benefit English language learner (ELL) students or special education students at any grade level.
When does summarizing happen?
Students can summarize a text during or after reading or viewing. Here are some key times when you may ask students to summarize what they’ve read (or watched!):
Post-reading: Summarizing often occurs after a student has read or watched a piece of content to recap what they learned.
During reading: Students can summarize sections of longer or more complex texts as they read. This can help manage the cognitive load and build step-by-step comprehension.
Outside of reading: Students can use summarizing to help them take notes, prepare for presentations, or tell stories about their day or what they learned in school to family and friends.
Throughout a lesson, students may summarize smaller chunks of the text and then use them to summarize the entire piece after reading it completely. Summarizing in chunks helps lessen the cognitive load on their working memory and makes it easier to comprehend information as they progress through a text.
What are some common challenges students face when learning to summarize?
Students may struggle to summarize texts because the skills needed to do it effectively are often the opposite of those we teach in other ELA or literacy lessons. Here are some common challenges students face when they’re learning to summarize:
Including too much detail
When students learn how to summarize, they may share too much information. They’re afraid they might miss something important if they don’t share enough. This happens because they need more practice finding the main idea and key details.
Incorporating additional lessons to practice these skills individually can be helpful. With a stronger foundation in the main idea and key details, students can make better decisions about what’s essential and what isn’t in a text. For example, you may stress that repeated words and ideas help you find the main idea or topic of a piece.
Omitting key details
Some students have the opposite problem and don’t share enough information in their summaries. They want to be concise and eliminate essential details that would otherwise make the summary more straightforward. Additional practice with key details and extraneous information helps.
Teaching a lesson on step-by-step instructions can also make this concept stick. An instructional activity can demonstrate to students what happens when critical details are omitted from a process. You can then scaffold that knowledge to teach them how omitting key details in a summary affects its clarity.
Copying the text word for word
Students who are unsure how to summarize may copy a text word for word. This mistake may indicate a problem with text comprehension. If students don’t understand what they read, they’re less likely to be able to put it into their own words. Decreased comprehension also makes it harder for them to find the main idea and key details.
One of the main goals of education is to teach students to generate new ideas and think for themselves. We encourage them to make text connections, persuade their audience when they write, and ask them to look for details in texts to support their opinions.
Yet, in summaries, students should share just information from the text in their own words. Summary pare-down activities can help. Ask students to write their first summary, then ask them to condense it to a certain number of words or sentences. Repeat this process one or two more times to teach them how to cut extraneous information, leaving them with just the main idea and key details.
What are the differences among summarizing, retelling, paraphrasing, and synthesizing?
It’s easy for students (and adults!) to confuse similar terms that all mean to shorten and sum up what they’ve read. Here are some of the main differences among summarizing, retelling, paraphrasing, and synthesizing:
Retelling vs. summarizing
Retellings are play-by-play accounts of everything in a story, including all the characters, major plot points, and key and extraneous details. Students typically learn how to retell a story before they learn how to summarize. They learn this skill after reading or listening to fictional stories, sometimes before learning to read independently.
Students retell stories in their own words, which is similar to summarizing. But retellings are much longer. They’re a good introduction to help students understand the structure of a story and how to put someone else’s ideas into their own words.
Paraphrasing vs. summarizing
Paraphrasing and summarizing are the two most closely related synonyms we’re discussing. They both involve putting someone else’s ideas into your own words. They’re also both shorter accounts of the original texts. The biggest difference between the two is usually the length of the text you’re reading.
People often use the term "paraphrase" when summarizing a single paragraph or a short passage from a larger work. Summarizing condenses a larger chunk of text, such as a chapter or an entire book.
In both cases, you may use the term summarize to avoid confusion for younger students. This may help them focus on learning the skill rather than remembering the correct vocabulary words. When introducing the term 'paraphrase' to middle and high school students, you can explore the differences between the two skills to familiarize them with the terminology.
Synthesizing vs. summarizing
Summarizing and synthesizing work together, but they’re not the same thing. Summarizing provides the scaffolding students need to take an idea and build on it. It teaches students how to put someone else’s ideas into their own words.
Synthesizing goes beyond understanding what someone else is saying. It requires students to create something new. For example, students may give their own opinions on a topic, extend a story, or complete a project that merges their background knowledge with new information from the text.
Teaching summarizing in reading with Newsela
To learn summarizing, students need modeling, examples of good summaries, and tools to help them find the main ideas and key details in a text. Newsela ELA has everything you need to support them as they learn.
Not only do you get access to over 18,000+ pieces of high-quality content that they can read and summarize, but you also get scaffolds and features like:
Annotations that help you model how to mark key details and the main idea of a text.
Power Words to provide definitions of unknown terms and build background knowledge on a topic.
Not a Newsela customer yet? You can sign up for your free Newsela Lite account and start your 45-day trial to get access to the content and skill-building scaffolds you need to teach students how to summarize.
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