My thinking about good summary

In the past, we seldom have class that the teacher main teaches students how to write a good summary. I remember that my teachers had ever taught us how to write a letter and post card in high school, but they never spent a lot of time to teach us how to write a good summary. In my experience, the training way about summary writing was that the teacher just gave us a short article, and asked us to summarize it. And of course, I summarized the English article just like I summed up the Chinese article. And the result was there were many strange mistakes would be produced in my summary. But for me, practicing to write a summary over and over again is the only way to prove my summary writing.

Therefore, according to my own experiences and suggestions from other people, there are some qualities should belong to a good summary itself. Firstly, appropriate summary length is very important. Actually the shorter the summary is, the harder the task is. Because you have to rewrite and fit the author’s conception precisely in a much shorter article length. If the summary is too long, it is not a clear, concise, and helpful work to make readers have a quick and easy comprehension about the original article. But if the summary is too short to understand the conception the author seeks to express, it also loses its function. So a good summary writer should adjust the length of summary based on the length of original article. Secondly, you should rewrite a new paragraph in your own word to tell readers what the author expresses in the article. It should be avoided to use the same words from the article in your writing, except for those particular proper nouns. This skill can show whether you comprehend the article clearly and completely, and then you can write it down through your own thinking. Thirdly, you know what the main point is in the article and your summary can include those main ideas. We have to focus on the base function of a summary, that is, a good summary should help readers have an overview about the article in the beginning. So if a summary loses this important function, it is not a good summary for me.