Five advantages of summarizing

The summary is an essential part so that the study techniques are complete and also to be able to deepen the learning. The summary helps you to have an active study and to get involved in what you are learning. By taking a more active role in your learning, your mind will be much more willing to accept everything you have to learn and you will memorize it more easily and effectively. 

What is a summary

A summary will help you to have the main and most important ideas in a small text, in this way you can study the text without having to read the whole syllabus again and again. But the summary cannot be done in any way and you will have to take some techniques into account so that the abstract is a summary and not a copy of the text.

The summary is within good study techniques and for it to be really useful, some steps in learning must be taken into account and the proper order in which to summarize. If the summary is done ahead of time it can be inefficient for the study, so it is important to know where to do it. The steps in the study are as follows, take a good look at where the summary should be located:

1. Pre-reading or speed reading
2. Speed ​​reading again
3. Comprehensive reading
4. Underline of main ideas
5. Scheme
6. Memorization
7. Summary
8. Review

Therefore, A summary is a record of the main ideas of the text to learn but to be done in the student's own words. The summary should explain the most important of the text in a synthesized way, that way it can be studied more effectively. It can only be done when the previous points of the study techniques have been done, in this way you make sure that what you are summarizing in your own words you understand. If there comes a point where you do not know how to develop in your own words, then it will be a signal to review that part.

When making a summary, you must decide which are the main ideas that you want to put in the text, this will imply having read and understood the text before, having underlined the main ideas and having made an outline structuring these ideas in a coherent way.

A summary is personal so it is necessary that you do not study other people's summaries, since it could confuse your knowledge or not know what you really know or have learned from what you do not have.

5 advantages of summarizing

The summary is a great technique to study and prepare a specific topic, the ideal is to make the summary for each different point that a topic has and then one together. While it is true that summaries take time, it is important that you know how to do it (which we will see next). So that you know all the good things that summaries offer you, don't miss out on their advantages.

You will have better synthesis capacity

Making diagrams will help you to have a very good capacity for synthesis. Although you don't expect it to come out right the first time, when you take several summaries and practice, you will realize that it is becoming much easier for you to make summaries.. You can summarize with your own words and synthesize a larger text. In this way you can differentiate the fundamental from the secondary, something essential to be able to study only the most important.

You will not have to reread the entire topic

Something that is very important when studying a topic is getting involved in learning so that you don't have to reread the whole topic over and over again. For this, it is necessary to understand it and synthesize the information in the form of diagrams and summaries. In this way, the information will only be returned if there is something that has been forgotten or that is not mastered. But thanks to the diagrams and summaries it will not be necessary to reread the entire topic to study and review what has been learned.

You will learn the concepts better

Once the steps are done and you make a summary with your words, you will realize what you know and what you have to review. In addition, the concepts that you already know will have been more effectively fixed in your mind. In this way you will be promoting memorization and also the understanding of what has been learned.

You will know how to better structure the contents

Another fundamental aspect when making the summaries is that you will learn to structure the contents with a coherent and logical order, something fundamental for learning and for your mind to better integrate the knowledge. This ability to structure is also very important to be able to take an exam, since it will allow you to be able to write what is necessary to the indicated questions and in an orderly and coherent way.

You will have greater fluency

When a summary is made, being written with your own words will improve your vocabulary and therefore you will feel much more confident when it comes to explaining what you have learned with your words, both orally and in writing. Copying the same words from the text to make a summary does not make sense pOr that it does not help to integrate the information and the brain would disperse easily.

How to summarize

When you have to make a summary it is very important that you do not copy the text literally because your mind will tend to scatter and not give importance to what is written. When you make a summary your mind has to be active in the process and therefore it is essential that once you understand the concepts, you use your own words.

To make the summary easier for you, you must have previously underlined and identified the main ideas of the text, Only in this way and with a later outline will you be able to have the main ideas well identified. Although another way to make the summary is to do it directly from the text, that is, identify the main ideas and write them previously on a paper or notebook, before making the outline or making the summary.

In the summary, the ideas must be developed in the form of sentences and not expressed sporadically as in an outline. It is a writing in which the ideas must be well related. For this, it is important that you use frequent points and in a row, that you avoid using too many points and apart and above all, that you use textual connectors. It is a priority that the summary makes sense and is well understood when reading it.